ProPublica

by James Bandler, ProPublica, A.C. Thompson, ProPublica and FRONTLINE, and Max Maldonado, FRONTLINE

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Early last year, Matthew Allison could be found at the Space Banana dance club, awkwardly swaying to his own beat. Clutching the cheapest house beer, he’d greet people with a bear hug, a broad grin and his familiar, “Yo, bro!” salutations.

Allison, then a 37-year-old convenience store worker and Saturday-night DJ, seemed to like everyone he met in Boise, Idaho’s small electronic dance music scene. And most people seemed to like him back.

He was so gentle, former friends remember, that for a time he eschewed honey so as not to cause harm to bees.

He was “a little goofy,” a former friend, Tyler Whitt, recalled. “But bro goofy.”

But that lovable persona hid a more sinister core. When he was behind his computer screen, Allison used the handle BTC, short for BanThisChannel, he told ProPublica and FRONTLINE. On the social media and messaging platform Telegram, authorities say, Allison was a key figure in a network of white supremacist and neo-Nazi chat groups and channels known as Terrorgram.

There, Allison held court, promoting himself as “the most infamous and prolific propagandist of our time.”

Hyperbole aside, BTC was infamous. Extremism researchers in the U.S. and in Europe studied his posts but did not know who he was. Leftist activists sought to expose him. And law enforcement authorities tried to identify and jail him.

Last September, he was finally arrested.

Prosecutors allege that Allison was one of the leaders in the Terrorgram Collective, a secretive group that produced propaganda and instructions for terrorists, and disseminated that information through the Terrorgram ecosystem.

They say Allison used the Telegram platform to solicit “attacks on government infrastructure, such as government buildings and energy facilities,” to encourage the assassination of “‘high-value targets’ — like politicians and government officials” with a “hit list,” and to help produce and distribute a Terrorgram Collective publication that featured instructions for making “Napalm, thermite, chlorine gas, pipe bombs, and dirty bombs.”

About This Partnership

This story is part of a collaborative investigation from ProPublica and FRONTLINE that includes an upcoming documentary, “The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram,” which premieres March 25 at 10 p.m. EDT/9 p.m. CDT on PBS stations (check local listings) and will be available to stream on YouTube, the PBS App and FRONTLINE’s website.

Authorities also contend in court filings that Allison had fantasies about committing gruesome violence and sexual assault, and that he may have been planning to act on them.

Allison has pleaded not guilty.

For about five years, the Terrorgram network operated largely unchallenged on Telegram, which has nearly one billion users. The Dubai-based company did little to prevent influencers like Allison from circulating their propaganda and encouraging isolated young men to kill, a ProPublica and FRONTLINE investigation found.

The news organizations obtained a trove of now-deleted Telegram chats and channel logs and used them to trace Allison’s activity and influence in the Terrorgram network.

Telegram has declined repeated requests to make its executives available for interviews but said in a statement, “When the Terrorgram name first surfaced years ago, we began removing groups and channels that used variations on the Terrorgram name. Calls for violence from any group are not tolerated on our platform.”

In the annals of white supremacist content online, Allison’s work stood out. “It was some of the most inflammatory propaganda that I had seen,” said Jennefer Harper, a researcher who has amassed a large archive of neo-Nazi materials from Telegram. Allison was also prolific. “This propaganda was being posted 24/7! The account wasn’t taking a break, it was like, ‘Don’t you have anything else to do in your life?’”

He specialized in what he called documentaries, and over more than five years, he said, he made and posted around 120 videos. There were images of riots, burning cities and Black people brutalizing white people. There was GoPro footage of massacres filmed by white killers as they murdered people of color.

Allison and the other Terrorgram leaders found a receptive audience for their propaganda. Some of their fans got off their phones and took action: scoping out high-profile targets and even killing people. ProPublica and FRONTLINE used the chat logs, court records and other sources to connect 35 criminal cases to the Terrorgram network. Each case involved an individual who posted in Terrorgram chats, followed Terrorgram accounts or was a member of an organized group whose leaders participated in the Terrorgram community.

Prosecutors have linked Allison and his co-defendant, Dallas Humber, to a trio of mass shootings that killed a total of six people and wounded a dozen others, and to a stabbing incident that injured five, according to the indictment and a subsequent brief.

In early 2024, Allison’s work caught the attention of a young man from New Jersey named Andrew Takhistov.

Takhistov was in a Terrorgram group chat in which someone had posted several Allison videos, including a 51-second clip showing how to disable overhead electrical lines, according to court records. In another post, Takhistov indicated that he’d seen one of Allison’s most infamous propaganda videos.

By that summer, Takhistov, then 18, was planning his own infrastructure attacks, scheming to disable two electrical substations in New Jersey using the technique featured in Allison’s video, according to prosecutors. In court records, they say Takhistov was a fan of one of the Terrorgram Collective’s terrorism how-to guides, which Allison allegedly helped produce.

On Sept. 9, 2024, the Biden administration’s Justice Department announced the arrests and indictments of Allison and Humber, his alleged co-conspirator.

“Today’s arrests are a warning that committing hate-fueled crimes in the darkest corners of the internet will not hide you, and soliciting terrorist attacks from behind a screen will not protect you,” declared then-Attorney General Merrick Garland in a statement. “The United States Department of Justice will find you, and we will hold you accountable.”

Allison and Humber were each charged with 15 felony counts, including soliciting hate crimes, soliciting the murder of federal officials and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.

Arrested in Boise, Allison was extradited to California, where Humber is also facing trial. They both pleaded not guilty.

Humber, visited in jail by a ProPublica and FRONTLINE reporter, said she would not talk to journalists. Her lawyer declined to comment.

Allison, against the advice of his own lawyer, granted two interviews. Looking pale and gaunt and dressed in jailhouse orange, Allison proudly acknowledged being BTC but denied he was a terrorist or that he had incited others to violence.

He called the indictment “bullshit,” claimed to be a video “artist” and indicated that he intended to fight the case on First Amendment grounds.

Allison said the alleged hit list of targets for assassination was merely a doxing list, a response to efforts by anti-fascist groups “to dox me” and anyone who claimed “to be pro-white.” He insisted he didn’t hate anyone.

His lawyers, in a bail motion, said the indictment was misleading. They argued that there was no evidence that Allison was a leader of a transnational terrorist organization. He was, they wrote, just a participant in chats that “‘are mostly a chaotic mix of hyperbole and posts without any recognized leader.”

Matthew Allison DJed in Boise, Idaho, before being arrested and charged with supporting terrorism. (Excerpt from “The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram”)

Watch video ➜

After Allison’s arrest, an FBI agent made his way to rural Perry, Missouri, to see Matthew’s father, John Allison, who lives in the basement of a rambling and drafty decommissioned church he’s renovating.

“Matthew was a perfect child,” John Allison remembers saying before closing the door on the agent. The father said the agent seemed interested only in incriminating information, so he refused to cooperate.

The first of four children, Matthew had sandy blond hair and blue eyes. Early on, he showed musical promise. Like Mozart in the movie “Amadeus,” John Allison recalls, Matthew could play the piano upside down.

The boy wasn’t raised to hate, his father told ProPublica and FRONTLINE in an interview.

But from the time he was 10 years old, the younger Allison took an interest in gruesome violence, prosecutors say. Matthew’s brother told federal agents that the boy enjoyed watching “graphic violent material,” including videos and images of “beheadings,” according to a prosecution brief. His legal team declined to comment on the allegation.

After high school in Perris, California, Matthew got an offer to attend a local college. He decided instead to follow his best friend to Idaho.

Allison’s lawyers said in a court filing that he spent 17 of the last 19 years in Boise, a relatively liberal city in a state that has become a haven for antigovernment and white supremacist activists.

He worked a variety of low-wage service jobs and did a lot of couch surfing, his friends say.

In 2013, Allison got a job working the night shift at a downtown coffee shop and bakery. His boss and co-worker remember him as quiet, polite and professional. He was in a long-term romance with a male co-worker and seemed very much in love.

“I always thought it was a very cohesive relationship,” said Tyler Armstrong, who worked at the bakery with both men. “They were together all the time. We’d all get together, smoke weed and just hang out.”

In Boise’s electronic dance music scene, Allison found a welcoming, inclusive community. He hosted parties where he would DJ, playing progressive house music.

He lived in a Spartan apartment. He didn’t have a car, or even a driver’s license. He told friends he wanted to stay under the radar.

Over the years, he lived in several upscale buildings, including The Fowler, a midrise that boasts a well-appointed fitness center and stunning views of the downtown.

While some acquaintances wondered how he afforded the rent on low-wage service jobs, four friends say that Allison had an illicit side hustle. As Tyler Whitt, one of his friends, put it, “He was an excellent plug” — a drug dealer.

Allison sold cocaine packaged in signature blue-tinted vials, according to Whitt and three other people who purchased drugs from him. Allison denied that he sold cocaine in an interview with FRONTLINE and ProPublica, and he has not been charged with any drug-related offenses.

In 2018, unbeknownst to his dance party friends, Allison was trying to break through on social media as an anonymous conservative influencer.

His early videos on YouTube under the Ban This Channel handle served up standard conservative fare. He peppered the videos with Tucker Carlson clips and used titles such as “The Russian Collusion Lie” and “Lies About Trump Exposed.” Most of the videos landed without notice.

Allison kept cranking out videos. They got more racist, homophobic and antisemitic. Eventually, after he posted the Nazi Party anthem, YouTube banished him from the platform.

His tilt to extremism came amid trouble in his personal life. Allison and his long-term boyfriend broke up, leaving him angry and depressed, according to Armstrong. And his younger brother in Nevada was imprisoned on drug charges, court records show.

In 2020, Allison abruptly left Idaho. He quit his job as a laborer for a flooring company, citing a family emergency. For a time, he lived in Nevada, taking care of his brother’s children.

Allison also lived with his father and stepmother in Utah for nearly six months, but he spent most of the time holed up in his room on his computer, his father said.

“That was a hard day,” Matthew Allison said after one 10-plus-hour session. His father stared at him, baffled.

Allison asked his father to help him start a website to host his content, which included videos he’d made from old Nazi propaganda footage, John Allison said.

“No, I’m not going to be a party to that,” he said he told his son.

Allison soon found another home for his content: Telegram.

Pete Simi, a sociology professor at Chapman University in Orange, California, has spent much of his career studying violent extremist groups and has closely tracked their migrations to Telegram.

It was sometime in 2021, during the pandemic, when Simi first became aware of BTC.

Simi had just been admitted to a private Telegram chat group.

The administrator of the chat hadn’t been willing to let Simi join until he provided proof of his whiteness. He’d thought his middle-aged skin might raise suspicion, so he’d shared a photo of his adult son’s forearm.

As soon as he entered the chat, someone shared a six-minute video called “Last Battle.” Simi downloaded a copy.

Simi had studied a lot of neo-Nazi propaganda — some of it crude and ineffective. But this video stood out, though the overall message was familiar: It told the story of a nation being destroyed by drag queens, immigrant invaders, Black criminals, interracial marriage and a “Jewish communist takeover.”

What was compelling about this video, Simi thought, was the way it blended violent imagery, ominous music and storytelling to impart a sense of fear and white victimhood. The only salvation, the video suggested, was for heterosexual white people to stand together and arm themselves.

“VOTING WILL NOT REMOVE THEM,” reads text on the screen. “THEY WANT YOU DEAD.”

“I would say ‘Last Battle’ would be one of the more effective videos I’ve seen,” Simi said.

Simi started teaching the video in class as an example of propaganda that would be compelling to many alienated young men.

Allison, as BTC, became a Terrorgram Collective leader in 2022 after a previous leader was arrested, according to prosecutors.

He allegedly distributed lengthy digital how-to guides for making explosives and attacking critical infrastructure, as well as audiobooks of murderers’ manifestos. Prosecutors say he helped create a hit list of perceived enemies — politicians, executives and academics — presented as red-and-black trading cards with assault weapon logos, which included headshots, addresses and photos of the targets’ homes.

One of his major contributions was the 24-minute movie “White Terror,” which he told ProPublica and FRONTLINE that he edited. It was an homage to 105 white men and women who committed acts of terrorism. Humber narrates the script in a remorseless monotone, describing the victims with slurs and praising the terrorists as “saints,” an honorific the Terrorgram influencers bestowed upon white supremacist murderers.

As Allison’s content became more extreme, Telegram started to take down his channels. Each time, the channel just popped back up with a slightly modified name. In December 2021, he bragged in a post that 50 of the channels he had started had been banned by Telegram.

Using data from the social media analysis platform Open Measures and other sources, ProPublica and FRONTLINE identified more than 20 channels in the Terrorgram ecosystem that were run by Allison.

The channels were “widely shared and promoted by other members of the Terrorgram scene,” said Pierre Vaux, a London-based researcher who has studied Terrorgram extensively. Vaux said that Allison also belonged to 120 chat groups and posted in them prolifically. “He’s a superspreader,” said Vaux.

In October 2022, a Slovakian teen who had spent years being indoctrinated on Telegram opened fire on an LGBTQ+ bar in the city of Bratislava, killing two people and wounding a third.

The shooter had been in direct contact with Terrorgram influencers, and according to U.S. prosecutors, sent his manifesto to Allison before the attack.

Another Telegram account Allison ran called BowlTurdsCoinInvesting shared the manifesto. In posts, Allison referred to the victims using a slur for gay people and called the manifesto “fucking amazing.”

Telegram shut the channel down.

But Allison quickly resurfaced — this time as BigTittyChica. He reposted an audiobook version of the Bratislava shooter’s manifesto.

Around this time, Humber sent Allison more news that she found encouraging. She had been communicating with a Terrorgram fan who was contemplating a school shooting targeting people of color, prosecutors said in court filings. About a month later, the user acted, killing four and wounding 11 at an elementary and middle school in Aracruz, Brazil.

Terrorgram consecrated another saint.

Allison’s legal team has suggested that the government may have misinterpreted the communications between Allison and the Slovakian killer. The evidence, they said, did “not show direct messages between Mr. Allison and the shooter but rather are messages that the shooter sent to Telegram group chats that were later forwarded between Mr. Allison’s purported two phones.”

Sociology professor Pete Simi and ProPublica reporter James Bandler watch Allison’s propaganda videos. (Excerpt from “The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram”)

Watch video ➜

While the real world and online lives of Allison might seem irreconcilable — a gay man who allegedly led a neo-Nazi terror group and advocated the murder of gays and lesbians — Simi, the Chapman University professor, has seen such cases before. It illustrates, he said, “the propensity that all of us have for leading contradictory lives. We have a great capacity for compartmentalizing as humans.”

Simi once interviewed a gay man who was also a member of Hammerskin Nation, a violent, hypermasculine Nazi skinhead gang whose members despise LGBTQ+ people. Ultimately, the cognitive dissonance became too great and the man quit the white supremacist movement.

There are other more recent examples. Taylor Ashley Parker-Dipeppe concealed his transgender identity from fellow members of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division, a violently homophobic group. His gender identity was revealed in court after he pleaded guilty in 2021 to conspiracy and stalking charges related to threats against journalists and activists.

Allison’s friends had no inkling that the man they partied with was celebrating the murder of gay people on Telegram. But one friend, Tyler Armstrong, recalled a troubling moment in 2020. He stumbled on a Snapchat post in which Allison repeated a white supremacist meme about high crime rates in the Black community.

When Armstrong asked how Allison, as a gay man, could demonize another vulnerable population, Allison replied, “Don’t get me started on the LGBTQ” community, according to Armstrong. Allison denied the exchange to FRONTLINE and ProPublica.

“Sup bro. do house parties exist anymore?”

It was February 2024, and Allison was texting a friend, trying to score DJ gigs. He’d been working a ton lately at a convenience store job he hated and only partying Saturday nights. “Anyone else tapped in to the scene who would know what’s up?” he asked. “I’m killing it djing and got all the gear.”

Meanwhile on Telegram, Allison was putting the final touches on a movie trilogy, which he said documented “one man’s process of radicalization every step of the way.”

In July, Allison filled out an online application for a part-time job at a popular downtown Boise breakfast spot just a short bike ride from his apartment.

“Hi there, my name’s Matt. I have relevant job experience in baking, making New York style bagels from scratch,” he wrote. “I’m a friendly, clean cut, sociable, reliable, and highly organized hard worker.”

He was hired and began working immediately.

That same month, federal agents arrested Takhistov, the New Jersey man who had watched Allison’s videos and read the Terrorgram Collective manual.

Prosecutors say Takhistov was working with another extremist to disable electrical power stations. What he didn’t know was that his co-conspirator was an undercover investigator. Takhistov was charged with soliciting another individual to destroy energy facilities. In building their case, investigators obtained his chat history, including more than 2,500 files.

Court records do not make it clear whether Takhistov has entered a plea. His attorney declined to comment.

The feds were getting closer. But if Allison was worried about the arrest of this young Terrorgram fan, he didn’t let on at work.

Over the next weeks at his new job, Allison was polite, professional and friendly. He told his father it was the best job he’d ever had.

On Friday, Sept. 6, armed federal agents confronted Allison as he prepared to bike to work.

He did not resist. And for two hours he spoke to investigators, waiving access to a lawyer. Allison admitted to making artwork for one Terrorgram production and to participating in a large number of Telegram channels with white supremacists, according to court records. He explained that he was just sharing “propaganda” and “documenting” his “understanding of the world.”

He repeatedly demanded: “What part of any of this was illegal?”

But investigators found more reasons for concern. In his backpack, agents found zip ties, duct tape, ammunition, a firearm, a knife, lockpicking equipment, two phones and a thumbdrive, court documents say.

In his apartment, they discovered an assault rifle, two laptops and a “go bag” with $1,500 cash, a black balaclava and the kind of skull mask favored by members of Atomwaffen Division, court records show.

Federal authorities also searched his storage unit, where they found disturbing handwritten letters titled “Commit Homicide” and “Post-Mortem Disembowelment” that contained graphic fantasies about murdering a baby and her mother, followed by the post-mortem rape and dissection of the woman’s body, according to the court filings. Prosecutors do not allege that he committed these crimes.

At a detention hearing, Allison’s defense claimed the writings were old song lyrics from his high school death metal band, Putrid Flesh.

In a motion for bail, Allison’s lawyers argued that he was not a threat to anyone and that his speech was protected under the First Amendment.

The judge denied Allison bail.

Late last year in Boise, the two Tylers who partied with Allison — Tyler Whitt and Tyler Armstrong — sat down to process the confounding double life of their former friend.

But first they watched “White Terror,” the BTC production that coldly celebrates terrorist killers with a mix of gruesome violence and dehumanizing language. Both men said the video left them in shock.

“That’s somebody who spent a lot of time thinking and giving in to all this hate in his heart,” Armstrong said. “And I’m like, Where does that come from?”

Whitt, who is gay, said he was still struggling to understand. “That’s got to be a totally broken person,” he said. “It was like hating everybody else is more important than loving one part of himself.”

But Whitt said he had no sympathy for his former friend and hopes Allison will spend the rest of his life in prison.

“I’m glad they got him.”

Tom Jennings, Annie Wong and Karina Meier of FRONTLINE contributed reporting.

by ProPublica and PBS's Frontline

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

This story is part of a collaborative investigation from ProPublica and FRONTLINE that includes an upcoming documentary, “The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram,” which premieres March 25 at 10 p.m. EDT/9 p.m. CDT on PBS stations (check local listings) and will be available to stream on YouTube, the PBS App and FRONTLINE’s website.

A new investigative collaboration from FRONTLINE and ProPublica explores a transnational online network of extremists accused of inciting acts of white supremacist terrorism on the messaging platform Telegram. They called themselves Terrorgram — and called their leadership the Terrorgram Collective.

From an award-winning team led by reporters A.C. Thompson and James Bandler and acclaimed filmmakers Thomas Jennings and Annie Wong, “The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram” continues years of groundbreaking reporting on violent extremism and online radicalization from ProPublica and FRONTLINE.

“Drawing on a trove of archived posts, our reporting shows how Telegram and other lightly regulated platforms became a gathering place for ‘militant accelerationists’ — neo-Nazis who want to use terror and violence to bring down governments and create new, white ethnostates,” says Thompson, who has been reporting on the evolution of violent extremism in the U.S. for years and, with this project, expands his focus worldwide.

“These people on the messaging and social media app Telegram were trying to stir other people to commit acts of incredible violence and to spark a race war,” says Bandler. “What we’ve seen through the Terrorgram story is that there are consequences to unfettered free speech, to having influencers out there advocating violence or mass murder.”

Telegram said in a statement that it has always screened postings for problematic content and that “calls for violence from any group are not tolerated on our platform.”

“The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram,” part of a collaborative investigation from FRONTLINE and ProPublica.

“The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram” also probes how authorities in several countries would eventually arrest around a dozen people allegedly tied to the Terrorgram Collective.

“Are these arrests the end of Terrorgram? You may have a collapse specifically of this particular network, but is that the end? Absolutely not,” sociologist Pete Simi says in the documentary. “There will be new Terrorgrams that take its place by another name, and we will continue to see this kind of extremism propagated through platforms of various sorts, not just Telegram.”

More than a year in the making, the 90-minute documentary is part of a multiplatform effort that also includes a series of stories from ProPublica.

“The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram,” premieres Tuesday, March 25 at 10 p.m. EDT/9 p.m. CDT on PBS stations (check local listings) and will be available to stream on YouTube, the PBS App and FRONTLINE’s website.

by Annie Waldman and Sharon Lerner

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

The National Institutes of Health will no longer be funding work on the health effects of climate change, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica.

The guidance, which was distributed to several staffers last week, comes on the back of multiple new directives to cut off NIH funding to grants that are focused on subjects that are viewed as conflicting with the Trump administration’s priorities, such as gender identity, LGBTQ+ issues, vaccine hesitancy, and diversity, equity and inclusion.

While it’s unclear whether the climate guidance will impact active grants and lead to funding terminations, the directive appears to halt opportunities for future funding of studies or academic programs focused on the health effects of climate change.

“This is an administration where industry voices rule and prevail,” said Dr. Lisa Patel, executive director of The Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, a coalition of medical professionals that raises awareness about the health effects of climate change. “This is an agenda item for the fossil fuel industry, and this administration is doing what the fossil fuel industry wants.”

She called the new guidance “catastrophic” and said it would have a “devastating” impact on much-needed research.

As extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, heat waves, wildfires and floods, continue to intensify and become more frequent, researchers are increasingly examining the impact climate change has on public health. The NIH, which provides billions of dollars annually for biomedical research across the country, has funded hundreds of grants and programs in recent years devoted to researching this issue.

In 2021, under President Joe Biden, the agency launched the Climate Change and Health Initiative to further coordinate and encourage greater research and training. The initiative received $40 million in congressional appropriations for research in both 2023 and 2024. However, last month, the initiative and two other similar NIH programs devoted to climate change and health were dismantled, according to reporting from Mother Jones.

The latest directive cuts all future climate change and health funding across the agency, regardless of its connection to the previously canceled initiative.

In response to ProPublica’s questions about the directive, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said the agency “is taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned with NIH and HHS priorities.”

“At HHS, we are dedicated to restoring our agencies to their tradition of upholding gold-standard, evidence-based science,” the spokesperson said. “As we begin to Make America Healthy Again, it’s important to prioritize research that directly affects the health of Americans. We will leave no stone unturned in identifying the root causes of the chronic disease epidemic as part of our mission to Make America Healthy Again.”

Climate and health researchers faced hostility during President Donald Trump’s first administration but were able to continue their work, according to Linda Birnbaum, a former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences who served as a federal scientist for four decades.

“Under Trump One, we scratched the word ‘change’ from our work and talked about ‘climate’ and ‘health,’ and that was acceptable,” she said. “If NIH doesn’t study the health impacts of climate, we are not going to be able to prevent some of those health impacts, and we aren’t going to be able to find ways to deal with them.”

In a report from December, the NIH listed numerous ongoing climate change and health projects that it was funding, including research to examine the health impacts of the Maui wildfires in Hawaii, develop models to predict dengue virus transmission by mosquitos, and study the effect of heat on fertility and reproductive functions. The Trump administration has since pulled the report offline.

“We can see with our own eyes how extreme heat and extreme weather are harming people’s health,” said Veena Singla, an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

The new NIH directive follows the Trump administration’s broader agenda to gut efforts to document and address climate change. Trump has paused billions of dollars of spending on climate-related causes. He has also issued executive orders aimed at increasing the production of fossil fuels and scaling back the government’s efforts to address climate change.

His administration is also considering a plan to eliminate the scientific research office of the Environmental Protection Agency, which could result in the firing of more than 1,000 scientists, according to The New York Times. Some scientists in that office have also been researching the health effects of climate change, investigating such questions as how rising temperatures might change the body’s response to air pollution and how climate change impacts the amount of toxic chemicals in air and water.

The NIH and White House did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment. The EPA did not answer questions about whether research on climate change and health will continue at the agency. In an emailed response to questions from ProPublica, the EPA press office wrote that “The Trump EPA is dedicated to being led by our commitment to the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment, unlike Biden EPA appointees with major ethical issues that were beholden to radical stakeholder groups.”

Trump’s perspective on climate change appears to be at odds with that of his health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who spent decades as an environmental attorney. “I believe the climate crisis is real, that humans are causing it, that it’s existential,” he said in an interview last year. HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions on the secretary’s views.

However, Patel told ProPublica that she did not expect the new health secretary, whose mandate oversees the NIH, to support views that were at odds with the administration’s agenda.

“What we can readily see, from the things that RFK Jr. is allowing to happen and unwilling to weigh in on, he is not going to be an anti-industry voice,” she said. “He is not there to follow the best science.”

Did You Work on a Terminated NIH Grant? ProPublica Wants to Hear From You.

by Abrahm Lustgarten

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For Chris Wright, there may be no simple truths. At his Senate confirmation hearing on Jan. 15, the man poised to take control of the U.S. Department of Energy and its vast apparatus of technological research and development sat behind a walnut desk wearing a gray suit and a crisply knotted red tie. Wright, the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, a $3 billion natural gas fracking company, harkened back to his days as a solar energy researcher and offered lawmakers a vision of open-mindedness and innovation. Climate change is an urgent challenge, he reassured them, and he would address it.

“It is a global issue. It is a real issue. It’s a challenging issue. And the solution to climate change is to evolve our energy system,” he told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. “I am for improving all energy technologies that can better human lives and reduce emissions.”

Since his confirmation as the secretary of energy on Feb. 3, though, Wright has outlined an anti-climate agenda. Speaking to conservative audiences, he is charismatic, animated and far more zealous. Wright dismissed the transition to renewable energy as nonexistent in a Feb. 18 speech at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, a gathering associated with the podcast host Jordan Peterson, and called global efforts to boost the use of renewables, which he said drive up the price of energy, “lunacy.”

“The world simply runs on hydrocarbons,” he told the group, “and for most of their uses, we don’t have replacements.”

Before Congress, he pledged to listen and learn and then chart his course. Before Peterson’s group, he announced he already had “a nine-point plan” that would more than double the world’s consumption of the very fuels causing the planet to overheat. “Number one is, get out of the way of the production, export and enhancement of our volumes of coal, oil and gas,” he said. Yes, they cause climate change, he has repeatedly acknowledged, but it amounts to an inconvenient complication.

Over the past several weeks, Wright has delivered speeches not just at Peterson’s conference but also at the Conservative Political Action Conference and at CERAWeek, widely seen as the oil industry’s most influential business event, during which he continued to assert that the world’s economy is primarily dependent on the expansion of hydrocarbons and that alternatives like solar and wind have proved both costly and a failure — characterizations that ignore the swiftly falling costs and rapid adoption of both technologies. “I think the agenda might be different here than climate change,” he mused at Peterson’s forum, referring to “the climate-obsessed people” he’s spoken with. Then he hit on a theme that he emphasized again in the weeks that followed: “It’s certainly been a powerful tool used to grow government power, top-down control and shrink human freedom. This is sinister.”

Chris Wright has different answers for different audiences … … on fossil fuel dependence

In Congress, at the Senate Confirmation Hearing on Jan. 15, 2025, Wright said: “The only pathway to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lift up people's quality of life is through energy innovation. And America has been a hotbed of that.”

At the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference on Feb. 17, 2025, Wright said: “The world simply runs on hydrocarbons and for most of their uses, we don't have replacements.”

… on responding to climate change

In Congress, at the Senate Confirmation Hearing on Jan. 15, 2025, Wright said: “I've studied and followed the data and the evolution of climate change for at least 20 years now. It is a global issue. It is a real issue. It's a challenging issue. And the solution to climate change is to evolve our energy system.”

At CERAWeek on March 10, 2025, Wright said: “I'm honored to play a role in reversing what I believe has been very poor direction in energy policy. The previous administration's policy was focused myopically on climate change with people as simply collateral damage.”

… on alternative energy sources

In Congress, at the Senate Confirmation Hearing on Jan. 15, 2025, Wright said: “I will be an unabashed steward for all sources of affordable, reliable and secure American energy and the infrastructure needed to develop, deliver and secure them.”

At CERAWeek on March 10, 2025, Wright said: “Beyond the obvious scale and cost problems, there is simply no physical way that wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas. I haven't even mentioned oil or coal yet.”

As Wright’s views have become more public, it suggests that he and the rest of Trump’s cabinet will embrace the premise of climate change but downplay its threat, even building a case that it is a benefit to society. The White House is seeking to reverse the legal definition of carbon dioxide as a climate pollutant and undo scores of rules addressing the economic costs of the extreme warming it causes. “Recently I’ve been called a climate denier or climate skeptic,” Wright told attendees at CERAWeek. “This is simply wrong. I am a climate realist.”

“The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side effect of building the modern world,” he continued. Global life expectancy has soared. Poverty has sharply declined. Modern medicine and telecommunications and airplanes have all resulted. And in the process, “We have indeed raised global atmospheric CO2 concentration by 50%.”

“Everything in life involves trade-offs,” he added. “Everything.”

Such a jarring claim amounts to more than a philosophical difference about the priorities of the world. It is unambiguously dismissive of a climate crisis that the vast majority of global scientists warn will prove devastatingly disruptive. It has given some of the people he addressed in Congress whiplash. Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., who sits on the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, wrote through a spokesperson in response to questions from ProPublica that Wright stated a willingness to “support all energy sources,” but now that he is prioritizing a fossil fuel agenda, it is “deeply disappointing.”

The one thing it is not, however, is new.

In 2024, Liberty Energy published a little-noticed, 180-page manifesto called “Bettering Human Lives,” connected to the similarly named poverty-alleviation foundation his company created that year to bring cooking fuels to Africa. The document amounts to a spirited moral argument for how energy produced from oil and gas has advanced the developed world and how essential it will be to raise undeveloped countries out of poverty. Wright’s premise is that communities that lack electricity or modern fuels should get the immediate benefit from the cheapest existing energy source available to them. He says that recent climate policies prohibiting U.S. investment in infrastructure that could provide that energy using oil and gas does enormous human harm. But the “Bettering Human Lives” report goes further, suggesting that there is little role for non-hydrocarbon technologies and arguing that if oil and gas production are not expanded globally, billions of people will be held in poverty.

At his senate confirmation, Wright was asked several times to explain his embrace of “all sources” of energy. During one exchange, in which Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., pushed him to expand on what he meant, Wright listed them: wind, nuclear, geothermal, hydropower. “And if I didn’t say solar, it was an oversight.”

The statement is a sharp contrast to what Wright has told his investors in Liberty Energy’s earnings calls, where he has blamed many of those renewables for rising poverty and declining growth and has criticized “the incessant repeating of the simply false term,” referring to “the so-called energy transition.” He argues that for all the years and dollars invested in lowering carbon and subsidizing a transition to cleaner energy, hydrocarbons still fuel roughly the same 85% of global energy supply that they have for decades. Renewables, he says, still account for less than 3%. (The remainder being nuclear and hydroelectric energy, among other sources.)

According to the Energy Institute’s “Statistical Review of World Energy,” the energy industry’s trusted source for global market trends, though, hydrocarbons have dropped to 81.5% of global energy consumption, and renewables now account for roughly 8% of global energy use — more than twice what Wright claims — and are projected to grow sharply over the next few years. Moreover, the report states that solar and wind capacity grew by 67% in 2023, adding more wind and solar capacity than ever before and driving the vast majority of the world’s increase in electricity generation for the year.

Wright, whose office did not respond to a detailed list of questions, has said he rejects similar calculations on methodological grounds.

He also ignores the ways in which the energy transition in the U.S. is already well underway. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the government’s primary energy data office, wind and solar are responsible for substantial growth in American electricity generation while generation from natural gas is forecast to decrease. South Dakota, for example, gets 80% of its electricity from renewables, and Vermont relies on them nearly 100%.

Facts aside, Wright, in his recent remarks, has begun to present his agenda in ideological terms, drawing a straight line between fossil fuel use and conservative fears that Americans’ freedom is under assault. At CPAC, liberated from the necktie he said he’d been compelled to wear since his confirmation hearing, roaming the brightly lit stage with his arms outstretched, he reframed oil and gas not as the cause of climate change the way he’d previously conceded but as a fuel that is patriotic and moral. “Not everyone in the world has access to the liberty and energy we have,” he told the audience. “But in our own country, both of those concepts have been under great threat in the last four years. Maybe that’s why my political career started. Liberty under threat, energy resources under threat.”

It was a whole different message from the one Wright delivered before the Senate.

Amy Westervelt of Drilled contributed research.

by Beth Hundsdorfer and Molly Parker, Capitol News Illinois

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

The U.S. Department of Justice has opened a wide-ranging investigation into Illinois’ treatment of people with developmental disabilities, examining whether the state provides adequate resources for community living and protects residents from harm in public institutions.

Tonya Piephoff, director of the Illinois Department of Human Services’ Division of Developmental Disabilities, informed employees of the investigation in a letter dated March 13 that was obtained by Capitol News Illinois.

“The investigation will examine whether the state unnecessarily institutionalizes, or puts at serious risk of institutionalization, adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities,” the letter stated. Illinois has long had one of the highest populations of people with developmental and intellectual disabilities living in state-run institutions in the nation.

The letter said the investigation also will look into abuse and neglect allegations of patients at three of the seven state-operated residential institutions run by IDHS, including the Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center, in rural southern Illinois, which was the subject of an investigative series by Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica starting in 2022. The news organizations launched the series after the arrests of Choate staff members for abuse and neglect of residents; the articles documented instances of mistreatment by staff.

Gov. JB Pritzker said Friday that Illinois has already made significant changes to improve the safety of people with developmental disabilities living in state-run institutions, including installing cameras to help investigate mistreatment allegations. Pritzker said that individuals had moved to other institutions, and that the state had also enhanced the services provided to residents in those places. He did not address parts of the federal investigation focused on whether Illinois is relying too heavily on institutions to provide care instead of supporting people in community-based settings.

“The work has been done already,” Pritzker said of the DOJ investigation, speaking at an unrelated news conference. “It’s fine if there’s an investigation, but the reality is that things have moved significantly in the right direction, and I have done what I said I should do, and that I think we all agree should be done, which is keep everyone safe.”

IDHS issued a written statement on Wednesday that read: “As always, the department will cooperate in full with the independent investigation and continue, as permitted and appropriate, to keep staff and interested stakeholders updated.”

It added: “IDHS has made unprecedented investments in home and community based options to empower Illinoisans with disabilities to live in the least restrictive setting of their choosing.”

A spokesperson for the DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.

The latest investigation also promises to be far broader than a previous DOJ inquiry. The new effort will review how the state provides services to all people with intellectual or developmental disabilities, including those who live in the community or at home.

The DOJ had previously investigated Choate in 2007. In a report released two years later, it found the facility had not provided proper transition planning for those wanting to move into the community; and for those living inside the state-run facility, had failed to protect residents from abuse and neglect, and did not meet their health, education and treatment needs, in violation of constitutional and federal statutory rights. The DOJ ended its monitoring in 2013.

In its investigative series a decade later, Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica detailed cases documented in internal reports and police and court records where staff had beaten, choked, whipped, sexually assaulted and humiliated residents. Those cases included the 2014 beating by staff of a man with intellectual disabilities for failing to pull up his pants. They also included the verbal abuse of a resident with developmental disabilities in 2020, including a threat by staff to break one of his fingers, captured on a recorded 911 line, according to court records, police reports and IDHS watchdog findings.

The reporting also documented a culture of covering up abuse and neglect at the facility, findings later echoed by IDHS’ Office of Inspector General — the watchdog arm that investigates abuse and neglect allegations at state-run facilities and provides agency oversight.

In the wake of the reporting, Pritzker called the abuse detailed in the stories “awful” and “deeply concerning.” The agency promised to make systemic changes to keep Choate home to the nearly 230 people with developmental disabilities who lived there at the time.

But as the news organizations continued to report on the abuse and neglect at Choate that was documented in internal and state police reports, Pritzker and his leadership team at IDHS changed course, announcing plans to move at least half of Choate’s residents to community placements or to one of the six other state-operated facilities.

“We are at a point today where all of those things weren’t working to the degree we wanted them to, so today we are making transformational changes,” he told reporters at a news conference.

In December, Equip for Equality, a legal advocacy organization monitoring the transition of Choate residents, found the state falling short of its promises, with many individuals ending up in other institutions instead of community settings, according to a report.It said the state needed to do more to help people find community group homes and prepare them for the transition.

Illinois’ reliance on institutions represents “an antiquated and oppressive model of serving people with developmental disabilities,” said Andrea Rizor, an Equip for Equality attorney, who also said the group hopes the investigation will ultimately help bring more resources to community-based care.

The U.S. Supreme Court found in 1999 that confining people with disabilities in state institutions constituted discrimination, holding that patients with mental disabilities should be placed in community settings if they are medically cleared to do so and expressed a desire to live outside a facility.

Illinois largely failed to do that and ended up under a federal consent decree, which a judge ruled just last year should stay in place until the state made more progress.

Today, accusations of abuse and neglect also have continued to grow, at Choate and across the system. A December 2024 report by the Office of Inspector General said it had received over 15,000 complaints from individuals in institutions and community-based settings, a 24% increase from the previous year and an 80% jump since fiscal year 2020. The office has struggled to keep up, even after growing from 73 to 91 employees in a year. The report said the Office of Inspector General “still lacks enough staff to handle rising caseloads efficiently, estimating it needs at least 120 workers.”

In addition, two years after Pritzker’s announcement that 123 residents with intellectual or developmental disabilities would be moved out of Choate, 81 have been relocated, with most moving to other state-operated developmental centers. Not included in the governor’s initiative are 111 patients with developmental disabilities who are living in specialized units at Choate.

There currently are nearly 1,600 people with developmental disabilities living in state-run facilities in Illinois, with 242 residents stating they want to explore living in the community.

by J. David McSwane, ProPublica, and Mara Silvers, Montana Free Press

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

Since at least April 2021, the Montana medical licensing board has had evidence, including thousands of pages of patient files and medical reviews, that Dr. Thomas C. Weiner, a popular Helena oncologist, had hurt and potentially killed patients, ProPublica and Montana Free Press have learned. Yet in that time, the board renewed his medical license — twice.

Weiner directed the cancer center at St. Peter’s Health for 24 years before he was fired in 2020 and accused of overprescribing narcotics, treating people who didn’t have cancer with chemotherapy and providing substandard care. Weiner, who has denied the allegations, was the subject of a December ProPublica investigation, which revealed a documented trail of patient harm and at least 10 suspicious deaths. Many of the records cited in the story had been in the medical board’s custody for nearly four years, St. Peter’s recently confirmed.

The Board of Medical Examiners renewed Weiner’s medical license in March 2023 and this month, authorizing him to treat patients and prescribe drugs. While lawyers for the state agency that oversees the medical board collected records from the hospital under subpoena, including medical reviews that criticized Weiner’s care, that inquiry languished at the staff level, according to one current and one former board member. It’s unclear why Weiner’s case was not elevated to the governor-appointed board members.

Sam Loveridge, a spokesperson for the Department of Labor and Industry, the board’s umbrella agency, did not answer a list of emailed questions, including whether the records provided by the hospital were reviewed by members of the board.

Kathleen Abke, a lawyer representing St. Peter’s, told ProPublica and Montana Free Press that the hospital initially surrendered to the licensing board 160,000 pages of documents relating to the care of 64 patients; the state received those records in early 2021, just months after Weiner was fired.

As part of the subpoena, St. Peter’s supplied the medical records of Scot Warwick, whom Weiner diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer in 2009. Even though there had not been a lung biopsy to confirm that Warwick had the disease, Weiner proceeded to give him chemotherapy and other treatments for 11 years. After Warwick died in 2020, an autopsy — which St. Peter’s said it gave to the medical board — found no evidence of cancer. Weiner maintained the patient had terminal cancer for 11 years and said a pathologist and post-mortem medical examiner missed the disease.

Lisa Warwick, Scot’s widow, sued St. Peter’s for his wrongful death and settled for an undisclosed amount. Warwick learned from ProPublica and Montana Free Press this month that the state had her husband’s records and other evidence for years. She called the situation “appalling.”

“I would just like to know what information they’re reviewing that sways their determination to renew this man’s license,” she said. “Because if they are truly doing their job and are reviewing these things and looking at all the cases that have been brought forth — the people who have died, the circumstances under which they died — there is no way they can justify renewing this man’s license.”

Anthony Olson, another Weiner patient who inappropriately received chemotherapy for nearly a decade, expressed shock when he learned Montana regulators had information about his case as early as 2021. Three biopsies confirmed that Olson never had cancer, according to court and medical records. That chemo created severe health complications for Olson.

“So they just really don’t care?” Olson asked. “It gives me the shakes. My heart’s racing, and I literally don’t know what to feel right now.”

Weiner blamed other doctors for Olson’s misdiagnosis but acknowledged he received toxic treatments “needlessly.”

In Montana, medical licenses are up for renewal every two years. A few months after the board renewed Weiner’s license in 2023, its staff subpoenaed the hospital for additional records. Abke said St. Peter’s provided the board with thousands more internal documents and medical reviews. Yet, she said, no one from the hospital was called by the board to testify about Weiner’s practices.

St. Peter’s confirmed that the second tranche included the medical records of Nadine Long, a 16-year-old girl who, court and medical records show, died in 2015 shortly after Weiner ordered the injection of a large amount of phenobarbital, a powerful sedative. Weiner has denied wrongdoing in the case. Maintaining that the girl’s condition was terminal, he said he was providing comfort.

St. Peter’s also reported Weiner’s removal to the National Practitioner Data Bank and alerted the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to his alleged narcotics practices, according to records and interviews.

“We provided information to every entity that had the ability to do something about this,” Abke said. “St. Peter’s took these allegations extremely seriously.”

Dr. James Burkholder, a member of the medical licensing board from 2016 to 2023, told ProPublica and Montana Free Press that Weiner’s name “never came up” during board deliberations. Burkholder, a retired family doctor from Helena, said he’s certain the case didn’t reach the board level because he knows Weiner professionally and would have recused himself. He also served on the screening subcommittee that would have first reviewed the state’s investigation into Weiner and passed it up to the full board to be adjudicated.

Dr. Carley Robertson, a current board member, said she’s never heard of Weiner.

It’s unclear how many complaints have been filed against Weiner, as the medical board keeps information about cases that weren’t substantiated secret. ProPublica and Montana Free Press confirmed that at least one licensing complaint against Weiner, filed in 2021, was pending for three years before being dismissed in December.

Marilyn Ketchum’s husband died while under Weiner’s care. After reviewing her husband’s medical records, she took her concerns about Weiner to the medical licensing board. (Melyssa St. Michael for ProPublica)

A few months after reading local news reports about Weiner being fired by St. Peter’s, Marilyn Ketchum decided to act on concerns about her husband, Shawn Ketchum, who died back in 2016 while under Weiner’s care. After reviewing his medical records, she told the board that Weiner altered her husband’s code status without permission. If his heart stopped, he wanted to be a full code, she said, meaning he wanted to be resuscitated. Instead, when he was rushed to the hospital, Weiner maintained that Ketchum was a DNR/DNI — do not resuscitate and do not intubate — his medical records show. Ketchum died without intervention soon after, according to the records.

In its internal reviews of Weiner’s care, St. Peter’s alleged that unilaterally changing patients’ code status was a “standard practice” of his, which it called “a serious violation of the standard of care and medical ethics.” Weiner did not respond to questions about Ketchum’s case and has denied that he ever changed a patient’s status without permission.

Ketchum, who now lives in Arkansas, said a state employee did not interview her until two years after she made a complaint against Weiner’s license. “I was on their ass to do something about it,” Ketchum said, emailing or calling someone from the labor department “every couple of weeks.”

In a letter sent in late 2024, the board provided no explanation for why it had dismissed her complaint.

Weiner has said he’s not currently treating patients because he can’t get malpractice insurance.

Following the ProPublica investigation published in December, the Montana Department of Justice launched a criminal inquiry into Weiner, according to three people with direct knowledge of the case. Weiner has not been charged with a crime. In separate cases last year, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Weiner and the hospital, alleging they defrauded federal health care programs. The hospital settled for $10.8 million. Weiner has denied the allegations through an attorney and petitioned the court to dismiss the case.

Last month, Weiner lost an appeal of a yearslong court battle over his firing. The Montana Supreme Court ruled that the hospital’s actions were “reasonable and warranted due to the quantity and severity of Weiner’s inappropriate patient care.”

Still, since Weiner’s firing, many Helena residents continue to defend him, including by funding billboards that proclaim “WE STAND WITH DR. WEINER.” Weiner’s supporters, often citing his renewed medical license, have accused the hospital of orchestrating a smear campaign against a dedicated oncologist. Since the winter of 2020, they’ve held protests outside of the hospital.

Abke said many St. Peter’s employees are exhausted by the blowback from Weiner’s supporters and are working to regain trust in Helena. Asked about concerns that the hospital unfairly targeted Weiner, Abke said, “No hospital would want to take the financial, the PR, the personal hit for no reason.”

by Hannah Allam

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

On a frigid winter morning in 2022, a stranger knocked on the door of a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, during Shabbat service.

Soon after he was invited in for tea, the visitor pulled out a pistol and demanded the release of an al-Qaida-linked detainee from a nearby federal prison, seizing as hostages a rabbi and three worshipers. The standoff lasted 10 hours until the rabbi, drawing on extensive security training, hurled a chair at the assailant. The hostages escaped.

“We are alive today because of that education,” Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker said after the attack.

The averted tragedy at Congregation Beth Israel is cited as a success story for the largely unseen prevention work federal authorities have relied on for years in the fight to stop terrorist attacks and mass shootings. The government weaves together partnerships with academic researchers and community groups across the country as part of a strategy for addressing violent extremism as a public health concern.

A specialized intervention team at Boston Children’s Hospital treats young patients — some referred by the FBI — who show signs of disturbing, violent behavior. Eradicate Hate, a national prevention umbrella group, says one of its trainees helped thwart a school shooting in California last year by reporting a gun in a fellow student’s backpack. In other programs, counselors guide neo-Nazis out of the white-power movement or help families of Islamist extremists undo the effects of violent propaganda.

The throughline for this work is federal funding — a reliance on grants that are rapidly disappearing as the Trump administration guts billions in spending.

Tens of millions of dollars slated for violence prevention have been cut or are frozen pending review as President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency steamrolls the national security sector. Barring action from Congress or the courts, counterterrorism professionals say, the White House appears poised to end the government’s backing of prevention work on urgent threats.

“This is the government getting out of the terrorism business,” said one federal grant recipient who was ordered this week to cease work on projects including a database used by law enforcement agencies to assess threats.

This account is drawn from interviews with nearly two dozen current and former national security personnel, federally funded researchers and nonprofit grant recipients. Except in a few cases, they spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration.

Dozens of academic and nonprofit programs that rely on grants from the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and other agencies are in crisis mode, mirroring the uncertainty of other parts of the government amid Trump’s seismic reorganization.

“We’re on a precipice,” said the leader of a large nonprofit that has received multiple federal grants and worked with Democratic and Republican administrations on prevention campaigns.

The Department of Justice has collected information about FBI employees who worked on cases related to the Capitol riot as part of a purge of FBI personnel, which is also forcing out officials with terrorism expertise. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Program leaders describe a chilling new operating environment. Scholars of white supremacist violence — which the FBI for years has described as a main driver of domestic terrorism — wonder how they’ll be able to continue tracking the threat without running afoul of the administration’s ban on terms related to race and racism.

The training the rabbi credits with saving his Texas synagogue in 2022 came from a broader community initiative whose federal funding is in limbo. One imperiled effort, FEMA’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program, has helped Jewish institutions across the country install security cameras, train staff and add protective barriers, according to the nonprofit Secure Community Network, which gives security advice and monitors threats to Jewish communities nationwide.

In July 2023, access-control doors acquired through the grant program prevented a gunman from entering Margolin Hebrew Academy in Memphis. In 2021, when gunfire struck the Jewish Family Service offices in Denver, grant-funded protective window film stopped bullets from penetrating the building.

“These are not hypothetical scenarios, they are real examples of how NSGP funds prevent injuries and deaths,” Michael Masters, director of the Secure Community Network, wrote this month in an op-ed in The Jerusalem Post calling for continued funding of the program.

Now the security grants program has been shelved as authorities and Jewish groups warn of rising antisemitism. The generous reading, one Jewish program leader said, is that the funds were inadvertently swept up in DOGE cuts. Trump has been a vocal supporter of Jewish groups and, as one of his first acts in office, signed an executive order promising to tackle antisemitism.

Still, the freeze on grants for synagogue protections has revived talk of finding new, more independent funding streams.

Throughout Jewish history, the program director said, “we’ve learned you need a Plan B.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

“Tsunami” of Cuts

For more than two decades, the federal government has invested tens of millions of dollars in prevention work and academic research with the goal of intervening in the crucial window known as “left of boom” — before an attack occurs.

The projects are diffuse, spread across several agencies, but the government’s central clearinghouse is at Homeland Security in the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, often called CP3. The office houses a grant program that since 2020 has awarded nearly $90 million to community groups and law enforcement agencies working at the local level to prevent terrorism and targeted violence such as mass shootings.

These days, CP3 is imploding. Nearly 20% of its workforce was cut through the dismissal of probationary employees March 3. CP3 Director Bill Braniff, an Army veteran who had fiercely defended the office’s achievements in LinkedIn posts in recent weeks, resigned the same night.

“It is a small act of quiet protest, and an act of immense respect I have for them and for our team,” Braniff wrote in a departing message to staff that was obtained by ProPublica. In the note, he called the employees “wrongfully terminated.”

Some of this year’s CP3 grant recipients say they have no idea whether their funding will continue. One awardee said the team is looking at nightmare scenarios of laying off staff and paring operations to the bone.

“Everybody’s trying to survive,” the grantee said. “It feels like this is a tsunami and you don’t know how it’s going to hit you.”

Current and former DHS officials say they don’t expect the prevention mission to continue in any meaningful way, signaling the end to an effort that had endured through early missteps and criticism from the left and right.

The prevention mission evolved from the post-9/11 growth of a field known as countering violent extremism, or CVE. In early CVE efforts, serious scholars of militant movements jostled for funding alongside pseudo-scientists claiming to have discovered predictors of radicalization. CVE results typically weren’t measurable, allowing for inflated promises of success — “snake oil,” as one researcher put it.

Worse, some CVE programs billed as community partnerships to prevent extremism backfired and led to mistrust that persists today. Muslim advocacy groups were incensed by the government’s targeting of their communities for deradicalization programs, blaming CVE for stigmatizing law-abiding families and contributing to anti-Muslim hostility. Among the most influential Muslim advocacy groups, it is still taboo to accept funding from Homeland Security.

Defenders of CP3, which launched in 2021 from an earlier incarnation, insist that the old tactics based on profiling are gone. They also say there are now more stringent metrics to gauge effectiveness. CP3’s 2024 report to Congress listed more than 1,000 interventions since 2020, cases where prevention workers stepped in with services to dissuade individuals from violence.

The probationary employees who were dismissed this month represented the future of CP3’s public health approach to curbing violence, say current and former DHS officials. They were terminated by email in boilerplate language about poor performance, a detail that infuriated colleagues who viewed them as accomplished social workers and public health professionals.

There were no consultations with administration officials or DOGE — just the ax, said one DHS source with knowledge of the CP3 cuts. Promised exemptions for national security personnel apparently didn’t apply as Trump’s Homeland Security agenda shrinks to a single issue.

“The vibe is: How to use DHS to go after migrants, immigrants. That is the vibe, that is the only vibe, there is no other vibe,” the source said. “It’s wild — it’s as if the rest of the department doesn’t exist.”

This week, with scant warning, Homeland Security cut around $20 million for more than two dozen programs from another wing of DHS, including efforts aimed at stopping terrorist attacks and school shooters.

A Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed “sweeping cuts and reforms” aimed at eliminating waste but did not address questions about specific programs. DHS “remains focused on supporting law enforcement and public safety through funding, training, increased public awareness, and partnerships,” the statement said.

One grant recipient said they were told by a Homeland Security liaison that targeted programs were located in places named on a Fox News list of “sanctuary states” that have resisted or refused cooperation with the government’s deportation campaign. The grantee’s project was given less than an hour to submit outstanding expenses before the shutdown.

The orders were so sudden that even some officials within the government had trouble coming up with language to justify the termination notices. They said they were given no explanation for how the targeted programs were in violation of the president’s executive orders.

“I just don’t believe this is in any way legal,” said one official with knowledge of the cuts.

Members of the far-right group the Proud Boys rally outside the U.S. Capitol in 2025. In one of the first acts of his second term, President Donald Trump pardoned nearly 1,600 people convicted of crimes related to the 2021 attack on the Capitol and commuted the sentences of a handful of others, including former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, left. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Threat Research in Limbo

Cuts are reshaping government across the board, but perhaps nowhere more jarringly than in the counterterrorism apparatus. The administration started dismantling it when the president granted clemency to nearly 1,600 defendants charged in connection with the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The pardons overturned what the Justice Department had celebrated as a watershed victory in the fight against domestic terrorism.

Senior FBI officials with terrorism expertise have left or are being forced out in the purge of personnel involved in the Jan. 6 investigation. In other cases, agents working terrorism cases have been moved to Homeland Security to help with Trump’s mass deportation effort, a resource shift that runs counter to the government’s own threat assessments showing homegrown militants as the more urgent priority. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Without research backing up the enforcement arm of counterterrorism, analysts and officials say, the government lacks the capacity to evaluate rapidly evolving homegrown threats.

Researchers are getting whiplash as grant dollars are frozen and unfrozen. Even if they win temporary relief, the prospect of getting new federal funding in the next four years is minimal. They described pressure to self-censor or tailor research narrowly to MAGA interests in far-left extremism and Islamist militants.

“What happens when you’re self-silencing? What happens if people just stop thinking they should propose something because it’s ‘too risky?’” said one extremism scholar who has advised senior officials and received federal funding. “A lot of ideas that could be used to prevent all kinds of social harms, including terrorism, could get tossed.”

Among the projects at risk is a national compilation of threats to public officials, including assassination attempts against Trump; research on the violent misogyny that floods social media platforms; a long-term study of far-right extremists who are attempting to disengage from hate movements. The studies are underway at research centers and university labs that, in some cases, are funded almost entirely by Homeland Security. A stop-work order could disrupt sensitive projects midstream or remove findings from public view.

“There are both national security and public safety implications for not continuing to study these very complicated problems,” said Pete Simi, a criminologist at Chapman University in California who has federally funded projects that could be cut.

One project never got off the ground before work was suspended.

Six months ago, the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department, announced the Domestic Radicalization and Violent Extremism Research Center of Excellence as a new hub for “understanding the phenomenon” of extremist violence.

Work was scheduled to start in January. The website has since disappeared and the future of the center is in limbo.

Other prevention initiatives in jeopardy at the Justice Department include grant programs related to hate crimes training, which has been in demand with recent unrest on college campuses. In the first weeks of the Trump administration, grant recipients heard a freeze was coming and rushed to withdraw remaining funds. Grant officers suggested work should cease, too, until directives come from the new leadership.

Anne Speckhard, a researcher who has interviewed dozens of militants and works closely with federal counterterrorism agencies, pushed back. She had around 200 people signed up for a training that was scheduled for days after the first funding freeze. Slides for the presentation had been approved, but Speckhard said she wasn’t getting clear answers from the grant office about how to proceed. She decided to go for it.

“I think the expected response was, ‘You’ll just stop working, and you’ll wait and see,’ and that’s not me,” said Speckhard, whose International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism receives U.S. funding along with backing from Qatar and private donations.

As the virtual training began, Speckhard and her team addressed the murkiness of the Justice Department’s support in a moment that drew laughter from the crowd of law enforcement officers and university administrators.

“We said, ‘We think this is a DOJ-sponsored training, and we want to thank them for their sponsorship,’” Speckhard said. “‘But we’re not sure.’”

by ProPublica

ProPublica announced on Thursday that Wendi C. Thomas, the founder of the award-winning nonprofit newsroom MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, will be rejoining ProPublica’s Distinguished Fellows program. Thomas will pursue investigative projects, in partnership with ProPublica, through April 2027.

“I am beyond excited to welcome Wendi back to the Local Reporting Network,” said Charles Ornstein, ProPublica’s managing editor for local. “Wendi knows Memphis, knows the South and has been an important voice for those who are often ignored, righting wrongs and forcing those in power to confront uncomfortable truths.”

Thomas was a ProPublica Local Reporting Network partner from 2019 to 2021, during which time her series, “Profiting From the Poor,” exposed the predatory debt collection practices of the largest health care system in Memphis and led the hospital to backtrack and eliminate patients’ debts. The series won a Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, a Gerald Loeb Award for local reporting, an Association of Health Care Journalists award for business reporting and tied for first place for the Investigative Reporters & Editors Award in the print/online category.

MLK50: Justice Through Journalism was founded in 2017 after Thomas conceived of the idea during a fellowship at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism the year prior. Launched with $3,000, MLK50 has grown to an organization with an annual budget of more than $2 million, making a measurable difference for the most vulnerable Memphians. Thomas previously held the roles of metro columnist and assistant managing editor at The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, and she worked for The Charlotte Observer, The Tennessean and The Indianapolis Star. She is a graduate of Butler University and a proud product of Memphis City Schools.

In addition to the recognition she received for her work as a Local Reporting Network partner, Thomas is the 2023 winner of the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence and the 2022 recipient of the Freedom of the Press Local Champion Award from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. In recognition of her work to create MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, she received the 2019 National Association of Black Journalists’ Best Practices award and the 2018 Journalist of the Year by Journalism and Women Symposium.

“ProPublica enabled me to do some of the best work of my career and learn from some of the smartest minds in the business,” Thomas said. “I’m delighted to be returning to create more ‘good trouble’ on behalf of the city’s most vulnerable residents.”

The Local Reporting Network, which began in 2018, has now worked on more than 100 different projects with over 80 newsrooms. As part of ProPublica’s 50 State Initiative, announced last year, we will work with news organizations in every state on accountability stories over the next several years.

by Nadia Sussman, Liz Moughon, Duaa Eldeib, Margaret Cheatham Williams and Lisa Riordan Seville

THE FILM

Intimate, infuriating and ultimately hopeful, “Before a Breath” braids together the stories of three mothers determined to make pregnancy safer after losing children to stillbirth.

After the loss of her daughter Autumn, Debbie Haine Vijayvergiya discovers that more than 20,000 stillbirths occur every year in the U.S. — and at least 1 in 4 is likely preventable. She goes to Washington, battling political inertia as she fights to make stillbirth research and prevention a federal priority. Kanika Harris, a maternal health advocate and doula, tells the story of her twins, Kodjo and Zindzi, as she trains a new generation of Black birth workers. And Stephanie Lee, a nurse leader at a Manhattan hospital, seeks answers about what might have led to her daughter Elodie’s stillbirth as she takes a leap of faith and becomes pregnant again.

Inspired by ProPublica’s groundbreaking reporting on the stillbirth crisis, which was a finalist for a 2023 Pulitzer Prize, the film is a powerful story of grief, healing and three mothers demanding that the U.S. do better by expecting parents.

Watch “Before a Breath” on YouTube

FEATURING Debbie Haine Vijayvergiya is a stillbirth parent advocate and the mother behind the SHINE for Autumn Act, named in honor of her daughter, Autumn, who was stillborn in 2011.

Watch video ➜

Kanika Harris is a birth justice advocate and doula. She holds a doctorate in health behavior and health education and is the executive director of the National Association to Advance Black Birth.

Watch video ➜

Stephanie Lee is an associate director of nursing in critical care at a New York City hospital. She was also a patient at the Rainbow Clinic at Mount Sinai.

Watch video ➜

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

“Before a Breath” is free to stream on YouTube. If you’d like to host a screening or conversation in your community, please sign up here and use these guides to help you get started.

Download the guide for a community screening

Download the guide for health professionals

WATCH MORE

You can find our trailer, sneak peek scenes and additional videos on the “Before a Breath” playlist on YouTube.

LEARN MORE

Read ProPublica’s reporting and participate in our stillbirth memorial.

• You can read ProPublica’s guide, “What You Need to Know About Stillbirths,” and our whole stillbirths series.
• Hear the stories of other families by visiting our stillbirth memorial and create your own.

Get more information about stillbirths and care for parents of loss.

• The Rainbow Clinic at Mount Sinai is one of several clinics opening around the country that care for pregnant patients with a history of perinatal loss.
• The University of Utah recently opened a Stillbirth Center of Excellence, a hub of efforts to end preventable stillbirths in the U.S.
• The International Stillbirth Alliance promotes collaboration for the prevention of stillbirth and newborn death worldwide.
• Bereavement support groups for families of loss are available around the country and online. Your local hospitals and birth centers may suggest some.

STAY IN TOUCH

• Have you hosted a screening? Tell us about it!

FILM TEAM

• Nadia Sussman, Director and Producer
• Liz Moughon, Director of Photography and Producer
• Duaa Eldeib, Reporter and Producer
• Lisa Riordan Seville, Producer
• Margaret Cheatham Williams, Editor
• Mahdokht Mahmoudabadi, Additional Editor
• Mandy Hoffman, Composer
• Almudena Toral, Executive Producer

by Stephen Engelberg

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists.

In late October, ProPublica published one of its most prophetic stories in our history. You can be forgiven if you missed it at the time. There was a lot going on in the days before the election, and the headlines were dominated by seemingly consequential issues like the racist humor of a comedian who addressed Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden.

But if you weren’t among the several hundred thousand people who read our story, “‘Put Them in Trauma’: Inside a Key MAGA Leader’s Plans for a New Trump Agenda,” in real time, you may have seen it referenced since Trump took office in January.

The story drew on private recordings of a series of speeches given in 2023 and 2024 by Russell Vought obtained by our colleagues at Documented, a news site with a remarkable knack for uncovering information powerful interests would prefer remained secret.

Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist who served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget in Trump’s first term, was known for his provocative public pronouncements. But he went even further in private, envisaging a Trump presidency in which regulatory agencies would be shut down and career civil servants would be too depressed to get out of bed.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in one recording. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

“We want to put them in trauma.”

Vought spoke openly about the ongoing planning to defund independent federal agencies and demonize government scientists. “We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”

Vought argued that the radical steps were necessary because Trump’s opponents were themselves attempting to end democracy. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country,” he said in one speech. “Our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us. And they are going to continue to aim it until they no longer have to win elections.”

It’s hard to imagine a more prescient piece of journalism. The story captured, as few did, the breadth and ferocity of the coming attack on the federal government. Vought has returned to his post as the budget office’s director, and his plans for eviscerating entire agencies and decimating the morale of federal workers have turned into reality. Trump 47 looks very different from Trump 45, just as Vought told his audiences that it would.

So why didn’t this story drive more of a national conversation when it appeared?

As a news organization that tries to spur change by bringing new facts to light, we think about this question a lot. Our job at ProPublica is to both get the story and get it into the heads of a critical mass of citizens and elected officials.

I’ve been an investigative reporter and editor for nearly three decades, and I still struggle to predict which of our stories will catalyze national conversations. Our 2018 story about the recording of a young girl in a immigration detention center prompted the Trump administration to end its policy of family separation at the border. Many other powerful stories fail to break through.

Part of the problem, of course, is the proliferation of media. Every day, dozens of important-sounding stories vie for readers’ attention along with the flood of posts on social media and texts from friends and colleagues. And that’s not to mention all the podcasts and multipart dramas on Netflix and HBO.

This was an issue long before Trump and his allies adopted a “flood the zone” strategy with multiple norm-challenging actions, but it seems even more acute right now.

It is often said of journalists that we write the rough draft of history. But our work differs from historians in a crucial aspect: Scholars typically are chronicling events after the outcome is clear. As journalists, we face a tougher challenge as we try to find the stories in the cacophony of daily events that tell us something about where we’re going.

A lot of what we do as reporters is akin to squinting through opaque windows at events unfolding in a very dimly lit room. We can see who is inside and how they’re moving, but our lack of context often prevents us from understanding what’s really happening. We default to assuming that the future will be roughly like the past, guessing that, say, Trump 47 will be roughly like Trump 45 with fewer guardrails.

Vought could not have been clearer that this was not the case, and he had the credentials that should have made what he was saying entirely credible. After all, Vought was the author of the plan in Trump’s first term to make it easier to fire large numbers of civil servants. He was a key member of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation project that described in copious detail how a second Trump administration might unfold.

Still, there was at least one data point that perhaps prevented readers from viewing his speeches as predictive as they turned out to be. As our story made clear, Vought despises the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, a core Republican ally in bringing conservative voices into the judiciary and federal law enforcement. We quoted him as asserting that “the vaunted so-called Federalist Society and originalist judges” were serving as a “Praetorian Guard” for the Democrats.

That view would seem to make him something of a fringe thinker in MAGA world, which relied on the Federalist Society to pick the judges who make up the conservative supermajority on the high court.

Things look different today. Seen against the backdrop of recent events, Vought’s disdain for the rule-of-law scruples of Federalist Society legal thinkers seems entirely in line with Trump’s recent post suggesting a federal judge shouldn’t have authority over his administration.

Just a few weeks ago, Danielle Sassoon, one of the Federalist Society’s bright lights, a Yale Law graduate who had clerked for conservative icon Antonin Scalia, resigned as acting U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York rather than carry out orders from the Trump Justice Department. In refusing to drop the corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, Sassoon wrote that she understood her duty as a prosecutor to mean “enforcing the law impartially, and that includes prosecuting a validly returned indictment regardless of whether its dismissal would be politically advantageous, to the defendant or those that appointed me.”

Many years ago, a New York Times investigative reporter and I were discussing a story we had worked on that had been sharply and justifiably criticized as new facts emerged. “I can be fair and accurate,” he said. “But fair, accurate and prescient is beyond me.”

It seems appropriate to give Vought the last word since the worldview he described has proven so accurate. What sounded grandiose in the preelection days seems today like a reasonable summary of the path Trump and his allies have chosen.

“We are here in the year of 2024, a year that very well [could] — and I believe it will — rival 1776 and 1860 for the complexity and the uncertainty of the forces arrayed against us,” Vought said, citing the years when the colonies declared independence from Britain and the first state seceded over President Abraham Lincoln’s election.

“God put us here for such a time as this.”

I’m not sure about the role of the almighty in ProPublica’s work in the coming years. But we feel equally strongly that we’re here for a “time such as this.”

by Patricia Callahan

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

The Food and Drug Administration has found problems at an Indian factory that makes generic drugs for American patients, including one medication that was manufactured there and has been linked to at least eight deaths, federal records show.

The agency inspected the factory after a ProPublica investigation in December found that the plant, operated by Glenmark Pharmaceuticals, was responsible for an outsized share of recalls for pills that didn’t dissolve properly and could harm people. Among the string of recalls, the FDA had determined last year that more than 50 million potassium chloride extended-release capsules had the potential to kill U.S. patients.

Still, ProPublica found, the FDA had not sent inspectors to the factory in Madhya Pradesh, India, since before the COVID-19 pandemic.

When FDA inspectors went to the Glenmark plant last month — five years after the agency’s prior inspection — they discovered problems with cleaning and testing that they said could affect medicines that were shipped to American consumers.

In a report detailing their findings, the inspectors wrote that Glenmark failed to resolve why some medicines weren’t dissolving properly, and they raised concerns about the factory’s manufacturing processes.

“Equipment and utensils are not cleaned at appropriate intervals to prevent contamination that would alter the safety, identity, strength, quality or purity of the drug product,” the inspectors wrote.

The FDA redacted large swaths of the inspection report, making it impossible to tell whether inspectors uncovered the reason for the pills not dissolving correctly or which Glenmark drugs sitting in American medicine cabinets were potentially at risk of contamination.

ProPublica obtained the report through the Freedom of Information Act. To justify censoring the document, an FDA attorney cited trade secrets “and/or commercial or financial information that was obtained from a person outside the government and that is privileged or confidential.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was sworn in the day before this inspection wrapped up, has vowed to bring “radical transparency” to his agency, which oversees the FDA. ProPublica asked the HHS media team whether Kennedy thinks the heavily redacted inspection record is in line with his transparency promise and whether he believes the names of drugs that inspectors raised safety concerns about are trade secrets. The media team did not respond.

An FDA spokesperson would not say why the agency waited so long to inspect this factory or what, if anything, federal regulators will require Glenmark do to fix the problems. “The FDA generally cannot discuss potential or ongoing compliance matters except with the company involved,” she wrote.

The FDA’s review of the Glenmark plant, she noted, “was a for-cause inspection, which can be triggered when the agency has reason to believe that a facility has quality problems, to follow up on complaints or other reasons.”

Drugs that fail to dissolve properly can cause perilous swings in dosing. Since Glenmark’s potassium chloride recall in May, the company has told federal regulators it received reports of eight deaths in the U.S. of people who took the recalled capsules, FDA records show. Companies are required to file reports of adverse events they receive from patients or their doctors so the agency can monitor drug safety. The FDA shares few details, though; as a result, ProPublica was unable to independently verify what happened in each of these cases. In general, the FDA says these reports reflect the opinions of the people who reported the harm and don’t prove that it was caused by the drug.

The family of a 91-year-old Maine woman sued Glenmark in federal court in Newark, New Jersey, last year, alleging the company’s recalled potassium chloride was responsible for her death in June. In court filings, the company has denied responsibility.

A spokesperson for Glenmark, which is based in Mumbai, declined to answer detailed questions about the inspection, citing the ongoing litigation. “Glenmark remains committed to working diligently with the FDA to ensure compliance with manufacturing operations and quality systems,” the spokesperson wrote.

Glenmark’s managing director told investors and analysts on an earnings call last month that 25% to 30% of its U.S. revenue comes from drugs made at its Madhya Pradesh factory.

Inspectors visited the factory between Feb. 3 and Feb. 14. Like all such reports, this one notes that the inspectors’ observations “do not represent a final Agency determination” about the company’s compliance with the FDA’s drug manufacturing rules.

Glenmark lacked proper cleaning procedures that prevent residues of one medicine from winding up in batches of the next pills produced with the same machinery, the inspectors found. While Glenmark rejected three batches when tests found cross-contamination, the inspectors said that the same equipment was used to make other drugs that were shipped to the U.S. Their report went on to list the “impacted batches,” but it is unclear what those drugs are because the next three pages are censored.

The FDA heavily redacted the first four pages of a report on its visit to a plant operated by Glenmark Pharmaceuticals. (Obtained by ProPublica)

ProPublica asked the FDA if the agency was testing any of these medicines for contamination. The spokesperson wouldn’t say and instead referred a reporter to an FDA website that shows past test results but does not include any for Glenmark products since the recalls.

Major production equipment is not decontaminated before the company uses it to make some drug products, a Glenmark vice president in charge of quality told the inspectors. It’s unclear what those drugs are because the FDA censored that part of the report.

The inspectors noted that Glenmark received two consumer complaints about adverse reactions to one of its drugs. When Glenmark investigated the complaints, the company failed to assess the potential problems that can occur when pharmaceutical products are manufactured using shared facilities and equipment, the report said. But the name of the drug and the type of potential contamination that inspectors worried about were not clear due to the FDA’s redactions.

Glenmark also didn’t get to the bottom of why some medicines made at the factory weren’t dissolving properly, the FDA inspectors found. The company’s investigations of some batches of faulty medicine didn’t identify specific root causes, and those that did pinpoint a reason weren’t adequately supported with evidence or didn’t explain all the data, the inspectors wrote.

The inspectors also raised concerns that some drugs made at the factory and the key ingredients that go into them “are routinely released by testing with analytical test methods that have not been adequately validated or verified.” The inspectors listed the ones that are currently on the U.S. market, but the FDA redacted the names of the drugs.

When Glenmark analysts’ tests found problems with a medicine, the company at times declared those results invalid and “retested with new samples to obtain passing results,” the FDA report said. “The batches were ultimately released to the US market.”

Glenmark has been the subject of FDA scrutiny for years. Since 2019, the agency’s inspectors have found major deficiencies at three of the company’s four other factories that have made drugs for American patients. The problems at one plant were so bad that in 2022 the agency barred medicines made there from entering the U.S.

The concerning string of recalls stemming from products made at the Madhya Pradesh factory in central India began in October 2023. Over the next 12 months, that single plant accounted for more than 30% of all FDA recalls for pills that didn’t dissolve correctly and could harm patients, a ProPublica analysis found.

The federal government often doesn’t make it easy for consumers to know where their medicines are manufactured. To identify this pattern, ProPublica had to match drug-labeling records from the U.S. National Library of Medicine with details in two FDA databases.

The majority of the factories making drugs for American patients are in foreign countries, but the investigative arm of Congress has repeatedly found that the FDA has too few inspectors to adequately oversee them.

by McKenzie Funk

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

The for-profit prison company GEO Group has surged in value under President Donald Trump. Investors are betting big on immigration detention. Its stock price doubled after Election Day.

But despite its soaring fortunes, the $4 billion company continues to resist having to pay detainees more than $1 a day for cleaning facilities where the government has forced them to live.

At the 1,575-bed detention center GEO runs for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Tacoma, Washington, detainees once prepared meals, washed laundry and scrubbed toilets, doing jobs that would otherwise require 85 full-time employees, the company estimated. The state’s minimum wage at the time was $11 an hour. (It’s now $16.66.) In 2017, Washington sued GEO to enforce it, and in October 2021 a federal jury ruled unanimously in the state’s favor.

This year, GEO and Washington are back in court — for a third time — as the company tries to reverse the earlier decision that sided with the state. GEO has brought in contract cleaners at the Tacoma facility while the case plays out, keeping detainees there from paid work and from having a way to earn commissary money.

The legal battle has national repercussions as the number of ICE detainees around the country rises to its highest level in five years. The vast majority are held in private facilities run by GEO or corporate competitors like CoreCivic. If following state minimum wages becomes the norm, Trump’s immigration crackdown could cost the country even more than it otherwise would — unless private detention centers absorb the cost themselves or decide to cut back on cleaning, which Tacoma detainees have already accused GEO of doing.

GEO frames the lawsuit as a fight over the federal government’s authority to make the laws of the nation. Multiple courts have decided that the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets the federal minimum wage, does not apply to detained migrants. At issue in the Tacoma case is the state minimum wage.

“Simply put, we believe the State of Washington has unconstitutionally violated the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution,” GEO wrote in a news release.

The company did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica. ICE and CoreCivic declined to comment.

GEO’s latest legal salvo came last month.

A three-judge panel at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had recently affirmed lower courts’ rulings. GEO had to pay state minimum wage at the Tacoma facility. The company was also ordered to hand over $17 million in back wages, plus $6 million for “unjust enrichment.” The combined penalties amounted to less than 1 percent of GEO’s total revenues in 2024.

Rather than pay up, GEO petitioned on Feb. 6 for a rehearing by the full 9th Circuit. In the news release, it vowed to “vigorously pursue all available appeals.”

It isn’t that GEO lacks the ability to pay, the company has made clear in legal filings. Its gross profit from its Tacoma facility, today called the Northwest ICE Processing Center, was about $20 million a year when Washington filed its lawsuit. The company told a judge in 2021 it could “pay the Judgments twenty times over.”

The real issue is the precedent the Tacoma case could set. GEO, which manages 16 ICE detention facilities across the country, faces similar lawsuits in California and Colorado. The California case, also before the 9th Circuit, is on hold pending the outcome of Washington’s. Colorado’s is winding its way through a lower court.

GEO is expected to fight the case all the way to the Supreme Court, if needed.

If eventually forced to pay state minimum wages across the country, the company could decide to pay detainees more or else hire outside employees at all its locations – either of which would potentially eat into its profits, stock price and dividends.

The company also could try to renegotiate its long-term contracts with ICE for a higher rate of reimbursement, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, an expert in incarceration, noted in an article for the Brennan Center for Justice.

Or GEO could respond to higher labor costs another way. After the jury decision against it in 2021, the company paused Tacoma’s Voluntary Work Program, as it is known, rather than pay detainees there minimum wage. Some could no longer afford phone calls to family members. (For such detainees, the program had never been entirely voluntary. “I need the money desperately,” one testified. “I have no choice.”)

The facility also “got really gross” after the sudden stoppage, a Mexican detainee told the Associated Press at the time. “Nobody cleaned anything.”

GEO brought in contract cleaners eventually.

Mike Faulk, a spokesperson for the Washington state attorney general’s office, said testimony in the minimum-wage issue highlights the problem with housing detainees in private prisons: profit motive. Not only did GEO pay $1 a day for cleaning in Tacoma, it budgeted less than $1 per meal that each detainee ate, one kitchen worker testified. “So the grade of food is abysmal,” Faulk said of the detainee’s testimony. “He routinely picked out grasshoppers/insects from the food.”

For its part, GEO argues that Washington wants to unfairly — and hypocritically — hold the Tacoma facility to a standard that even state facilities don’t have to meet. The company has noted that a carveout in Washington law exempts state prisons from minimum-wage requirements, allowing the state to pay prisoners no more than $40 a week. The federal government, taking GEO’s side, has made the same point in “friend of the court” briefs under both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration. So did a dissenting judge in the recent 9th Circuit decision.

But to liken state prisons to a privately run immigration facility is an “apples and oranges” comparison, the 9th Circuit decided. Washington doesn’t let private companies run its state prisons. And the migrants in Tacoma are detained under civil charges, not as convicted criminals.

As judges have noted, GEO’s contract with ICE states that the prison company must follow “all applicable federal, state, and local laws and standards,” including “labor laws and codes.” It also holds that GEO must pay detainees at least $1 a day for the Voluntary Work Program. The federal government “made a deliberate choice to dictate to GEO the minimum rate,” the 9th Circuit wrote in its most recent decision, but “it also made a deliberate choice not to dictate to GEO a maximum rate.”

Conditions in Tacoma are worsening as the number of detainees rises, according to Maru Mora Villalpando, founder of the activist group La Resistencia. The group is in regular contact with people inside the detention center.

Meal service, Mora Villalpando said, is faltering: “Dinner used to be at 5. Then 6. Now it’s 9.”

Cleaning is faltering, too, she said. Without detainee labor, the outside cleaners have to do it all.

“But these people,” Mora Villalpando said, “can’t keep up.”

by Jeremy Schwartz, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Dan Keemahill, The Texas Tribune, photography by Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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

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

In 2019, the Keller Independent School District in North Texas looked a lot like its counterpart just 30 miles to the east in the Dallas suburb of Richardson. Each served about 35,000 children and had experienced sharp increases in the racial diversity of students in recent decades. Each was run by a school board that was almost entirely white.

In the five years since, the districts have followed strikingly divergent paths as culture war battles over how to teach race and gender exploded across the state.

In Keller, candidates backed by groups seeking to limit the teaching of race and gender took control of the school board and immediately passed sweeping policies that gave outsized power to any individual who wanted to prevent the purchase of books they believed to be unsuitable for children.

Though more than half of Keller’s students are from racially diverse backgrounds, the district in 2023 nixed a plan to buy copies of a biography of Black poet Amanda Gorman after a teacher at a religious private school who had no children in the district complained about this passage: “Amanda realized that all the books she had read before were written by white men. Discovering a book written by people who look like her helped Amanda find her own voice.” The passage, the woman wrote, “makes it sound like it’s okay to judge a book by the authors skin color rather than the content of the book.”

Board members at the Richardson school district went in the opposite direction, even as they contended with similar pressure from groups aiming to rid the district of any materials that they claimed pushed critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that discusses systemic racism. The school board did not ban library books but instead allowed parents to limit their own children’s access to them, keeping them available for other students.

One major difference contributed to the districts’ divergence: the makeup of their school boards.

The way communities elect school board members plays a key, if often overlooked, role in whether racially diverse districts like Keller and Richardson experience takeovers by ideologically driven conservatives seeking to exert greater influence over what children learn in public schools, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found. Since the pandemic, such groups have successfully leveraged the state’s long-standing and predominantly at-large method of electing candidates to flip school boards in their direction.

Most of Texas’ 1,000 school districts use an at-large method, where voters can cast ballots for all candidates. Supporters say that allows for broader representation for students, but voting rights advocates argue that such systems dilute the power of voters of color. If board members are elected districtwide, there tends to be less diversity, according to research, which also shows that if they are elected by smaller geographic zones, candidates of color often have more success.

Tabitha Branum, the Richardson superintendent, at a meeting on Jan. 16. After a lawsuit in 2019, the district converted primarily to a system in which candidates needed to live within specific boundaries and receive a majority of votes from residents who also lived within those boundaries to be elected.

“What you’re seeing happening in Texas is how at-large districts make it easy for somebody to come in, usually from the outside, and hijack the process and essentially buy a board,” said Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit public policy institute that champions small-donor campaign financing. “Because of this conflux of factors — at-large elections and large amounts of outside money — it just sort of defeats the idea of representative democracy.”

ProPublica and the Tribune examined 14 rapidly diversifying suburban school districts where children from diverse backgrounds now make up more than half of the student population. In the six districts that used at-large voting systems, well-funded and culture-war-driven movements successfully helped elect school board members who have moved aggressively to ban or remove educational materials that teach children about diversity, even in districts where a majority of children are not white. Nearly 70% of board members in such districts live in areas that are whiter than their district’s population.

Eight nearby school systems with similar demographics employ single-member voting systems to elect school board candidates. Under the single-member system, voters within certain boundaries elect a board member who specifically represents their area. Candidates in those districts received less campaign support from ideologically driven political action committees, and none of the districts experienced school board takeovers fueled by culture war issues.

About 150 Texas school districts have transitioned to a single-member system since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is intended to prevent voter discrimination and has brought greater racial representation to local governments. Richardson joined that list in 2019 after a former Black board member sued the district.

Such legal challenges, however, could soon become more difficult. In one of his first acts in office, President Donald Trump froze civil rights litigation against school districts accused of discriminating against minority groups, and many legal experts believe that under his administration, federal prosecutors will refuse to bring challenges against at-large systems. DOJ officials did not respond to questions from the news organizations.

Trump, a staunch critic of diversity and inclusion programs, has threatened to cut federal funding to schools that he says are pushing “inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the shoulders of our children.”

Districts whose boards oppose sweeping efforts to restrict curriculum and books related to race and racism face even more headwinds in Texas. In January, Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in public schools, a move that would expand the state’s existing ban on college campuses. And Texas lawmakers continue to target the books students can access. One bill, authored by North Texas state Sen. Angela Paxton, the wife of Attorney General Ken Paxton, would require every district in the state to follow a version of Keller’s library book purchase policy.

The president of the Keller board, Charles Randklev, did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the district did not answer written questions. District officials have previously said that the board represents all students, not just those in a specific neighborhood or area.

But Laney Hawes, the parent of four students in the district and an outspoken critic of the school board, said the policy on library purchases spawned a backdoor channel to banning materials about race. That, she said, has deprived her children of reading books about Americans like Gorman that provide points of view they might not find otherwise.

“They have created a system that allows anyone in the community to complain about any book for any reason, and now that book is not on library shelves,” said Hawes, who is white. She added that the book does not contain any sexually explicit material and was strictly targeted because it dealt with race.

“They just hate the racial undertones.”

Laney Hawes, a parent of four children in the Keller district, feels the school board’s actions have limited her children’s ability to access learning materials. “Up Against a Machine”

School districts across Texas have drawn considerable attention for removing books from their shelves, but board members in Keller went further when they passed a policy in August 2022 that, in practice, allowed community members to block proposed purchases.

Students spoke out against the district’s removal policies during a board meeting months later, pleading for access to books about race. One biracial student, who has since graduated, told the board that books about characters from different racial backgrounds helped her feel more accepted.

“All kids deserve to see themselves in literature,” the student said. “Racial minorities being written into a story does not instantly equate the book to being propaganda. Having books that mirror the experience of race is not pushing an agenda. It's simply documenting the hardships that consistently happen to most students of color that they’re able to relate to. Concealing ideas just because they tell an uncomfortable truth is not protecting your children.”

The students’ pleas didn’t sway the board, and by July 2023, challenges to such books began pouring in.

One person opposed the purchase of “Jim Crow: Segregation and the Legacy of Slavery.” The person, who did not provide their name, pointed to a photo of a young girl participating in a Black Lives Matter protest with the caption: “Just as in the past, people continue fighting for change.” They also took issue with this quote: “You can’t ‘get over’ something that is still happening. Which is why black Americans can’t ‘get over’ slavery or Jim Crow.”

The photo and the quotes, the book challenger said, were “potentially CRT,” showed the Black Lives Matter Movement in “a positive light” and claimed “oppression is still happening.”

A complaint that kept the Keller district from purchasing the book “Our Skin” said: “This book starts out beautifully, but unfortunately tenets of CRT, social justice, and anti-white activism are portrayed. Texas passed a law banning critical race theory in schools. Please remove this book for consideration.” (Obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Another person challenged the planned purchase of “Our Skin: A First Conversation About Race,” saying that the book started “beautifully,” but that “unfortunately tenets of CRT, social justice, and anti-white activism are portrayed.” The person, who used a pseudonym, did not offer specifics.

Administrators removed those books, the Gorman biography and 26 others from the purchase list after receiving the complaints, according to district officials. Librarians can reinstate books on future lists, but 75% of those flagged for further review never made it to the shelves, an online search of district libraries shows. That includes the three books about race.

Hawes, who heads two PTA groups at her children’s schools, said book challenges and complaints have come from allies of school board members. In 2022, Patriot Mobile Action, a North Texas Christian nationalist PAC funded by a cellphone company, spent more than $115,000 supporting three ideologically driven conservatives running for control of the school board.

Leigh Wambsganss, Patriot Mobile’s spokesperson and executive director of the PAC, declined to comment but said in a 2022 podcast that the PAC chose candidates based on their Christian conservative views and sought out those who “absolutely would stand against critical race theory.” Patriot Mobile supported eight candidates in three other North Texas districts that used at-large voting during the same election cycle. All of them won their races.

“We weren’t prepared for what was coming,” Hawes said. “We were literally up against a machine.”

Another PAC, KISD Family Alliance, spent $50,000 to help elect the same Keller school board candidates. Its donors included conservative activist Monty Bennett, who previously told the Tribune that he believes schools have been taken over by ideologues “pushing their outlandish agendas.” Neither Bennett nor the PAC’s treasurer responded to requests for comment.

The slate of Keller candidates, whose combined campaign war chests dwarfed that of their opponents’ by a more than 4 to 1 margin, focused their agendas squarely on culture war issues related to library books and curriculum.

“While I have many priorities I want to focus on, if concerns over child safety, and sexualization and politicization of children make me a one-issue candidate, so be it. I will be a one-issue candidate all day long,” Joni Shaw Smith wrote on her campaign website. Smith, who is now a board member, declined to comment.

Her election contributed to what would become a sweep of the seven seats on the board. Five of those seats are held by board members who live in the city of Keller, where three-quarters of residents are white and the median household income of more than $160,000 is among the highest in the state.

Most of the Keller district’s 42 schools, however, are located in the more diverse neighborhoods of Fort Worth.

David Tyson Jr. was the first Black school board member in Richardson. He would later settle a lawsuit against the district over its at-large voting system. A Different Approach

Thirty miles away, the makeup of Richardson’s school board changed dramatically after the district settled a lawsuit filed in 2018 by David Tyson Jr. He argued that the continued use of at-large voting to select candidates was a “relic of the district’s segregated past.”

Tyson became the district’s first Black board member when he was elected in 2004. After he retired in 2010, he watched with growing consternation as no candidates from diverse backgrounds followed in his footsteps, even though students of color accounted for nearly 70% of the district’s population.

Frustrated, Tyson sued Richardson, challenging its system for electing candidates under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He and Richardson officials settled the lawsuit in 2019, and the district converted primarily to a system in which candidates needed to live within specific boundaries and receive a majority of votes from residents who also lived within those boundaries to be elected.

Richardson Board Members Now Represent More Parts of the District

In 2019, the district switched from at-large voting to a single-member system that required board members to live in the areas they represent. Now, board members come from more diverse backgrounds and are spread across the district.

Note: Boundaries shown are single-member districts, which were adopted following the 2019 settlement of a Voting Rights Act lawsuit. Demographics are based on the 2020 census, which was used by the district to draw the boundaries. (Source: Richardson ISD. Credit: Dan Keemahill/ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.)

Watch video ➜

As ideologically driven candidates swept Keller school board elections, similar efforts played out differently in Richardson. In 2022, two candidates supported by groups seeking to limit instruction and library books that deal with race and gender ran against two candidates of color with differing views. A local PAC that accused the district of teaching “CRT nonsense” in a mailer hired the same Republican campaign consulting firm that was working in support of the Keller candidates.

Despite being outspent 2-to-1, the candidates of color won their elections. Their wins gave Richardson four board members of diverse backgrounds, a remarkable evolution from an all-white board just three years earlier. And, as nearby districts began mass removals of library books dealing with race and gender, the Richardson school board embraced an “opt-out” process to give concerned parents control over their children’s reading “without impacting the choices of other families who may have different values, wishes or expectations.” Opponents say opt-out systems do not go far enough in protecting students from materials they deem objectionable.

“Single-member districts benefited us in making sure our school board maintains the diversity, and diversity of thought, we have, and not just fall into those culture wars,” said Vanessa Pacheco, one of the board members who won.

Pacheco said not being consumed by such fights allowed the board to focus on “real stuff” like dual-language classes for elementary students, expanding pre-K opportunities and scheduling school events for parents in the evenings and on weekends to account for working families.

So striking was the district’s atmosphere following the 2022 election that a Dallas Morning News commentary dubbed Richardson a “no-drama district” in a sea of school boards consumed by fights over race and gender.

Tyson, whose lawsuit set the stage for the Richardson school board’s dramatic transformation, said that the shift in voting methods has accomplished what he had hoped for.

“The goal was to get representation,” he said. “We’re a majority-minority school district, and so we need to have a majority-minority representation on the school board.”

“Single-member districts benefited us in making sure our school board maintains the diversity, and diversity of thought, we have, and not just fall into those culture wars,” Richardson school board member Vanessa Pacheco said. “Now or Never”

Hawes watched as voters down the road in Richardson rejected candidates seeking to limit what the district’s diverse student body could read and learn. She watched as the board itself grew increasingly diverse. And she watched with a touch of envy as the district embraced the idea that parents and community members who opposed certain books should not make decisions for every child in the district.

With Richardson as their north star, Hawes and a growing number of concerned parents began discussing ways to force the Keller school district to adopt what they believed was a more representative voting system. It wasn’t just a question of race for Hawes. It was also about geographic diversity. Board members who live in the city of Keller hold a majority, even though less than a third of students in the district attend schools there.

Most Keller Board Members Live in the District’s Least Diverse Area

Meanwhile, no board member lives in the area with the largest share of students of color.

Note: Demographic numbers were calculated by aggregating students from all schools in each high school’s attendance zone for the 2023-24 school year. (Source: Texas Education Agency. Credit: Dan Keemahill/ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.)

So last year, Hawes and other concerned parents met with law firms and the NAACP and began planning a petition drive that would require the board to hold an election to do away with at-large voting. Members planned to meet in January to finalize a strategy.

Then, in mid-January, the Keller school board shocked many in the community by proposing to split the district in two, separating the whiter, more affluent city of Keller to the east from the neighborhoods of northern Fort Worth, which are home to the majority of the district’s students, including many who are low income. Like many districts in the state, Keller faces a massive budget shortfall.

Randklev, the board president, defended the split as financially beneficial for both districts in a Facebook post last month. He also wrote that “neighboring school districts have been forced into single-member districts, and that’s a no-win situation regardless of where you live.” He did not explain his position but said the proposed split “could provide programming opportunities that best reflect local community goals and values and foster greater parent and community involvement.”

Dixie Davis, a Keller district parent who lost her race for a school board seat, believes that the proposed district split would disenfranchise students of color.

But many parents, including Dixie Davis, who previously ran unsuccessfully for the board, said the proposed change would leave the vast majority of the district’s low-income student population, and most of its students of color, with uncertain access to facilities like an advanced learning center and the district’s swimming complex.

On Friday, board members abandoned plans to divide the school district in two, citing the cost of restructuring the district’s debt. But their push to split the district has further energized efforts by some parents to do away with at-large voting. Brewer Storefront, the same law firm that fought to change the voting system in Richardson, has filed a similar legal challenge in federal court against Keller and concerned parents have launched a petition drive to force the district to vote on its at-large system. The district has not yet filed a response to the lawsuit and did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“With the momentum and uproar around this proposed district split, it's now or never to get this done,” Davis said. “It'll be a huge uphill battle, but this is our best shot.”

Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Jessica Priest, The Texas Tribune, contributed research.

by Andy Kroll

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

On Feb. 20, nearly 7,000 probationary employees at the Internal Revenue Service began receiving an unsigned letter telling them that they had been fired for poor performance.

Trump administration lawyers insist that the IRS and other federal agencies have acted within their authority when they ordered waves of mass terminations since Trump took office. But according to previously unreported emails obtained by ProPublica, a top lawyer at the IRS warned administration officials that the performance-related language in his agency’s termination letter was “a false statement” that amounted to “fraud” if the agency kept the language in the letter.

The emails reveal that in the hours before the IRS sent out its Feb. 20 termination letter, a fierce dispute played out at the agency’s highest levels.

Joseph Rillotta, a senior IRS lawyer, wrote that “no one” at the IRS had taken into account the performance of the probationary workers set to be fired. Rillotta urged that the language be struck from the draft termination letter.

If the falsehood wasn’t removed, Rillotta said he would file a report with the inspector general for the IRS.

Excerpt of an email written by IRS lawyer Joseph Rillotta (Obtained by ProPublica)

No one appeared to respond to Rillotta’s first email. In a follow-up email, he said he was “pleading with you to remove the clause,” adding: “It is not an immaterial false statement, because it is designed to improve the government’s posture in litigation (to the detriment of the employees that we are terminating today).”

Because it was not true, he wrote, “That renders it, as I see it, an anticipatory fraud on tribunals of jurisdiction over these employment actions.”

Rillotta was again ignored. The IRS sent out the Feb. 20 termination notice with the disputed language in it, according to copies received by fired workers who shared them with ProPublica. The notice said the decision to fire the workers had taken “into account your performance” as well as administration guidance and “current mission needs.”

Excerpt of a termination notice sent to probationary employees at the IRS (Obtained by ProPublica)

In fact, many of the employees had received laudatory reviews with no hint of any concerns.

Soon afterward, the inspector general for the IRS took preliminary steps to look into the matter, according to a person familiar with the effort who wasn’t authorized to speak with reporters. This person said they told the investigator that they agreed with Rillotta that the performance rationale was false.

Michelle Bercovici, a lawyer who represents federal workers, told ProPublica that Rillotta’s ignored warnings should make it easier for plaintiffs to show that the mass firings were “arbitrary and capricious,” the legal standard needed to invalidate a federal agency’s action. She added that the emails could also help plaintiffs recover attorneys’ fees from the government.

“When an agency acts based on false information, not only does it set the action up for being overturned,” she said. “It also means the agency is not going to have many defenses to its actions and could be liable for fees.”

Spokespeople for the Treasury Department and IRS did not respond to requests for comment. An Office of Personnel Management spokesperson referred ProPublica to a revised memorandum stating that OPM “is not directing agencies to take any specific performance-based actions regarding probationary employees.”

The terminations at the tax agency were among the deep cuts to federal agencies by the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency, led by the billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk.

Multiple federal lawsuits are now challenging the Trump administration’s mass firings. Last week, two federal judges temporarily blocked the IRS and other firings, but the lawsuits continue.

The issue of whether the performance rationale was legitimate has been central to the suits. One suit, brought by a group of labor unions, advocacy groups and other parties in California federal court, alleges that OPM directed the probationary firings and so “perpetrated one of the most massive employment frauds in the history of this country, telling tens of thousands of workers that they are being fired for performance reasons, when they most certainly were not.”

In response, administration lawyers denied that OPM directed agencies to fire probationary workers based on performance or misconduct. Instead, the filing says, “OPM reminded agencies of the importance of the probationary period in evaluating applicants’ continued employment and directed agencies to identify all employees on probationary periods and promptly determine whether those employees should be retained at the agency.”

The plaintiffs later expanded that suit to include the Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS, as one of the defendants. In mid-March, Judge William Alsup issued a preliminary injunction in the case, saying the administration’s probationary firings were based on “a lie.” Alsup ordered several federal agencies, including the Treasury, to reinstate thousands of fired employees. The Trump administration has appealed Alsup’s ruling.

Another suit, filed in Maryland federal court by nearly two dozen Democratic state attorneys general, also claims that the IRS mass firings were unlawful and should be reversed. (In that case, administration lawyers asserted that the mass firings were lawful.)

Court filings in both cases have partially revealed how the administration chose to make the legally questionable decision to fire probationary workers en masse on performance grounds..

At the IRS, the plan to fire probationary employees began in early February, according to an affidavit filed in the Maryland case.

A high-ranking Treasury Department official instructed a senior IRS personnel employee named Traci DiMartini to identify all probationary IRS employees and fire them “based on performance,” according to an affidavit DiMartini later filed in court.

DiMartini had “never heard of mass probationary employee firings,” she stated in her affidavit.

Excerpt of an affidavit filed in federal court by IRS human capital employee Traci DiMartini

When DiMartini asked the Treasury Department official why they were firing so many probationary employees, she was told that the order came from OPM, which was staffed by Trump appointees and members of DOGE.

In her affidavit, DiMartini confirmed what Rillotta wrote in his emails — that it was false to say probationary employees were fired for performance. DiMartini’s office “did not review or consider” any probationary employees’ job performance or conduct. Nor did the Treasury Department. “I know this because this fact was discussed openly in meetings,” DiMartini stated in her affidavit.

Excerpt of an affidavit DiMartini filed in federal court

According to DiMartini’s affidavit, OPM drafted the IRS mass-termination letter. While Treasury officials made several changes to it, the IRS’s personnel office where DiMartini worked “was not permitted to make any changes to the letter,” DiMartini’s affidavit said.

DiMartini refused to sign the mass-termination letter, according to her affidavit. The then-acting commissioner of the IRS, Douglas O’Donnell, also refused to sign the letter.

When thousands of affected IRS employees finally received the letter, it arrived from a generic email account. No agency official’s name appeared anywhere in the document.

Do you have any information we should know about the IRS, DOGE or the Trump administration’s mass firings? Andy Kroll can be reached by email at andy.kroll@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 202-215-6203.

by Nicole Foy

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

About a week after President Donald Trump took office, Jonathan Guerrero was sitting at the Philadelphia car wash where he works when immigration agents burst in.

The agents didn’t say why they were there and didn’t show their badges, Guerrero recalled. So the 21-year-old didn’t get a chance to explain that although his parents were from Mexico, he had been born right there in Philadelphia.

“They looked at me and made me put my hands up without letting me explain that I’m from here,” Guerrero said.

An agent pointed his gun at Guerrero and handcuffed him. Then they brought in other car wash workers, including Guerrero’s father, who is undocumented. When agents began checking IDs, they finally noticed that Guerrero was a citizen and quickly let him go.

“I said, ‘Look, man, I don’t know who these guys are and what they’re doing,” said Guerrero. “With anything law-related, I just stay quiet.”

Less than two months into the new Trump administration, there has been a small but steady beat of reported cases like Guerrero’s.

In Utah, agents pulled over and detained a 20-year-old American after he honked at them. In New Mexico, a member of the Mescalero Apache nation more than two hours from the border was questioned by agents who demanded to see their passport. Earlier this month, a Trump voter in Virginia was pulled over and handcuffed by gun-wielding immigration agents.

In Texas, a 10-year-old citizen recovering from brain cancer was detained at a Border Patrol checkpoint and eventually deported to Mexico with her undocumented parents and other citizen siblings in February. The family said it was rushing her to an emergency checkup in Houston when Border Patrol agents ignored a hospital letter that the family had used to go through checkpoints before. An agency spokesperson said the family’s account was inaccurate but declined to provide specifics.

It’s unclear exactly how many citizens have faced the Trump administration’s dragnet so far. And while previous administrations have mistakenly held Americans too, there’s no firm count of those incidents either.

The government does not release figures on citizens who have been held by immigration authorities. Neither Customs and Border Protection nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles interior immigration enforcement, would provide numbers to ProPublica on how many Americans have been mistakenly detained.

Experts and advocates say that what is clear to them is that Trump’s aggressive immigration policies — such as arrest quotas for enforcement agents — make it likely that more citizens will get caught up in immigration sweeps.

“It’s really everyone — not just noncitizens or undocumented people — who are in danger of having their liberty violated in this kind of mass deportation machinery,” said Cody Wofsy, the deputy director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Asked about reports of Americans getting caught up in administration’s enforcement policies, an ICE spokesperson told ProPublica in a written statement that agents are allowed to ask for citizens’ identification: “Any US immigration officer has authority to question, without warrant, any alien or person believed to be an alien concerning his or her right to be, or to remain, in the United States.” The agency did not respond to questions about specific cases.

The U.S. has gone through spasms of detaining and even deporting large numbers of citizens. In the 1930s and 1940s, federal and local authorities forcibly exiled an estimated 1 million Mexican Americans, including hundreds of thousands of American-born children.

Relatives and friends wave goodbye to a train carrying 1,500 people being expelled from Los Angeles to Mexico in August 1931. (NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images/Public Domain)

Spanning both Obama administrations, an NPR investigation found, immigration authorities asked local authorities to detain about 700 Americans. Meanwhile, a U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that immigration authorities asked to hold roughly 600 likely citizens during Trump’s first term. The GAO also found that Trump actually deported about 70 likely citizens.

The GAO report did not get into any individual cases. But lawsuits brought against federal immigration agencies detail dozens of cases where plaintiffs received a settlement.

When local deputies in Pierce County, Washington, arrested Carlos Rios on suspicion of drunken driving in 2019, not even the fact that he had his U.S. passport could convince the deputies — or the ICE agents who took him into federal custody — that he was a citizen.

Rios, who immigrated from Mexico in the 1980s and became a citizen in 2000, often carried his passport with him in case he picked up a welding job on a Coast Guard ship or a commercial fishing job that took him into international waters. But no one listened to him when Rios insisted repeatedly that he was a citizen and begged Pierce County jail officials and ICE officers to check his bag. Rios ended up being held for a week. ICE did not comment on the case.

Rios received a $125,000 settlement but is still haunted by his time in detention.

“I don’t even have to close my eyes,” Rios said. “I remember every single second.”

There are other, more recent instances too. This January, in the last days of President Joseph Biden’s time in office, Border Patrol conducted raids in Kern County, California, more than four hours from the border.

Among those detained was Ernesto Campos, a U.S. citizen and owner of a Bakersfield landscaping company. Agents stopped Campos’ truck and slashed his tires when he refused to hand over his keys.

At that point, Campos began recording on his phone and protested that he is a U.S. citizen.

In the video, agents said they were arresting Campos for “alien smuggling.” (His undocumented employee was in the truck with Campos.) Border Patrol told a local TV station that agents were also concerned about human trafficking.

Campos has still not been charged. His lawyer said he was held for four hours.

Campos’ case is mentioned in a recent lawsuit by the ACLU of Southern California and the United Farm Workers contending that agents in the same operation detained and handcuffed a 56-year-old grandmother who is a legal permanent resident. The suit argues that Border Patrol agents “went on a fishing expedition” that profiled Latinos and farmworkers.

Asked about Campos’ case and the lawsuit, Customs and Border Protection said it does not comment on ongoing litigation.

While there are a number of fixes the government could make to limit the wrongful detention of citizens, immigration authorities have often failed to follow through.

After a series of lawsuits against the Obama administration, ICE began requiring officers to consult with supervisors before detaining someone who claims to be a citizen, and to not arrest someone if the evidence of citizenship “outweighs evidence to the contrary.” But the GAO report on mistaken detention of citizens noted that ICE wasn’t actually training officers to follow the policy. (In response to the GAO report, ICE said it revised its training materials. It told ProPublica that agents are still following those policies for determining citizenship)

Customs and Border Protection and ICE are not even required to track how often they hold citizens on immigration charges, the GAO found. While ICE agents could note in their database if someone they’ve investigated turns out to be a citizen, the GAO found that they are not required to do so. As a result, records are often wrong and left uncorrected even after agents have been told of a mistake. Someone flagged incorrectly in an ICE database once may be forced to deal with questions about their citizenship for years.

Peter Sean Brown, another U.S. citizen born in Philadelphia, was mistaken more than 20 years ago for a Jamaican national living in the U.S. illegally. When he was later arrested in 2018 for a probation violation, immigration officials requested he be held, despite their own records documenting the case of mistaken identity, his lawyer said.

Brown repeatedly insisted he was a citizen, a claim agents are supposed to immediately review.

“I’M TRYING TO OBTAIN INFORMATION CONCERNING A UNVALID ICE HOLD,” Brown wrote to guards on April 19, 2018, while still detained at the Monroe County jail in Florida. “IM A US CITIZEN…HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE?”

ICE eventually released him — after three weeks in detention.

Pratheek Rebala contributed research.

Correction

March 19, 2025: This story originally incorrectly referred to an agency that provided statements to ProPublica. It was Customs and Border Protection, not Border Patrol.

by Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy, ProPublica, and Le Van for ProPublica

Read this story in Vietnamese. Xem bài viết này bằng tiếng Việt.

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In mid-February, Trump administration leaders received a desperate warning from their diplomats posted in Vietnam, one of the most important American partners in Asia.

Workers were in the middle of cleaning up the site of an enormous chemical spill, the Bien Hoa air base, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly halted all foreign aid funding. The shutdown left exposed open pits of soil contaminated with dioxin, the deadly byproduct of Agent Orange, which the American military sprayed across large swaths of the country during the Vietnam War. After Rubio’s orders to stop work, the cleanup crews were forced to abandon the site, and, for weeks, all that was covering the contaminated dirt were tarps, which at one point blew off in the wind.

And even more pressing, the officials warned in a Feb. 14 letter obtained by ProPublica, Vietnam is on the verge of its rainy season, when torrential downpours are common. With enough rain, they said, soil contaminated with dioxin could flood into nearby communities, poisoning their food supplies.

Hundreds of thousands of people live around the Bien Hoa air base, and some of their homes abut the site’s perimeter fence, just yards from the contaminated areas. And less than 1,500 feet away is a major river that flows into Ho Chi Minh City, population 9 million.

“Simply put,” the officials added, “we are quickly heading toward an environmental and life-threatening catastrophe.”

They received no response from Washington, according to three people familiar with the situation.

Instead, Rubio and Peter Marocco, another top Trump appointee, have not only ordered the work to stop, but they also have frozen more than $1 million in payments for work already completed by the contractors the U.S. hired. The company overseeing the project is Tetra Tech, a publicly traded consulting and engineering firm based in the U.S., and a Vietnamese construction firm has been tasked with the excavation work.

Then, on Feb. 26, Rubio and Marocco canceled both companies’ contracts altogether before apparently reversing that decision about a week later, agency records show. As of Thursday, the companies had not been paid.

The Trump administration has told the courts repeatedly that its process to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, which manages the project’s funds, has been careful and considered. But the botched situation at Bien Hoa is a stark example of the whiplash, conflicting messages and dire consequences that aid organizations worldwide have faced since early February.

Now, after losing several weeks because of the administration’s orders, the companies are scrambling — at their own expense — to secure the Bien Hoa site before it starts raining, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica and several people familiar with the current situation.

The USAID officials who would typically travel to the air base to provide oversight have been placed on administrative leave or prevented from traveling to check on the work. They’ve also been forbidden from communicating with the Vietnamese government or the companies working at the base, sources say, though they believe that directive was lifted after the contracts were recently reinstated. The confusion has left many at both the embassy and in Washington in the dark about where the situation stands.

To ascertain the current status of the work, ProPublica hired a reporter to visit the air base on Friday.

Workers are laboring in 95 degree heat, surrounded by toxic soil. The site has a skeleton crew of less than half of what they previously had, according to workers and documents reviewed by ProPublica. Some staffers found new jobs during the suspension. People working at the site told the reporter they are worried about completing the work before the rainy season descends and are terrified the U.S. will pause the work again.

Since 2019, the U.S. government has collaborated with Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense to clean up the Bien Hoa air base and agreed to spend more than $430 million for the project. Unlike other foreign aid programs, addressing Agent Orange is more akin to restitution than charity because the U.S. brought the deadly substance there in the first place. “The dioxin remediation program is one of the core reasons why we have an extraordinary relationship with Vietnam today,” a State Department official told ProPublica, “a country that should by all rights hate us.”

With enough contaminated soil to fill about 40,000 dump trucks, the Bien Hoa air base is the largest deposit of postwar pesticides remaining in Vietnam after a decadeslong cleanup campaign. Human rights groups, environmentalists and diplomats consider the cleanup work — along with disability assistance that the U.S. has provided to Agent Orange victims across the country — to be one of the most successful foreign aid initiatives of all time.

All of that was now in peril, the officials wrote in their Feb. 14 letter to USAID officials in Washington. “What immediate actions can be taken to avert a potential life-threatening incident while still maintaining compliance with the Executive Order and the suspension directives?” the officials wrote.

U.S. officials in Vietnam grew increasingly panicked. The ambassador sent a diplomatic cable to Washington, and Congress and USAID’s inspector general each received a whistleblower complaint, multiple people told ProPublica.

“Halting a project like that in the middle of the work, that’s an environmental crime,” said Jan Haemers, CEO of another organization that previously worked in Vietnam to clean up Agent Orange in the soil. “If you stop in the middle, it’s worse than if you never started.”

The Bien Hoa air base on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in 2018. Workers were in the middle of cleaning up an enormous chemical spill there when Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly halted all foreign aid funding. (Thomas Watkins/ AFP/Getty Images)

The State Department said in a statement that the contracts at Bien Hoa are “active and running” but did not respond to detailed follow-up questions. Tetra Tech and the Vietnamese construction firm did not respond to questions for this story. The Vietnamese Embassy and Ministry of Defense did not return requests for comment. But the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs made a statement on Feb. 13 that it was “deeply concerned” about USAID program suspensions, specifically mentioning the Bien Hoa project.

Trump’s aides, including billionaire Elon Musk, began dismantling the U.S. foreign assistance system almost immediately after the inauguration. They dismissed USAID staff en masse, issued sweeping stop-work orders, froze funds and eventually canceled most of the agency’s contracts with aid organizations around the world, leaving countless children, refugees and other desperately vulnerable people without critical services.

On Monday, Rubio boasted on X that they had cut 83% of USAID’s programs because they didn’t align with Trump’s agenda.

After terminating the contracts, Rubio, Musk and Marocco reversed several of their decisions in Vietnam, designating the Bien Hoa project as one of the few programs to survive, at least for now.

Every president since George W. Bush — including Trump — has made good on the American promise to repair relations with Vietnam by cleaning up Agent Orange and helping those sick or disabled from dioxin poisoning. In 2017, Trump landed at Danang Airport, a prior cleanup site, ahead of a free-trade meeting with Asia-Pacific countries. The U.S. now conducts $160 billion in annual commerce with Vietnam, which has also become a key partner against China’s growing influence in the South China Sea. The Pentagon and Vietnamese military now work together as well, including efforts to locate the remains of soldiers missing in action from the war 50 years ago.

“All of this is underpinned by the cooperation on Agent Orange,” said Charles Bailey, a former Ford Foundation representative in Vietnam who co-wrote a book on the country’s relations with the U.S. in the wake of the war. “It’s like pulling out one or two legs of the stool.”

The Bien Hoa project was formally launched and initial contracts signed during Trump’s first presidency. In another example of the administration’s confusing stance toward the project, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told his Vietnamese counterpart on a Feb. 7 phone call that Trump wanted to enhance defense ties by addressing war legacy issues, which include Agent Orange remediation. About half of the project’s funding comes from the Pentagon’s budget, though it’s funneled through USAID, so it was also caught up in the foreign aid freeze.

Environmental consultants, foreign policy experts and government officials said the episode in Bien Hoa shows the administration did not do a thoughtful audit. “One might imagine a less reckless government looking at what we’re doing carefully and then deciding what’s in our interest,” David Shear, a former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam under Barack Obama, told ProPublica.

“But,” he said, “this is government reform by meat cleaver.”

The mixture known as Agent Orange is a combination of two herbicides that the U.S. brought to Vietnam in huge volumes to kill off jungles and mangroves that hid opposition forces during the Vietnam war. The mixture contained dioxin, a deadly substance that not only causes a range of cancers and other illnesses, but is also linked to birth defects for babies exposed in utero. During the war, the U.S. sprayed more than 10 million gallons of the herbicides across vast swaths of the country, exposing U.S. soldiers as well as millions of Vietnamese people and their future children to the deadly toxic substance.

A treatment center for children with disabilities in Ho Chi Minh City in 2009. Many of them are from areas that were heavily sprayed with Agent Orange during the war. (Kuni Takahashi/Getty Images)

Storage sites like the air bases of Danang and Bien Hoa were heavily contaminated as barrels leaked, broke or were otherwise mishandled. Over the decades, dust has blown the contaminated soil off the bases and abundant rains have pushed the dioxin into waterways and the densely packed surrounding neighborhoods, contaminating fish as well as ducks and chicken that people raise for food. Soil samples at the Bien Hoa base have shown dioxin at levels as high as 800 times the allowed amount in Vietnam.

For decades since the war, and despite extensive documentation of higher rates of cancers and birth defects among people who had been exposed to the chemicals, the U.S. denied the mass toll Agent Orange had taken on Vietnamese people — as well as on American veterans, as ProPublica has previously reported. But starting in the mid-2000s under President George W. Bush, the U.S. began earmarking federal dollars for dioxin remediation in Vietnam to clean up the contamination sites and the two nations’ troubled relationship.

The cleanup work is dangerous and laborious. People hired by the contractors wear extensive protective equipment in the sweltering humidity and must have their blood tested regularly for dioxin. When levels get too high, they are no longer allowed to work at the site. There are supposed to be extensive safety checks in place to ensure the dirt doesn’t poison military officials or the surrounding community.

The plan at Bien Hoa is to excavate a half-million cubic meters of the most contaminated soil and enclose it underground or cook it in an enormous furnace, which hasn’t been built yet, until the dioxin no longer poses a threat. The work requires extensive pumping and management of dioxin-contaminated water. Contractors are halfway through a 10-year project set to happen in stages, and the bulk of the excavation work must be done between December and April when there is less rain.

After Rubio first issued sweeping stop-work orders to aid organizations and contractors around the world in late January, workers from the site were told to stay home for weeks. The companies stopped receiving money to cover payroll and their past invoices. Huge mounds of tarp-covered dirt dotted sections of the base.

USAID and State Department staff scrambled to get the project back online through the State Department’s confusing waiver process and appealed to counterparts in the U.S. A group of Democratic senators sent a letter to Hegseth and Rubio urging them to pay the contractors. “It would be difficult to overstate the damage to the relationship that would result if the U.S were to walk away from these war legacy programs,” they wrote. They got no response.

One of the senators who signed the letter, Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., told ProPublica that abandoning the Bien Hoa cleanup is “a betrayal of the goodwill our two nations built over 30 years” and a “gift to our adversaries.”

Even off-season rains pushed the sites to the brink, two sources said, with water pooling up to the edge of protective aprons, threatening to spill out onto an active military runway after recent rainstorms.

Heavier rains typically start in April before the downpours of the rainy season in May.

The contractors are desperately trying to secure the contaminated dirt and pits before then, according to interviews this week with several people working there. But they are two months behind schedule.

“The problem is that the Trump administration has destroyed USAID, so it’s very unclear how we’re going to complete this project,” said Tim Rieser, a longtime aide to former Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who led a bipartisan delegation to break ground in Bien Hoa in 2019. “The people making the decisions probably know the least.”

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

by Phoebe Petrovic, Wisconsin Watch

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

A behind-the-scenes legal effort to force Congress to call a convention to amend the Constitution could end up helping President Donald Trump in his push to expand presidential power.

While the convention effort is focused on the national debt, legal experts say it could open the door to other changes, such as limiting who can be a U.S. citizen, allowing the president to overrule Congress’ spending decisions or even making it legal for Trump to run for a third term.

Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica have obtained a draft version of a proposed lawsuit being floated to attorneys general in several states, revealing new details about who’s involved and their efforts to advance legal arguments that liberal and conservative legal scholars alike have criticized, calling them “wild,” “completely illegitimate” and “deeply flawed.”

The endeavor predates Trump’s second term but carries new weight as several members of Trump’s inner circle and House Speaker Mike Johnson have previously expressed support for a convention to limit federal government spending and power.

Article V of the Constitution requires Congress to call a convention to propose and pass amendments if two-thirds of states, or 34, request one. This type of convention has never happened in U.S. history, and a decadeslong effort to advance a so-called balanced budget amendment, which would prohibit the government from running a deficit, has stalled at 28.

Despite that, the lawsuit being circulated claims that Congress must hold a convention now because the states reached the two-thirds threshold in 1979. To get there, these activists count various calls for a convention dating back to the late 1700s. Wisconsin’s petition, for example, was written in 1929 and was an effort to repeal Prohibition. The oldest petition they cite, from New York, predates the Bill of Rights. Some others came on the eve of the Civil War.

A lawsuit being circulated claims that Congress must hold a convention to amend the Constitution now because the states reached the two-thirds threshold for calling one in 1979. However, they cite petitions going back hundreds of years, including this one from New York in 1789. ((<a href="https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/bcf4e50c-cd23-6423-e040-e00a18061eb6#/?uuid=bcf4e50c-cd24-6423-e040-e00a18061eb6">Via The New York Public Library</a>))

“It is absurd, on the face of it, that they could count something that had to do with Prohibition as a call for a constitutional convention in 2025,” said Russ Feingold, a former Democratic senator from Wisconsin who co-wrote a book critical of convention efforts like this one. “They’re just playing games to try to pretend that the founders of this country wanted you to be able to mix and match resolutions from all different times in American history.”

To avoid the threat of a convention, the legislatures in some states like Colorado and Illinois have passed resolutions withdrawing their petitions. The draft lawsuit says those actions don’t count because “once the Article V bell has been rung, it cannot be unrung.” Nearly half the states the draft counts have rescinded their petitions.

The draft lawsuit is the work of the Federal Fiscal Sustainability Foundation, a low-profile nonprofit that has drawn support from balanced budget advocates and the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council. The group’s chair, David M. Walker, oversaw government accountability as U.S. comptroller general during both the Clinton and Bush administrations. The draft lawsuit is signed by Charles “Chuck” Cooper, a high-powered conservative lawyer in Washington, D.C., who represented Trump’s previous attorney general during the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Walker and his team have shopped the lawsuit to over a dozen state attorneys general and Republican-controlled legislatures seeking to find states to serve as plaintiffs, according to emails obtained through records requests, public testimony and interviews. Alongside ALEC’s CEO, they met with members of the Utah attorney general’s office in 2023, trying to recruit the state to take the lead, and planned to meet with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, emails show. Lawmakers in Utah, Arizona, South Carolina and West Virginia have sought to get their states to join the lawsuit.

Walker declined to confirm the authenticity of the draft complaint and wouldn’t say which states have signed onto the lawsuit. But it mirrors the legal arguments Walker and his group have made, and the document’s metadata shows Cooper’s firm authored it. Neither Cooper nor his firm returned repeated requests for comment. An ALEC spokesperson said the group has merely provided a “forum” to “exchange ideas.”

Walker said an attorney general’s office has written its own version with “modifications.” He said he hopes the states will announce their intent to sue within the next two months and file shortly after.

Walker and the draft complaint say the convention is necessary to confront the national debt and would be limited to discussing fiscal responsibility.

“Some people think that the convention would get together to basically rewrite the Constitution. That’s totally false,” Walker said. “That has nothing to do with what we’re proposing. Under Article V, it’s just a separate way to get an amendment to the existing constitution.”

The legal effort is headed by David M. Walker, the former U.S. comptroller general, shown here in 2006, first image. The draft lawsuit is signed by Charles “Chuck” Cooper, an influential conservative lawyer in Washington, D.C., shown here in 2011. (First image: Chris Carson/AP. Second image: Paul Sakuma/AP.)

Dozens of legal scholars and hundreds of civil society groups, organized by the government watchdog Common Cause, have warned that it would be exceedingly difficult to constrain a convention to just one idea and that calling one would expose the entire Constitution to revision. Some of them say the risk has grown under Trump.

“Nobody is observing any restraints on their power,” Georgetown law professor and convention critic David Super said. “If he continues to lose in the courts, one can imagine he will be trying to get a convention to adopt his view of presidential powers.”

Asked to respond, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly accused Wisconsin Watch of having “TDS” (Trump derangement syndrome) and being a “dark money” group. (Wisconsin Watch makes its donors public here.)

Sam Fieldman, of the campaign finance reform group Wolf-PAC, has individually worked with the foundation on the lawsuit. He said the process empowers states to check the federal government and change the Constitution if Congress fails to act.

“People who are claiming that this process will lead to tyranny are sitting here twiddling their thumbs while we are heading toward tyranny like a rocket right now,” Fieldman said.

“Fuzzy Math” and a “Time Machine”

Throughout history, the Constitution has been amended 27 times, including to abolish slavery and provide women with the right to vote. An amendment must be approved by two-thirds of both houses of Congress. It then must be ratified by three-quarters of the states to become law.

The Constitution also offers another way: Congress can call a convention after two-thirds of state legislatures request one.

But Article V provides few other details. It does not say what constitutes a valid application or how to add them together to reach 34. Nor does it say how a convention should run. It does not enumerate specifics on delegates, such as who can serve and how states should select them, nor whether each state gets one vote or votes relative to population. And it does not specify whether a convention can be limited to specific issues.

As of now, the three-fourths ratification requirement still stands. Critics fear delegates could take the extreme step of lowering the threshold to make it easier for the amendments to pass, a scenario that proponents dismiss as “fear mongering.”

Fewer than half the states have laws or policies governing convention procedures. The majority of those would give state legislators, rather than voters, the ability to select delegates. They’d also permit each state one vote, according to a 2025 review by the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive government watchdog.

The center obtained audio of former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania at a private ALEC workshop saying that because “most states are going to be controlled by Republicans,” rural and Republican voters will have “an outsize granted power” in a convention.

“We have the opportunity as a result of that to have a supermajority,” he said, even though “we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us.”

Santorum did not return emails seeking comment.

Over the years, people from across the political spectrum have attempted to call conventions for various topics, such as campaign finance reform and congressional term limits. None of the advocates have tried to use states’ old calls that didn’t specify a topic to reach the required 34.

But during a 2020 ALEC presentation, a balanced budget activist named David Biddulph debuted a new theory: By combining old resolutions that generally called for a convention with ones for a balanced budget amendment, the nation already surpassed the threshold.

Illinois has since withdrawn its 1861 resolution. (1861 Ill. Laws 281-82, highlights added by Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica.)

Biddulph said he based his theory on a paper authored by Robert Natelson, a former law professor who focuses on Article V, and published by the Federalist Society in 2018. But Natelson’s paper did not claim the threshold had been reached, and in an interview, he said he disagrees with activists claiming otherwise.

During the presentation, moderated by former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Biddulph announced that his organization, which became the Federal Fiscal Sustainability Foundation, was encouraging attorneys general to file suit against Congress.

Biddulph did not respond to repeated calls and emails seeking comment.

That same theory forms the basis of the draft lawsuit, which counts six petitions that called for a convention without stating a specific purpose alongside balanced budget ones to support their claim for a convention.

“They realize they will never get to 34 honestly now, so they are talking about a new math,” said Nancy MacLean, a historian whose book “Democracy in Chains” discusses the dangers of a convention. Some convention opponents, like Super, refer to this as the “fuzzy math” theory.

During a legislative hearing in Utah, Sharon Anderson, a conservative opponent of a convention, used a metaphor to criticize the counting method.

“A certain team, discouraged that they hadn’t scored the winning touchdown yet, devised a way to win the game,” Anderson said. “Instead of actually getting the ball into the end zone, they would basically add up all the yards they had gained until they totaled a distance needed to cross the goal line.”

But Natelson, a member of ALEC’s board of scholars who is cited repeatedly in the lawsuit, said if lawmakers had wanted to limit their calls to specific topics, they could have done so.

A Washington, D.C., newspaper, The Evening Star, ran an Associated Press article in 1929 detailing Wisconsin’s call for a constitutional convention. (Via Chronicling America)

The second key part of the foundation’s legal argument is timing, which opponents like Super refer to as the “time machine” theory. Wisconsin passed a balanced budget amendment resolution in 2017, yet the draft instead includes the state’s Prohibition-era petition because it’s counting applications on the books between 1979 and 1998 — a period when the draft argues at least 34 existed.

Unmentioned, however, is that almost nobody during that period claimed that the nation had surpassed the threshold.

This is unlike recent debates over the Equal Rights Amendment, which would prohibit discrimination based on sex. Some argue that enough states have now approved the amendment, but the U.S. archivist declined to certify it because Congress explicitly set a deadline for ratification that states did not meet.

Getting States on Board

Biddulph and others began to enlist state support in 2022 with an email that announced: “The historic milestone of 34 Article V state resolutions calling for an amendment convention to propose a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) has finally been achieved, and surprisingly it happened over 40 years ago.”

The message, obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy and provided to Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica, asked states to pass a resolution demanding Congress call a convention and directing the state’s legislature and attorney general to “take such actions as will require Congress’s compliance.”

Republican state lawmakers in Utah and South Carolina responded within days, introducing measures incorporating some of the proposed language.

“We have a tremendous opportunity as a state to deal with an issue that is a very serious and grave moment in our nation,” Utah state Rep. Ken Ivory, a Republican who introduced the measure, said at a legislative hearing in February 2022. “It’s the power of the state to be able to deal with the excessive debt and the financial explosion and the swindling, as Thomas Jefferson said, the swindling of the future on a massive scale.”

Since the Utah hearing, Arizona and West Virginia have also introduced measures demanding Congress call a convention. West Virginia’s was the most explicit, resolving to “commence federal court action” against Congress, and advanced the furthest, passing the state House of Delegates before stalling in its Senate. So far, none of the resolutions has been adopted. West Virginia’s was reintroduced last month.

In February 2024, activists believed they were close to filing the lawsuit, emails obtained through a public records request show. The Senate presidents and House speakers in Utah and Arizona signed letters expressing their interest in joining a federal lawsuit against Congress to force a convention on fiscal issues.

In an email that was cc’d to the Arizona lawmaker who sponsored the state’s resolution, convention supporter Mike Kapic celebrated Utah’s and Arizona’s interest as a “win.”

“One more and UT says they’ll lead the filing in federal court,” Kapic wrote. “Then watch other states rush to file.”

It still hasn’t happened. The Arizona Legislature does not have standing to file a lawsuit on its own, a spokesperson for the state attorney general said, and the Democratic attorney general has not agreed to take the case.

A spokesperson for the Utah attorney general’s office declined to comment on whether the state had agreed to file the suit.

Ivory said by email that he is unaware whether Utah has any current plans to sue Congress. “New AG, New Congress, New President,” he wrote, adding that he believes “negotiations” may be taking place with Congress “with potential promising results,” but that he is not involved.

Alaska is the only state listed on the draft complaint, but the state attorney general’s office would not confirm whether it has joined.

In Congress, Texas Republican Rep. Jodey Arrington has also introduced resolutions to trigger a convention, including one he put forward last month. His office did not agree to an interview.

If Congress does call a convention, it would likely be up to delegates to keep it from creeping into other parts of the Constitution.

Historians generally agree that the 1787 constitutional convention itself was a runaway convention. Delegates met in Philadelphia to amend the Articles of Confederation, a process that required unanimity among states. Instead, they scrapped the entire document and drafted the Constitution, proposing a lower threshold for states to ratify amendments.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica and FRONTLINE, and James Bandler, ProPublica

This story contains references to homophobia, antisemitism and racism, as well as mass shootings and other violence.

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

On Jan. 19, 2024, the sheriff of Jacksonville, Florida, released a 27-page manifesto left behind by Ryan Palmeter, a 21-year old white man who had murdered three Black people at a Dollar General store before turning the gun on himself.

The Florida Times-Union, a prominent local news outlet, said it would not be publishing the document, which it said used the N-word 183 times and had an “overall theme of white superiority.” T.K. Waters, the sheriff, said he had posted what he described as the “rantings of an isolated, hateful, madman” to keep his promise of public transparency. An attorney for one of the victims’ families urged the public “to not give Palmeter the satisfaction of publishing or distributing his manifesto,” saying it “contains not one redeemable thought.”

Dallas Humber (Illustration for ProPublica)

Thousands of miles away, in Elk Grove, California, Dallas Humber saw Palmeter’s view of the world as perfect for her audience of online neo-Nazis. Humber, a now-35-year-old woman with a penchant for dyeing her hair neon colors, was a leading voice in an online network of white supremacists who had coalesced in a dark corner of Telegram, a social media and messaging service with almost a billion users worldwide.

She and her comrades called this constellation of interlocking Telegram accounts Terrorgram. Their shared goal was to topple modern democracies through terrorism and sabotage and then replace them with all-white ethno-states.

Humber quickly turned Palmeter’s slur-riddled manifesto into an audiobook that she narrated in a monotone. Then she sent it into the world with her signature line:

“So, let’s get this party started, Terrorbros.”

The manifesto immediately began to spread, pinballing around the worldwide Terrorgram scene, which celebrated mass shooters like Palmeter as “saints.”

The Terrorgram story is part of a much larger 21st century phenomenon. Over the past two decades, massive social networks like X, Facebook and Telegram have emerged as a powerful force for both good and evil. The ability to connect with like-minded strangers helped fuel uprisings like the Arab Spring and Iran’s pro-democracy movements. But it has also aided extremists, including brutal jihadist organizations like the Islamic State group and white supremacists around the world.

About This Partnership

This story is part of a collaborative investigation from FRONTLINE and ProPublica that includes an upcoming documentary, “The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram,” which premieres March 25 at 10 p.m. EDT/9 p.m. CDT on PBS stations (check local listings) and will be available to stream on YouTube, the PBS App and FRONTLINE’s website.

Telegram, which is massively popular outside of the U.S., boasted an array of features that appealed to Humber and her fellow Terrorgammers. They could send encrypted direct messages, start big chat groups and create public channels to broadcast their messages. In the span of five years, they grew Terrorgram from a handful of accounts into a community with hundreds of chats and channels focused on recruiting would-be terrorists, sharing grisly videos and trading expertise on everything from assassination techniques to the best ways to sabotage water systems and electrical transmission lines. On one of her many accounts, Humber posted step-by-step instructions for making pipe bombs and synthesizing HMTD, a potent explosive.

Humber went by a series of usernames but was eventually publicly exposed by a group of California activists. ProPublica and FRONTLINE reviewed chat logs — some provided by the Australian anti-fascist research organization The White Rose Society — court records and Humber’s other digital accounts to independently confirm her identity.

U.S. prosecutors say Humber helped lead the Terrorgram Collective, a transnational organization that ran popular Terrorgram accounts, produced sophisticated works of propaganda and distributed an alleged hit list of potential assassination targets. She is currently facing a host of federal terrorism charges, along with another alleged Terrorgram leader, Matthew Allison, a 38-year-old DJ from Boise, Idaho. Both have pleaded not guilty.

To trace the rise and fall of Terrorgram, ProPublica and FRONTLINE obtained a trove of chat logs and got access to some of the extremists’ private channels, allowing reporters to track in real time their posts and relationships. We combed through legal documents, talked with law enforcement officials and researchers in six countries and interviewed a member of the collective in jail. Taken together, our reporting reveals new details about the Terrorgram Collective, showing how Humber and her compatriots were powerful social media influencers who, rather than peddling fashion or food, promoted murder and destruction.

“The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram,” part of a collaborative investigation from FRONTLINE and ProPublica, premieres March 25.

The material illustrates the tension faced by every online platform: What limits should be imposed on the things users post or discuss? For years, social networks like Facebook and X employed thousands of people to review and take down offensive content, from pornography to racist memes to direct incitement of violence. The efforts at content moderation prompted complaints, primarily from conservatives, that the platforms were censoring conservative views of the world.

Telegram was created in 2013 by Pavel Durov, a Russian-born technologist, and his brother Nikolai. Pavel Durov, a billionaire who posts pictures of himself on Instagram, baring his chiseled torso amid rock formations and sand dunes, became the face of the company. He marketed the platform as a free-speech-focused alternative to the Silicon Valley social media platforms, which in the mid-2010s had begun aggressively policing disinformation and racist and dehumanizing content. Telegram’s restrictions were far more lax than those of its competitors, and it quickly became a hub for hate as well as illegal activity like child sexual exploitation and gunrunning.

Our review of thousands of Terrorgram posts shows that the lack of content moderation was crucial to the spread of the collective’s violent content. Telegram’s largely hands-off approach allowed Humber and her alleged confederates to reach an international audience of disaffected young people.

They encouraged these followers to turn their violent thoughts into action. And some of them did.

ProPublica and FRONTLINE identified 35 crimes linked to Terrorgram, including bomb plots, stabbings and shootings. Each case involved an individual who posted in Terrorgram chats, followed Terrorgram accounts or was a member of an organized group whose leaders participated in the Terrorgram community.

One of the crimes was a 2022 shooting at an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, that left two people dead and another injured. In an earlier story, ProPublica and FRONTLINE detailed how the shooter, Juraj Krajčík, was coached to kill over three years by members of the Terrorgram Collective, a process that started when he was just 16 years old.

Radka Trokšiarová survived the Bratislava attack after being shot twice in the leg. “Sometimes I catch myself wishing to be able to ask the gunman: ‘Why did you do it? What was the point and purpose of destroying so many lives?’” she said.

Telegram declined repeated requests to make its executives available for interviews and would not answer specific questions about Humber and other Terrorgram leaders. But in a statement, the company said, “Calls for violence from any group are not tolerated on our platform.”

The company said that Telegram’s “significant growth has presented unique moderation challenges due to the sheer volume and diversity of content uploaded to the platform,” but that since 2023 it has stepped up its moderation practices, using AI and a team of about 750 contractors. Telegram said it now “proactively monitors public content across the platform and takes down objectionable content before it reaches users and has a chance to be reported.”

Excerpt from “The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram” (FRONTLINE)

Watch video ➜

Right-wing extremists were flocking to Telegram by 2019.

Many had been effectively exiled from major social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, which, in response to public pressure, had built vast “trust and safety” teams tasked with purging hateful and violent content. The companies had also begun using a shared database of hashes — essentially digital fingerprints — to quickly identify and delete videos and images produced by terror groups.

Even 8chan, an anonymous message board frequented by extremists, had begun pulling down particularly egregious posts and videos. Users there openly discussed moving to Telegram. One lengthy thread encouraged white supremacists to start using Telegram as a tool for communicating with like-minded people and spreading radical ideas to those they considered “normies.” “It offers a clean UI” — user interface — “and the best privacy protection we can get for this sort of social,” wrote one 8chan poster.

Pavel Durov, the 40-year-old Telegram co-founder, had positioned himself as a stalwart champion of privacy and free expression, arguing that “privacy is more important than the fear of terrorism.” After the Iranian government blocked access to the app in that country in 2018, he called free speech an “undeniable human right.”

To the extremists, Telegram and Durov seemed to be promising to leave them and their posts alone — no matter how offensive and alarming others might find their messages.

Among those who joined the online migration were Pavol Beňadik and Matthew Althorpe. The two men quickly began testing Telegram’s limits by posting content explicitly aimed at inspiring acts of white supremacist terrorism.

Then 23, Althorpe came from a small town on the Niagara River in Ontario, Canada; Beňadik, who was 19 at the time, lived in a village in Western Slovakia and went by the online handle Slovakbro.

Both were believers in a doctrine called militant accelerationism, which has become popular with neo-Nazis over the past decade, the chat logs show. Militant accelerationists want to speed the collapse of society by committing destabilizing terrorist attacks and mass killings. They have frequently targeted their perceived enemies, including people of color, Muslims, Jews, gays and lesbians.

Telegram gave them the ability to share tactics and targets with thousands of potential terrorists around the globe. Day after day they urged their followers to go out and kill as many people as possible to advance the white supremacist cause.

Pavol Beňadik (Illustration for ProPublica)

Beňadik had been immersed in the extremist scene since at least 2017, bouncing from one online space to the next, a review of his online life shows. He’d spent time on Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Gab and 4chan, another low-moderation message board.

Beňadik would later tell authorities that he was inspired by Christopher Cantwell, a New Hampshire white supremacist known as the “Crying Nazi” for posting a video of himself sobbing after learning that he might be arrested for his actions during the deadly 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. From Slovakia, Beňadik listened to Cantwell’s podcast, which featured long racist diatribes and interviews with white nationalist figures like Richard Spencer.

By 2019, Beňadik had created a chat group on Telegram in which he encouraged his followers to firebomb businesses, torch the homes of antifascists and seek out radioactive material to build dirty bombs and detonate them in American cities.

Althorpe started a channel and uploaded a steady stream of violent propaganda, the Telegram chat logs show. He named his channel Terrorwave Refined.

“Direct action against the system,” Althorpe argued in one post, is “the ONLY path toward total aryan victory.” Althorpe often shared detailed material that could aid in carrying out terrorist attacks, such as instructions for making the explosive thermite and plans for building assault rifles that couldn’t be traced by law enforcement.

Other sizable social media platforms or online forums would have detected and deleted the material posted by Althorpe and Beňadik. But on Telegram, the posts stayed up.

Soon others were creating similar content. In the summer of 2019, the duo began circulating online flyers listing allied Telegram chat groups and channels. Early on the network was small, just seven accounts.

Beňadik and Althorpe began calling this new community Terrorgram. The moniker stuck.

“I decided to become a fucking content producer,” Beňadik would later say on a podcast called HateLab, which has since been deleted. “I saw a niche and I decided to fill it.”

They were becoming influencers.

At the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, a gunman attacked worshippers in 2019, killing dozens. (FRONTLINE)

Watch video ➜

As the pair grew their audience on Telegram, they studied a massacre that had occurred a few months earlier in New Zealand.

A heavily armed man had murdered 51 Muslims at two mosques, livestreaming the carnage from a GoPro camera strapped to his ballistic helmet. To explain his motivations, Brenton Tarrant had drafted a 74-page treatise arguing that white people were being wiped out in an ongoing genocide. He described the Muslim worshippers he murdered as “invaders” and invoked a conspiracy theory claiming they were part of a plot to replace people of European ancestry with nonwhite people.

Tarrant’s slaughter had sent a surge of fear through New Zealand society. And his written and visual propaganda, which was aimed at inspiring more violence, had spread widely. Researchers would later discover that more than 12,000 copies of the video had been posted online in the 24 hours after the massacre.

Within the Terrorgram community, Tarrant became an icon.

On Telegram, Beňadik and Althorpe dubbed him a “saint” — an honorific they bestowed on someone who killed in the name of the white supremacist movement.

The two men saw Tarrant’s crime as a template for future attacks. Over and over, the duo encouraged their subscribers to follow Tarrant’s example and become the next saint.

For extremism researchers, the rise of the Terrorgram community was alarming. “Neo-Nazis, white nationalists and antigovernment extremists are publishing volumes of propaganda advocating terrorism and mass shootings on Telegram,” warned an investigator with the Southern Poverty Law Center in June 2019. The investigator said he was unable to even reach anyone at Telegram at the time to discuss the matter.

By August 2019, the Terrorgram network had grown to nearly 20 chat groups and channels. The Terrorwave Refined channel had ballooned to over 2,000 subscribers. “Thanks to everyone who helped us hit 2,000!” wrote Althorpe in a post. “HAIL THE SAINTS. HAIL HOLY TERROR.”

In addition to his chat groups, Beňadik created an array of channels to distribute propaganda and guides to weaponry and explosives. One of the most popular attracted nearly 5,000 subscribers.

“He was, I would say, a key architect behind Terrorgram,” said Rebecca Weiner, deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism at the New York Police Department. Weiner’s unit spent years monitoring the Terrorgram scene and assisted the FBI in investigating cases linked to the community.

When compared to mainstream social media, the numbers were tiny. But looked at a different way, they were stunning: Althorpe and Beňadik had built an online community of thousands of people dedicated to celebrating and committing acts of terrorism.

One of them was Jarrett Smith, a U.S. Army private based at Fort Riley in Kansas who was a regular in Beňadik’s chat group during the fall of 2019.

A beefy guy who enjoyed posting photos of himself in military gear, Smith had a love of explosives — he urged his fellow Terrorgrammers to bomb electric power stations, cell towers and natural gas lines — and contempt for federal law enforcement agents. “Feds deserve to be shot. They are the enemy,” he wrote in one chat thread.

Days after making the post, Smith unknowingly began communicating with a federal agent who was posing as an extremist.

In a string of direct messages, the undercover agent asked for Smith’s help in assassinating government officials in Texas. “Got a liberal texas mayor in my sights!” wrote the agent.

Happy to oblige, Smith provided the agent with a detailed step-by-step guide to building a potent improvised explosive device capable of destroying a car, as well as how-tos for several other types of bombs.

He was arrested that September and later pleaded guilty to charges that he shared instructions for making bombs and homemade napalm. Smith was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

The Terrorgram community was becoming a significant concern for law enforcement.

An October 2019 intelligence bulletin noted: “Telegram has become increasingly popular with WSEs” — white supremacist extremists — “due to frequent suspensions and censorship of their accounts across multiple social media platforms. Currently, WSEs are able to maintain relatively extensive networks of public channels some of which have thousands of members with minimal disruptions.”

The bulletin was produced by the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange, an intelligence-sharing center staffed by federal, state and local law enforcement personnel. Today, that five-page document — which was not meant for public dissemination — seems prescient.

It noted that while jihadist organizations and white supremacists were posting similar content on the platform, Telegram was treating the two camps in “vastly different” ways. The company, which had been headquartered in the United Arab Emirates since 2017, routinely shut down accounts created by the Islamic State group but it would “rarely remove WSE content, and typically only for high-profile accounts or posts that have received extensive media attention.”

By 2020, a pattern emerged: When Telegram did take down an account, it was often quickly replaced by a new one — sometimes with a near-identical name.

When the company deleted Althorpe’s Terrorwave Refined channel, he simply started a new one called Terrorwave Revived and began posting the same material. Within seven hours, he had attracted 1,000 followers, according to a post he wrote at the time.

The Terrorgrammers saw the modest attempts at content moderation as a betrayal by Pavel Durov and Telegram. “You could do anything on 2019 Telegram,” wrote Beňadik in a 2021 post. “I told people how to plan a genocide,” he said, noting that the company did nothing about those posts.

Apple, Google and Microsoft distribute the Telegram app through their respective online stores, giving them a measure of control over what their users could see on the platform. As the Terrorgram community attracted more notice from the outside world, including extremism researchers and law enforcement, these tech giants began restricting certain Terrorgram chats and channels, making them impossible to view.

Still, the Terrorgrammers found ways to evade the blackouts and shared the work-arounds with their followers. The network eventually grew to include hundreds of chats and channels.

The Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy, a German organization that studies online extremism, “has tracked about 400 channels and 200 group chats which are considered part of the Terrorgram community on Telegram,” said Jennefer Harper, a researcher with the center.

As the content spread, so did crime. Using court records, news clips and Telegram data collected by Open Measures, a research platform that monitors social media, ProPublica and FRONTLINE identified a string of crimes tied to Terrorgram.

Nicholas Welker, who was active in the Terrorgram community, is serving a 44-month prison sentence for making death threats toward a Brooklyn-based journalist reporting on a neo-Nazi group.

A Missouri man who planned to blow up a hospital with a vehicle bomb was killed during a shootout with FBI agents in 2020; his neo-Nazi organization had posted in Beňadik’s chat group and was using it to enlist new members.

The most deadly known crime stemming from Terrorgram occurred in 2022 Brazil, where a teenager who was allegedly in contact with Humber shot 15 people, killing four. The teen was later hailed as a saint by the Terrorgrammers.

Excerpt from “The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram” (FRONTLINE)

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While Terrorgram started as a loose collection of chats and channels, by 2021 Althorpe and Beňadik had created a more formal organization, according to Canadian court records and interviews with law enforcement sources in Slovakia. Their small, clandestine group was the Terrorgram Collective.

The organization began producing more sophisticated content — books, videos and a roster of alleged assassination targets — and distributing the material to thousands of followers.

Court documents, a U.S. State Department bulletin and Telegram logs show that over the next three years, the collective would come to include at least six other people in five countries.

Over 14 months, the group generated three books and repeatedly posted them in PDF form on Terrorgram accounts. Ranging in length from 136 to 268 pages, the books offer a raft of specific advice for planning a terror attack, including how to sabotage railroads, electrical substations and other critical infrastructure. The publications also celebrated a pantheon of white supremacist saints — mass murderers including Timothy McVeigh, who in 1995 bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.

“That combination of tactical guidance plus propaganda is something that we’d seen a lot of coming out of ISIS in years past,” said Weiner of the NYPD. She added that the books are filled with “splashy graphics” designed to appeal to young people.

“It’s a real manual on how to commit an act of terrorism,” Jakub Gajdoš, who helped oversee an investigation of Beňadik and Terrorgram for Slovakia’s federal police agency, said of one book. “A guide for killing people.”

At least two Americans were involved in creating one of the books, according to U.S. federal prosecutors: Humber and Allison, the DJ from Boise, Idaho. The chat logs show they were both prolific creators and influencers in the Terrorgram community who frenetically generated new content, including videos, audiobooks, graphics and calendars, which they posted on an array of channels.

Allison made around 120 Terrorgram videos, including editing “White Terror,” a quasi-documentary glorifying more than 100 white murderers and terrorists. Narrated by Humber, the video starts with the man who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and concludes with the young man who shot and killed 10 Black shoppers in a Buffalo supermarket in 2022.

These “white men and women of action have taken it upon themselves to wage war against the system and our racial enemies,” Humber intones. “To the saints of tomorrow watching this today, know that when you succeed you will be celebrated with reverence and your sacrifice will not be in vain.”

The pair also allegedly helped create “The List,” a detailed hit list of American politicians, corporate executives, academics and others, according to court documents. The List was shared on a series of dedicated Telegram channels, as well as an array of other accounts, some made to look like legitimate news aggregators. Each entry included a photo of the target and their home address.

It was an escalation — and from court documents it’s clear that The List captured the attention of U.S. law enforcement agents, who worried that it might trigger a wave of assassinations.

In 2022, a gunman attacked an LGBTQ+ bar in the Old Town neighborhood of Bratislava, Slovakia. (FRONTLINE)

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The collective’s books influenced a new generation of armed extremists, some of them in their teens.

One of these young disciples was Juraj Krajčík. The Slovakian student had joined Beňadik’s chat groups at the age of 16 and had become a frequent poster.

ProPublica and FRONTLINE obtained an extensive trove of Terrorgram chat logs that show how Beňadik mentored Krajčík and played a profound role in shaping his beliefs. Over the span of three years, Beňadik, Allison and Humber all urged the teen to take action, the chat logs show.

On the night of Oct. 12, 2022, Krajčík, armed with a handgun, opened fire on three people outside of Tepláreň, a small LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava’s Old Town neighborhood, killing Juraj Vankulič and Matúš Horváth and wounding their friend Radka Trokšiarová.

“I was in terrible pain because the bullet went through my thighbone,” she recalled. “I am still in pain.”

Krajčík took off on foot, and hours later he killed himself in a grove of trees next to a busy roadway. He was 19.

Six thousand miles away in California, Humber promptly began making celebratory posts. Krajčík, she exclaimed, had achieved sainthood.

Shortly after the Bratislava attack, Humber messaged Allison on Telegram, according to court records recently filed by federal prosecutors in the U.S.

She told him she’d been communicating with another Terrorgrammer who was planning a racially motivated school shooting.The attack occurred weeks later in Aracruz, Brazil, when a 16-year-old wearing a skull mask shot 15 people at two schools, killing four. Another saint.

On a Terrogram channel, Humber posted a ZIP file with info on the attack, including 17 photos and four videos. The massacre, she noted, was motivated by “Hatred of non-Whites.” And she made a pitch tailored for the next would-be teenage terrorist: The assailant, she wrote in a post, would get a “SLAP ON THE WRIST” prison sentence due to his age.

While Krajčík was planning his attack, law enforcement agencies in Europe, the U.S. and Canada were quietly pursuing the leaders of the Terrorgram Collective.

Beňadik was the first to fall. Using information collected by the FBI, investigators in Slovakia arrested him in May 2022 while he was on break from college. He’d been studying computer science at the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic.

While in jail, Beňadik admitted his involvement with Terrorgram. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years in prison shortly after the Tepláreň attacks.

Describing Beňadik as “extremely intelligent,” prosecutor Peter Kysel said he believes the student never met with any of his fellow Terrorgrammers in person and didn’t even know their real names. “All the contacts was in the cyberspace,” he said.

But Beňadik misled investigators about his connection to Krajčík, saying they had one brief interaction, via direct message. “This was the only communication,” said Daniel Lipšic, the prosecutor who investigated the Tepláreň attack.

In fact, Beňadik and Krajčík had many conversations, the logs obtained by ProPublica and FRONTLINE show. The pair repeatedly discussed targeting Tepláreň, with the older man writing that killing the bar patrons with a nail bomb wasn’t brutal enough. Krajčík posted frequently about his animus toward gays and lesbians, which Beňadik encouraged.

Alleged Terrorgram Collective co-founder Althorpe is also in custody. Canadian prosecutors have accused him of helping to produce the Terrorgram Collective publications, through which they say he “promoted genocide” and “knowingly instructed” others to carry out “terrorist activity.”

At the time of his arrest, Althorpe was running a small company selling components for semi-automatic rifles such as AK-47s and AR-15s. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

In the U.S., Humber and Allison are facing trial on charges including soliciting people to kill government officials through The List, distributing bomb-making instructions and providing material support to terrorists. Prosecutors say the two have been involved with the Terrorgram community since 2019.

The 37-page indictment says they incited the attack on Tepláreň, noting that Krajčík “had frequent conversations with HUMBER, ALLISON, and other members of the Terrorgram Collective” before carrying out the crime.

In a jailhouse interview that Allison gave against his lawyer’s advice, he admitted he produced content for the collective, including editing the “White Terror” video. Still, Allison insisted he never incited others to commit crimes and claimed The List wasn’t meant to be a guide for assassins. He said it was merely an exercise in doxxing, similar to how right-wing activists are outed by anti-fascist activists.

All of his Telegram posts are protected under the First Amendment, according to a motion filed by his lawyers. They argue that while he was active in Telegram chats and channels, there is nothing in the government’s evidence to support the claim that he was a Terrorgram leader. “The chats are mostly a chaotic mix of hyperbole and posts without any recognized leader,” his lawyers wrote in the motion.

Looking pale and grim, Humber declined to be interviewed when ProPublica and FRONTLINE visited the Sacramento County Jail. Her attorney declined to comment on the case.

During the last days of the Biden administration, in January 2025, the State Department officially designated the Terrorgram Collective a global terrorist organization, hitting three more collective leaders in South Africa, Croatia and Brazil with sanctions. In February, Australia announced its own sanctions on Terrorgram, the first time that country’s government has imposed counterterrorism financing sanctions on an organization that is entirely based online.

“The group has been majorly impacted in terms of its activity. We’ve seen many chats being voluntarily closed as people feel at risk of legal action, and we’ve seen generally the amount of discourse really reducing,” said Milo Comerford, an extremism expert at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based nonprofit that tracks hate groups and disinformation. The “organizational capabilities of the Terrorgram Collective itself have been severely undermined.”

Pavel Durov (Illustration for ProPublica)

The demise of Terrorgram has coincided with reforms announced at Telegram in the wake of one co-founder’s arrest last year in France. Pavel Durov is charged with allowing criminal activity, including drug trafficking and child sexual abuse, to flourish on his platform. He has called the charges “misguided,” saying CEOs should not be held liable for the misuse of their platforms. He was ordered to remain in France during the ongoing investigation, and, depending on the outcome, could face trial next year.

In a statement, the company said, “Mr. Durov firmly denies all allegations.”

The company said it has always complied with the European Union’s laws. “It is absurd to suggest that Telegram’s owner is responsible for the actions of a negligible fraction (<0.01%) of its 950M+ active users.”

Still, after the arrest, the company announced a slew of reforms designed to make Telegram safer. It promised to police illegal content on the platform and share the IP addresses and phone numbers of alleged lawbreakers with authorities.

In response, white supremacists began to flee the platform.

Pete Simi, a sociology professor who studies extremism at Chapman University in Orange, California, said the incendiary ideas promoting race war and violence that animated the Terrorgram Collective will migrate to other platforms. “Especially given the broader climate that exists within our society,” Simi said. “There will be new Terrorgrams that take its place by another name, and we will continue to see this kind of extremism propagated through platforms of various sorts, not just Telegram.”

Today, many extremists are gathering on X, where owner Elon Musk has loosened content restrictions. White supremacists frequently post a popular Terrorgram slogan about killing all Black people. There are several Brenton Tarrant fan accounts, and some racist and antisemitic influencers who were previously banned now have hundreds of thousands of followers.

A review by ProPublica and FRONTLINE shows the company is removing some violent white supremacist content and suspending some extremist accounts. It also restricts the visibility of some racist and hateful posts by excluding them from search results or by adding a note to the post saying it violates X’s rules of community conduct. And we were unable to find posts on the platform that shared the bomb-making and terrorism manuals that had previously appeared on Telegram. The news organizations reached out to X multiple times but got no response.

In early March, a person who had a history of posting Nazi imagery shared a 21-second video lionizing Juraj Krajčík. The clip shows one of his victims lying dead on the pavement.

Tom Jennings, Annie Wong, Karina Meier and Max Maldonado of FRONTLINE, and Lukáš Diko of the Investigative Center of Jan Kuciak contributed reporting.

by Christopher Bing, Avi Asher-Schapiro and Annie Waldman

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

When President Donald Trump announced his marquee government cost-cutting initiative, he left no doubt about whom he intended to run it: Elon Musk. Still, questions about the scope of Musk’s authority have hounded the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency ever since.

As DOGE began to order massive budget cuts and layoffs, and those affected by the moves began to raise questions in the press and in court about their legality, administration officials equivocated on Musk’s exact role, asserting he was simply a senior adviser to the president and had no official position in DOGE.

Five weeks after its creation and under pressure from a growing cascade of lawsuits, the White House revealed in late February that an obscure bureaucrat named Amy Gleason had been acting as DOGE’s administrator since nearly day one.

However, ProPublica has found that she does not appear to be running the budget-slashing group, according to interviews with six current and former government officials. All spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs.

“I get the sense that Amy is in the role of scapegoat,” said one source who had been in meetings with Gleason.

The exact chain of command at DOGE is not clear to most federal employees who brush up against the team. But sources told ProPublica that longtime Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, a former executive of Musk’s Boring Company and SpaceX, appears to be administering day-to-day operations. And at times, Musk himself issues commands from inside the Secretary of War Suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, said a person familiar with the matter.

“I don’t know who Amy Gleason even is,” said one person who’s worked closely with DOGE’s leadership in a federal agency. “Davis runs the show.”

Musk, Davis and Gleason did not respond to requests for comment.

Since DOGE was created by executive order on Jan. 20, the Trump administration has gone to great lengths to put legal distance between Musk and the entity, saying he is neither an employee nor its head. And even though the order creates the role of an administrator — someone to coordinate with the White House and help place DOGE teams inside agencies — the Trump administration deflected questions about who was in that position for over a month.

The arrangement has confounded judges overseeing challenges to DOGE’s authority. “The whole operation, it raises questions,” remarked U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang, adding that the lack of clarity was “highly suspicious.”

This setup could make it more difficult to prove that Musk has violated conflicts of interests laws, which generally bar federal employees from getting involved in government matters that impact their own business interests.

By denying that Musk is the legal DOGE administrator “it gets him more removed, and it could make it harder to prove a violation,” said Richard Painter, a former top ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration.

In an interview with Fox News, Musk dismissed concerns about conflicts, saying, “I’ll recuse myself” if issues arise.

The announcement that placed Gleason in between Musk and DOGE’s daily operations appeared haphazard: Gleason was on vacation in Mexico when Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, named her as acting administrator to a group of reporters in Washington. Gleason told colleagues the White House had not coordinated the announcement with her.

Other parts of the rollout were equally perplexing: Leavitt asserted Gleason had been the administrator since nearly its inception — but colleagues said Gleason only began running staff meetings about a month into the administration with a small group of career technologists that predated the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, Gleason told her former colleagues back in Nashville, Tennessee — where she recently worked as a health technology executive — she was planning on returning there in a few short months.

One government worker who has been in meetings with Gleason described her as “someone with little to no actual decision-making” responsibilities.

She revealed as much to colleagues in meetings in recent weeks, where she made clear she was not deeply involved in the DOGE budget cutting that has put humanitarian programs in peril and forced thousands of employees out of work, sources who were in those meetings told ProPublica.

One reason it’s so difficult to pin down who is in charge of DOGE: It contains two separate teams that are almost entirely walled-off from each other.

In forming DOGE, Trump folded the entity into the existing U.S. Digital Service, a small unit of tech experts housed within the White House focused on improving government software platforms. While DOGE, on paper, has a similar mission, the actual work of Musk’s group has been far more expansive, such as cutting funding to programs and gaining access to sensitive agency data systems, as ProPublica and other media have reported.

In recent weeks, many holdover digital service workers have resigned or been laid off, and only a small group of a few dozen federal technologists remain. Gleason is only in charge of this smaller group, the sources said.

Officials who worked with Gleason, who served in the Digital Service during the prior Trump and Biden administrations, spoke highly of her dedication to the mission. One noted she helped upgrade health care technology across government, such as digitizing COVID-19 test results during the pandemic.

“My sense of her initial expectations was that USDS was going to have a synergy with DOGE … while also making government work better,” a former colleague said. “She was not expecting DOGE to come in and dismantle USDS.”

The secrecy surrounding Gleason’s appointment extends to all of DOGE. The Trump administration has offered scant information about its employees — except when compelled by lawsuits. In an effort to gain a clearer understanding of how the group operates, ProPublica has spent weeks identifying and profiling its staff.

Among them are engineers, lawyers, technology executives and consultants. Many were recruited from Musk’s businesses, including SpaceX, Tesla and Neuralink, or from firms owned by his business associates. Today ProPublica is adding 20 names to our running list, bringing the total to 66. None have responded to requests for comment.

Some have been enlisted to oversee cuts at the very agencies that conducted oversight of the industries where they’d previously worked.

DOGE assigned Tyler Hassen, an energy industry executive, to the Department of the Interior. Scott Langmack and Michael Alexander Mirski — two executives from real estate firms — have been seen at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And former Tesla lawyer Daniel Abrahamson has worked for DOGE at the Department of Transportation — an agency reportedly in the midst of several investigations over the safety of Teslas. Tesla has defended the safety of its vehicles.

None of the DOGE staffers replied to requests for comment. The Interior Department said it doesn’t comment on personnel, adding that there were no “DOGE staffers” at the agency, and the Transportation Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Three of the names ProPublica is adding to our tracker are engineers from Musk’s SpaceX who have been issued ethics waivers by Trump administration lawyers to do work that could potentially benefit one of Musk’s companies. SpaceX, which includes internet satellite service Starlink, and Verizon are reportedly competing for control of a $2.4 billion Federal Aviation Administration contract, according to The Washington Post.

SpaceX responded to that reporting in a post on X. “Recent media reports about SpaceX and the FAA are false,” it wrote. “There is no effort or intent for Starlink to ‘take over’ any existing contract.” The FAA did not respond to a request for comment.

Publicly, Musk continues to champion DOGE’s mission. “The people voted for major government reform,” he said, “and that’s what the people are going to get.”

Kirsten Berg, Al Shaw and Andy Kroll contributed reporting.

by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen

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

Saying the Trump administration is sabotaging civil rights enforcement by the Department of Education, a federal lawsuit filed Friday morning seeks to stop the president and Secretary Linda McMahon from carrying out the mass firing of civil rights investigators and lawyers.

Two parents and the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a national disability rights group, jointly filed the lawsuit. It alleges that decimating the department’s Office for Civil Rights will leave the agency unable to handle the public’s complaints of discrimination at school. That, they said, would violate the equal protection clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The complaint comes three days after the Education Department notified about 1,300 employees — including the entire staff in seven of the 12 regional civil rights offices — that they are being fired, and the day after a group of 21 Democratic attorneys general sued McMahon and the president. That lawsuit alleges the Trump administration does not have the authority to circumvent Congress to effectively shutter the department.

The complaint filed on Friday argues that the “OCR has abdicated its responsibility to enforce civil rights protections” and that the administration has made a “decision to sabotage” the Education Department’s civil rights functions. That, the lawsuit alleges, overrides Congress’ authority. It names the Education Department, McMahon and the acting head of OCR, Craig Trainor.

“Through a series of press releases, policy statements, and executive orders, the administration has made clear its contempt for the civil rights of marginalized students,” the lawsuit says.

The parents’ lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It asks the court to declare the “decimation” of the OCR unlawful and seeks an injunction to compel the office to “process OCR complaints promptly and equitably.”

A Department of Education spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the department has said it would still meet its legal obligations.

The lawsuit brought by the attorneys general was filed in federal court in Massachusetts. It alleges the firings are “so severe and extreme that it incapacitates components of the Department responsible for performing functions mandated by statute.” It cites the closing of the seven regional OCR outposts as an example.

Each year, the OCR investigates thousands of allegations of discrimination in schools based on disability, race and gender and is one of the federal government’s largest civil rights units. At last count there were about 550 OCR employees; at least 243 union-represented employees were laid off Tuesday.

The administration plans to close OCR locations in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Offices will remain in Atlanta, Denver, Kansas City, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

The lawsuit brought by the parents and advocacy group reveals concerns by students and families who have pending complaints that, under President Donald Trump, are not being investigated. There also are concerns that new complaints won’t get investigated if they don’t fall under one of the president’s priorities: curbing antisemitism, ending participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports and combating alleged discrimination against white students.

After Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20, the administration implemented a monthlong freeze on the agency’s civil rights work. Although OCR investigators were prohibited from working on their assigned discrimination cases, the Trump administration launched a new “End DEI Portal” meant only to collect complaints about diversity, equity and inclusion in schools. It has said it is trying to shrink the size of government, including the Education Department, which Trump has called a “big con job.”

Trump’s actions so far have led many to wonder “if there is a real and meaningful complaint investigation process existing at the moment,” said Johnathan Smith, an attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, which represents the plaintiffs. Smith is a former deputy assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

“They are putting the thumb on the scale of who the winners and losers are before they do the investigation, and that is deeply problematic from a law enforcement perspective,” Smith said.

The lawsuit is perhaps the most substantive legal effort to require the Education Department to enforce civil rights since 1970, when the NAACP sued the agency for allowing segregation to continue. That lawsuit resulted in repeated overhauling of the OCR and 20 years of judicial oversight, with the goal of ensuring that the division fairly investigated and enforced discrimination claims.

Students and families turn to the OCR after they feel their concerns have not been addressed by their schools or colleges. Both individuals named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit are parents of students whose civil rights complaints were being investigated — until Trump took office.

One of the plaintiffs, Alabama parent Nikki S. Carter, has three students and is an advocate for students with disabilities in her community. Carter is Black. According to the lawsuit, Carter filed a complaint with OCR in 2022 alleging discrimination on the basis of race after her children’s school district, the Demopolis City Schools, twice banned Carter from school district property.

When reached by ProPublica, the district superintendent said he’s not aware of the lawsuit or the civil rights complaint and could not comment; he is new to the district.

The district has said it barred Carter after a confrontation with a white staff member. But Carter has said that a white parent who had a similar confrontation wasn’t banned, leading her to believe that the district punished her because of her advocacy. She said it prevented her from attending parent-teacher conferences and other school events.

The other parent, identified by the initials A.W., filed a complaint with OCR alleging their child’s school failed to respond properly to sexual assault and harassment by a classmate.

Investigations of both families’ discrimination complaints have stopped under the new OCR leadership, according to the lawsuit.