ProPublica

by Jasper Scherer, Zach Despart and Berenice Garcia, The Texas Tribune, and Perla Trevizo and Dan Keemahill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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

Texas Democrats have long viewed the state’s growing Latino population as their ticket to eventually breaking through the Republican Party’s dominance. Tuesday night, however, showed that the GOP has made significant gains in peeling away those voters, and nowhere was that more apparent than along the border.

After years of losing the statewide Latino vote by double digits, Republicans set a high-water mark with Donald Trump capturing 55% of the critical voting bloc, besting Vice President Kamala Harris’ 44% share, according to exit polls.

In the traditionally Democratic strongholds along the border, Trump managed a near sweep.

He won 14 out of the 18 counties within 20 miles of the border, a number that doubled his attention-grabbing 2020 performance in the Latino-majority region. He carried all four counties in the Rio Grande Valley just eight years after drawing a mere 29% in the region — a feat that included delivering 97% Latino Starr County to Republicans for the first time since 1896. And, though he lost El Paso, one of the border’s most populous counties, he narrowed margins there in ways not seen in decades.

Counties Along the Border Continue to Flip

Trump was the top vote-getter in a majority of the counties along the Texas-Mexico border in 2024. This continues the trend of border counties voting more conservatively in presidential races. Shown is how many counties have voted for each party’s candidate in each race since 1996.

Note: Unofficial results for 2024. (Source: Texas Secretary of State. Map: Dan Keemahill/ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.)

His gains along the border were the most for a Republican presidential candidate in at least 30 years, exceeding even the inroads made by native Texan George W. Bush in 2004.

Trump’s success in appealing to heavily Latino communities was evident throughout the country as he became the first Republican presidential candidate to win Miami-Dade County in more than three decades and nearly doubled his share of the Latino vote in Pennsylvania, even after a comedian at one of his rallies called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” But Trump’s performance is particularly striking in Texas, where Democrats have all but tied their fate to the idea that, as long as the state’s Latino electorate continued to grow and stayed reliably blue, Republicans would one day cease to win statewide elections.

In addition to dominating the presidential race, Republicans saw other gains along the border. U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, a Republican from Edinburg, held onto a key GOP seat anchored in the Rio Grande Valley, and Republicans picked up a state Senate seat and two state House districts in South Texas that were previously held by Democrats. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who won reelection by carrying a majority of Latino voters, said the results amounted to “generational change.”

Democrats saw their own bright spots. Eddie Morales Jr., a state representative for a sprawling border district that stretches from Eagle Pass to El Paso, held onto his seat on Tuesday, though he narrowly eked out a victory two years after winning by a more comfortable 12-point margin. U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from Laredo, also won by an unexpectedly narrow margin of about 5 percentage points against a GOP challenger whom he vastly outspent.

Joshua Blank, research director for the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said it’s too early to tell if Republican gains will hold or extend beyond Trump himself. But, Blank said, Democrats would be wise to worry about the possibility that this shift endures.

Trump’s success among Latino voters seemed to stem from an understanding that, in places like Texas, many Latinos “think of themselves as multiracial” and have grown up in communities where race and ethnicity are not top of mind, Blank said. Trump targeted Hispanic men who rarely vote by appealing “to their pocketbooks, to their masculinity, to their place in culture and society, but not directly to an identity as a racial and ethnic minority.”

“Does that mean that these voters are going to stay in the Republican column? We don’t know. Does it mean that they’re going to support somebody who’s not named Donald Trump? Unclear,” Blank said. “But he has changed the terms of the debate in a way that I think Democrats are uncomfortable with.”

Border Counties Making Rightward Shift Toward Trump

Nine counties within 20 miles of the Texas-Mexico border flipped from supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 to Republican Donald Trump in 2024.

Note: Unofficial results for 2024. (Source: Texas Secretary of State. Chart: Dan Keemahill/ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Not unlike his appeal among other constituencies, Trump won over Latino voters by hammering Harris on economic challenges that many of them — rightly and wrongly — blame on President Joe Biden.

University of Houston political science professor Jeronimo Cortina said Trump’s challenge now would be to deliver on his promises to improve voters’ economic fortunes. And he said he’d expect voters to hold Trump accountable if he doesn’t. Cortina noted that many Latinos supported Bush’s 2004 reelection, only to desert the Republican Party in favor of Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 amid a flailing economy.

“Realignments occur when there’s a sustainable change, and right now, it’s not clear we have that,” Cortina said.

He also said it would be premature to say whether Trump’s appeal — to say nothing of the Republican Party’s — was anything other than fleeting because, in local races, Latinos still tended to prefer Democrats.

One such example is the race for sheriff in Val Verde County, nearly three hours west of San Antonio.

In that race, Democrat Joe Frank Martinez held onto his seat, beating his Republican challenger after receiving 57% of the vote, even as Trump won the county with 63% of the vote.

According to Martinez, Project Red TX, a GOP-backed PAC, initially tried to get him to switch parties. When he declined, the PAC backed his opponent, who ran a campaign centered around the issue of immigration, even though that is not part of the sheriff’s job.

This year, the group supported more than 50 local candidates, primarily in border counties. The three candidates it backed in Val Verde County lost, though Wayne Hamilton, a veteran GOP operative who heads the group, noted that he also supported a number of local candidates who won their races with Trump carrying the county atop the ballot. One such case was in Jim Wells County, where Trump received 57% and the Democratic sheriff was narrowly ousted by a Republican challenger.

Hamilton said Latino voters living at or near the border flocked to Trump over what they see as the Biden administration’s “collapse in border enforcement and failing to do their job” by preventing more migrants from crossing into Texas.

Record numbers of arrivals overwhelmed border infrastructure in numerous communities. In Val Verde, some 20,000 mostly Haitian migrants arrived almost at once in 2021, forcing officials to shut the international port of entry while they figured out how to respond to the situation.

Public outcry was most acute, Hamilton said, in counties with high poverty rates where residents were more likely to feel that their community was “being overrun by people that are even poorer, with even greater needs.”

Hamilton celebrated that Trump flipped Starr by 16 points this year, a 76-point swing from his 60-point deficit there in 2016.

Down the ballot, though, Democrats, including the incumbent sheriff, managed to hold on to their positions despite aggressive campaigns on the Republican side. “All of those candidates that ran as Democrats, all won, so the Trump presidency is basically an isolated seat,” Starr County Democratic Chair Jessica Vera said.

Still, she said, if national and statewide Democrats want to keep the county blue, they need to work together with local leaders to connect with voters there.

Hamilton said some newly converted Trump voters might feel less inclined to vote against their local Democratic officials, especially in the smaller border counties, because they tend to be known in the community.

“The further down the ballot you go, it all becomes more personal,” Hamilton said. “It’s not a guy I see on TV, right? It’s the guy I go to Mass with.”

Local Democratic Party officials, including Sylvia Bruni in Webb County, a longtime Democratic stronghold, said they had warned their state and national headquarters about the advances Republicans were making in their districts. But she said she had gotten little support and instead had to rely almost entirely on whatever funds her group could raise on its own.

That’s not going to be good enough in the future, Bruni said. “We need help.”

by Stephen Engelberg

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

Donald Trump’s victory marks a turning point in the American experiment, and there is much to be dissected about what it means.

We will leave that analysis to others.

Our role as an investigative news organization lies elsewhere. In the coming months and years, we will be devoting a significant portion of our staff to chronicling the effects of what promises to be a drastic change in the role of the federal government in all of our lives.

This is nothing new for us. Over the past three presidential administrations, we have closely covered the actions of the federal government, from the Navy’s propensity for building expensive ships that aren’t seaworthy to the failings of regulators to protect the public’s health and safety.

I’ve been a reporter and editor for more than four decades, long enough to see the pendulum of public sentiment swing from the presidencies of Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama to Trump. At moments of seismic shift in our country, I like to look back on the words of Adolph S. Ochs when he took control of The New York Times in 1896. The paper, he wrote, would “give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved.”

In the 21st century, “without fear or favor” means maintaining a fact-based, data-driven approach to journalism. Our job is to give readers an independent, verifiable account of what’s happening, even if the president is calling us enemies of the people or bloodsuckers. At ProPublica, our mantra is that we bring the receipts to every story we publish.

We are journalists, not leaders of the resistance.

There are some who will argue that ProPublica’s model of doing journalism that spurs reforms will be hobbled when one political party controls both branches of Congress and the White House.

I do not agree.

Again and again, we have seen powerfully documented stories stir change in states dominated by one party. One example: Our series on Florida’s shabby treatment of the families of children born with brain injuries prompted Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-led Legislature to take immediate action. ProPublica’s story that included a recording of a 6-year-old Salvadoran girl wailing for her mother prompted an immediate end to the first Trump administration’s policy of deterring migrants by separating families.

As we have done for each presidential administration since 2008, our reporters will begin with basic questions about new government policies: Who is benefiting? Who is suffering? What are the unintended consequences?

We are mindful that we may be entering a new era, one without precedent. Trump’s first administration, which included two impeachments, was defined by his penchant for smashing norms.

There will be far fewer guardrails in the second Trump presidency. The Supreme Court’s decision declaring presidents presumptively immune from prosecution for official acts and the return of Republican control of the Senate, and perhaps the House, mean there will be few, if any, checks on the power of the president.

Trump famously said that he wouldn’t be a dictator, “except for Day One.” In fact, it will take a while for a picture to emerge of how he plans to use the expansive authority of his office.

A man watches election results come in at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center in Fairburn, Georgia. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)

The coming months will feel as chaotic as they always do during a transition. Various figures in the president-elect’s orbit will be jockeying for influence and will leak transition team documents in hopes of turning them into reality. You will read many stories about proposals for radical change in every government agency. Some will be embraced. Many more will be cast aside, never to be seen again.

Of course, ProPublica reporters would be delighted to receive any and all leaks sources can share about the transition. You can reach our whole team at propublica.org/tips if you have a tip for us to investigate. You can also text or call 917-512-0201 or send us a message at that number on Signal, a secure messaging app.

While Trump’s campaign speeches were less than linear, he has been clear and consistent about his plans in many areas. Some, like health care and taxes, are subjects ProPublica has long closely covered. Others, like his plan for imposing much higher tariffs on imported goods, open up whole new arenas of inquiry for us.

The campaign pledge with the greatest immediate impact will be his plan to deport millions of people who entered this country illegally. Karoline Leavitt, the campaign press secretary, told Fox News on Wednesday that Trump will begin “the largest mass deportation operation” in American history on his first day in office.

Previous presidents have stepped up the enforcement of immigration laws, notably Trump in his first term and Obama. But the United States has not attempted mass arrests of migrants since 1954, when border agents rounded up more than 1 million people living in Texas and California and forcibly transported them to Mexico.

We have been closely covering immigration, and our recent series of stories of its impact on towns like Del Rio, Texas, and Whitewater, Wisconsin, reflect our emphasis on deep, on-the-ground reporting. If Trump carries out his pledge to round up and expel 15 million to 20 million people, we will cover it in ways that go beyond the day’s headlines.

Jesse Eisinger, one of our senior editors, delivered some remarks to his staff this morning that sum up how I believe reporters at ProPublica and elsewhere should be approaching this moment.

“We face the biggest test of our professional lives,” he told them. “Now we get to see if we really meant it when we said we will hold power to account. Will we do so when our subjects have true power on their side and a willingness to use it? We may be harassed. We may be sued. We may be threatened with violence. We may be ignored. Are we just sunshine journalists or are we ready?”

People cast their votes at Osborn High School in Detroit. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

by ProPublica

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

Reporters at ProPublica live and work in 26 states across the country, from California to Minnesota, Texas to New York. Many have covered key election issues and how they are resonating at national, state and local levels. On Election Day, our reporters will be on the ground in many of these locations, on the lookout for what’s going right and what isn’t. The topics we’re watching include how extremist groups react to the election, the actions of newly recruited poll workers who were mobilized on the basis of their distrust of election administration, and how well embattled election boards and commissions handle potential challenges to voting processes.

Some are paying attention to the defining cultural debates of today. In Missouri, a reliably red state, we’ll be watching whether a voter-initiated constitutional amendment aimed at restoring abortion rights passes. We’re also looking at whether voters in states opt to expand school voucher programs or elect legislators who will do so.

You can reach our whole team at propublica.org/tips if you have a tip for us to investigate. You can also text or call 917-512-0201, or send us a message at that number on Signal, a secure messaging app. Below you’ll find a list of some of our reporters, what they’re covering and individual contact information.

Voting Issues

Andy Kroll, reporter, will be watching for disruptions and disputes at the polls and among political organizations.

I have extensive experience covering dark money in politics, legal battles over voting and election-related disinformation. On Election Day, I’ll be watching swing states for any disruptions or attempts to suppress the vote. I’ll also be monitoring last-minute lawsuits related to the election and viral rumors or misleading information about voting and the integrity of the elections. If you believe you witnessed possible voter suppression, attempts to knowingly mislead voters or other efforts to subvert the election, please get in touch.

Email: andy.kroll@propublica.org; call or text: 202-215-6203

The Role of Extremist Groups

Joshua Kaplan, A.C. Thompson and James Bandler, reporters, will be looking at how extremist groups are reacting to election results.

We are reporting on extremism tied to the election. For years, we’ve covered violence and intimidation in American politics — we’ve explored how social media companies helped extremists organize, dug into botched responses by law enforcement, and exposed the people and groups committing harm. Do you know a voter or election official who has been threatened? Do you have information about efforts to incite violence? Are you seeing this kind of conduct on specific social media or messaging platforms? Please contact us.

Email: joshua.kaplan@propublica.org, ac.thompson@propublica.org, james.bandler@propublica.org

School Vouchers

Jeremy Schwartz, reporter for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, will be monitoring state races to see if school voucher supporters are elected.

Following primary runoff elections in May, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared he finally would have enough votes in the Legislature to pass his top priority: a private-school voucher system. But Democrats in the state are holding out hope they can flip a handful of Republican-held seats on Tuesday and keep Abbott from his goal. I have been covering the voucher debate in Texas for the past two years, reporting on the decadeslong effort to build political support behind the scenes and efforts by pro-voucher billionaires to influence school board races and bond elections. On Election Day, I’ll be looking at how issues of vouchers and public education play out up and down the ballot in Texas, from school board races to key Texas legislative battles.

Email: jeremy.schwartz@propublica.org; call or text: 708-967-5730

Texas Voter Roll Removals

Vianna Davila and Lexi Churchill, reporters for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, will be watching to see whether people who were removed from the voter rolls because they were incorrectly flagged as noncitizens show up to vote.

In late August, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced that 1.1 million voters across the state were removed from the rolls since 2021, including 6,500 potential noncitizens. Our reporting has found that the claims of noncitizens on the voter rolls are likely inflated and, in some cases, wrong. So far, we have found at least 10 U.S. citizens in three Texas counties who were likely included in that total, and our research shows there are almost certainly others. The voters we have pinned down come from a range of political and racial backgrounds, including a lifelong Republican and Donald Trump supporter who never thought her citizenship or right to vote would be in question. We want to hear from voters who discover their registration has been canceled and face hurdles to vote at the polls, as well as county officials who witness these issues. Even if your registration has been canceled, voting rights experts say you should almost always be able to cast a ballot, even if it’s a provisional one. Check out our guide on the steps U.S. citizens can take to vote if you’ve been removed after your citizenship was questioned.

Email: vianna.davila@propublica.org, lexi.churchill@propublica.org; text or Signal: 512-596-0148, 816-898-5462

Georgia’s New Election Rules

Doug Bock Clark, reporter, will be looking at how new election rules approved in Georgia affect voting and tabulating results.

For months, national right-wing groups have been working behind the scenes to change Georgia’s election rules to benefit Trump. And although courts have blocked those rule changes for the moment, those groups are still active. They have been recruiting and training poll watchers and preparing to push for a Trump victory. On Election Day, I’ll be on the ground in Atlanta, Georgia, to monitor some of the most electorally important counties in the swing state and the nation. I’m interested in hearing from readers who encounter unusual poll watcher activity. I have also reported extensively on challenges to voter registrations, and I’m looking to hear from anyone who finds themselves dealing with such a challenge. Fulton County, Georgia, was the epicenter of numerous conspiracy theories about election malfeasance in 2020, and I’ll be closely examining any such claims this time. And as ProPublica’s democracy reporter for the South, I’ll also be keeping an eye on other states, such as North Carolina.

Email: doug.clark@propublica.org; text or Signal: 678-243-0784

The Outcome in Minnesota

Jessica Lussenhop, reporter, will be monitoring results from Minnesota, Tim Walz’s home state.

I’m a native Minnesotan who has been reporting on how Tim Walz, our governor and the Democratic vice presidential candidate, has handled crucial matters in the state, including health care and police reform. If Kamala Harris wins the election and takes Walz to the White House with her, that will cause a huge political shake-up here, so I’ll be paying close attention to that. In the near term, though, I’ll have my attention focused on Michigan and any fallout in such an important swing state during and following the election.

Email: Jessica.Lussenhop@propublica.org; Signal: 612-460-1202

Poll Workers

Phoebe Petrovic, a Local Reporting Network partner at Wisconsin Watch, will be watching the conduct of poll workers recruited by Christian nationalist groups.

I’ve been reporting about Christian nationalist efforts to recruit poll workers and undermine certification ahead of the election. And on Election Day I’ll be looking to see if those efforts will be successful. Specifically, I’ll be watching for misinformation or misconduct from both poll workers and poll watchers, especially in Wisconsin. I’ll also be looking for activity from extremist groups and conspiracy theorists online and on the ground, as well as their influence on the certification of results and lawsuits in the days after. Together, all these reflect attempts to erode the public’s trust in elections. I’m eager to hear from voters who got turned away due to misinformation from poll workers, elections officials facing threats or anyone with knowledge of attempts to block certification.

Email: ppetrovic@wisconsinwatch.org; call, text or Signal: 608-571-3748

Missouri’s Abortion Rights Amendment

Jeremy Kohler, reporter, will be reporting on the fate of a constitutional amendment in Missouri to restore abortion rights.

Although Missouri is a reliably red state where the outcome of the presidential election isn’t in doubt, it is at the center of a pivotal election issue: a voter-initiated constitutional amendment aimed at restoring abortion rights. This initiative follows years of the state legislature tightening abortion restrictions, culminating in the trigger ban that nearly eliminated access to the procedure upon the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Missouri is among 10 states with an amendment to restore access to abortion on the ballot. In my earlier reporting, I showed how anti-abortion activists have employed disinformation tactics, attempting to sway public opinion against abortion rights by linking the amendment to unrelated issues like gender-affirming care for transgender people. While polling showed the amendment leading by a wide margin, I’ll be watching to see whether late campaign efforts sway public opinion and how abortion foes try to regroup to repeal the amendment if it passes. And I’ll be watching developments in other states where abortion is on the ballot.

Email: jeremy.kohler@propublica.org; call, text or Signal: 314-486-7204

Nevada’s New Voter System

Anjeanette Damon, reporter, will be watching how Nevada’s new centralized voter registration system holds up.

Eight weeks before the general election, 16 of Nevada’s 17 counties switched to a new centralized voter registration system that promises to vastly improve election security and efficiency in the state. But the rollout, which consisted of transferring massive voter datasets from antiquated county systems, was difficult for understaffed and overtaxed county clerk offices. As with any system upgrade, problems with the data were discovered that had to be corrected before early voting began on Oct. 16. (In Nevada, nearly 90% of people vote before Election Day.) I am based in Washoe County, Nevada’s key swing county, which is home to Reno. Washoe County’s clerk, who is on administrative leave from her job, said she didn’t think her office would have time to fix all of the problems. County and state officials said all identified issues were corrected. Please reach out to me if you encounter difficulty checking in at the polls, if you received an incorrect ballot or if you were mistakenly marked inactive. I’ll also be watching the ballot cure process, in which clerks take additional steps to verify ballot signatures that had issues on initial review.

Email: anjeanette.damon@propublica.org; call, text or Signal: 775-303-8857

Wisconsin Elections Commission

Megan O’Matz, reporter, will be watching out for how the embattled Wisconsin Elections Commission handles voting and the results.

Wisconsin has a highly decentralized system of administering elections. More than 1,800 clerks in cities, towns and villages oversee the balloting. After Trump lost Wisconsin in 2020, voters and officials upset with the outcome focused their ire on the state agency that issues guidance to the clerks and considers complaints. I reported on the effort — ultimately unsuccessful — to oust the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s neutral administrator, as well as the bullying of a Republican member who rejected the stolen election myth. On Election Day I’ll be watching the mechanics of voting and pressures on election officials. Are controversial drop boxes inflaming tensions? Are there threats, signs of voter intimidation or suppression? What events could become fodder for lawsuits? How is law enforcement responding? I’m eager to hear from voters, public officials, poll workers or observers.

Email: megan.omatz@propublica.org

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by Stephen Engelberg

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

ProPublica launched its coverage of this year’s presidential race back in 2022. No, we didn’t send a reporter to Iowa to check out how people were feeling about Donald Trump or try to figure out Nikki Haley’s prospects in New Hampshire. We’ve long believed that sort of story is best left to the nation’s cadre of capable political reporters.

Instead, we turned our attention to Afghanistan, taking a close look at the chaotic final days of the war. Working with Alive in Afghanistan and their journalists in Kabul, we explored the extent to which the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal contributed to the deaths of 13 U.S. servicemen in a suicide bombing. Headlined “Hell at Abbey Gate: Chaos, Confusion and Death in the Final Days of the War in Afghanistan,” the story found the typical mix of policy missteps and on-the-ground miscalculations that contribute to such tragedies. We concluded that the Biden administration had underestimated how quickly the Afghan Army would collapse and failed to plan for events that, in retrospect, appeared probable if not inevitable.

“The shadow of the Afghanistan withdrawal looms large over the administration of President Joe Biden as it navigates the growing conflict in Ukraine,” we wrote. “The widely publicized chaos of the evacuation caused an immediate drop in Biden’s approval ratings, and Republican groups have signaled they intend to make it a wedge issue in future elections.’’

Things didn’t turn out as we anticipated. While Haley, Trump and other Republicans did attack the Biden administration’s handling of Afghanistan, other issues turned out to play a much larger role in the 2024 campaign.

As an organization that specializes in investigative reporting, our role in the political process is a bit hard to define. We say in our mission statement that our goal is to expose “abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust” in the belief that our stories will spur “reform.’’ We're a nonprofit that doesn't engage in advocacy for either party. When it comes to politics, we focus on the process of elections, the substance of issues and the behind-the-scenes forces that stand to benefit from particular outcomes.

Back in 2011, we spent considerable time digging into the intricacies of gerrymandering. We documented how, in state after state, majority parties tilted electoral maps in their favor. The attractions of gerrymandering, we learned, were bipartisan. The Democratic supermajority in California was just as likely to jigger the maps as the Republicans in North Carolina and Florida.

In the winter of 2016, our reporter Alec MacGillis set out to see what was happening to the Republican Party in Ohio. What he found were the beginnings of a profound split, in which an alienated, politically homeless electorate was quite willing to vote for Trump.

“The stresses that created these Trump voters had been building for decades in places like Dayton,’’ he wrote. “For the most part, the political establishment ignored, dismissed or overlooked these forces, until suddenly they blew apart nearly everyone’s blueprint for the presidential campaign.’’

MacGillis’ work proved prescient. Rereading it for this column, I was struck again by how important it is to subject the conventional wisdom to the stresses of on-the-ground reporting.

Our efforts to contribute to voters’ understanding of what many see as the most consequential election in modern American history have been even broader.

One key question we and many others tried to address is the likely policies of a second Trump administration. Trump had been clear about his plans in 2016, announcing his intentions to build a wall on the southwest border, ban Muslim immigrants and raise tariffs.

In 2024, the wish list for a Republican administration was assembled under the banner of Project 2025, written by an assortment of former officials, most of whom had worked for Trump’s 2016 campaign or in his first term. The document they produced was covered in detail by various outlets.

Working with our partners at the nonprofit Documented, we obtained 14 hours of training videos that shed further light on what Project 2025 intends to accomplish. There is advice on how to avoid embarrassing disclosures through the Freedom of Information Act along with reams of strategies for vanquishing the bureaucrats in the “Deep State.’’ One video that caught our eye was a senior official in the first Trump administration who said an early task of the next Trump presidency would be to “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.’’

In a separate collaboration with Documented, we uncovered a speech in which another top Trump ally said the plan was to put career civil servants “in trauma.’’ Such extreme steps were necessary, he said, because the United States was in the midst of a “Marxist takeover’’ and faced a crisis comparable to 1776 and 1860.

Another key function of journalism in elections is to write about the issues voters care about. We’ve dispatched journalists to scrutinize two pivotal issues in this year’s campaign: immigration and abortion.

As Trump steamrollered his opponents in the 2024 primaries, it quickly became clear that immigration was going to be a major flash point for voters. The numbers of migrants encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border were way up from their pandemic lows, and the Biden administration had been slow to react. Democratic mayors like New York’s Eric Adams were publicly criticizing Biden as thousands of migrants from countries like Venezuela were showing up in cities looking for shelter.

We assembled a team of ProPublica journalists to dig deeper. Mica Rosenberg, our newly hired immigration reporter, and data reporter Jeff Ernsthausen began with the central question: What changed in the past decade to make the issue such an important part of the American political conversation? They found new patterns in the masses of data collected by federal agencies. The mix of migrants traveling to the southwest border had radically changed, from mostly single Mexican adults in decades past to an increasing number of families and children from Central America starting around 2014. And more recently, new migrants have been coming from a much broader array of countries, including Venezuela, Haiti, China and West African nations. We found that the changing face of immigration to America had been set in motion by the policies of both Presidents Trump and Biden.

Our data analysis showed that the number of migrants crossing the southwest border into the United States was not vastly higher than in other periods of history. But the new migrants were more visible than their predecessors, as many applied for asylum or entered through other legal pathways instead of trying to escape arrest at the border. They have moved to new cities and towns that, in some cases, lacked the infrastructure to deal with their needs for schools, housing, driver’s licenses and medical care. The strains were real, and their impact was vastly magnified by social media and television.

One of those communities affected by the new migrants was the tiny town of Whitewater, Wisconsin. Hundreds of Nicaraguans had moved to Whitewater, and many of them were driving without licenses or much experience behind the wheel. The police chief had written a letter to President Biden asking for help. He said he didn’t need much — just a few hundred thousand dollars to hire a couple of police officers, preferably some who could speak Spanish. The White House did not respond to the chief’s request for close to two months, and when it did it told the chief about a program unavailable to Whitewater. Meanwhile, Trump turned Whitewater into yet another flashpoint in his argument that Democrats are ignoring an “invasion.’’

Our reporters Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel had spent years exploring the role of immigrants in Wisconsin’s dairy industry. Their story, “What Happened in Whitewater,’’ added more nuanced context. Yes, the chief’s initial plea for help went unheeded. But he eventually did get some funding to hire more officers, and Whitewater is on its way to integrating its new residents.

We’ve done a myriad of other reporting that figures in the election. Our reporting on the women who died trying to obtain medical care in states with abortion bans began long before the 2024 campaign turned white hot. We had no idea one of those stories would end up as the centerpiece of a political ad aired by the Harris-Walz campaign.

A final thought on politics and ProPublica. No one knows what’s going to happen on Nov. 5. Like most American newsrooms, we’re planning for multiple outcomes, from a clear victory by either candidate to a grinding conflict in the courts and, possibly, in state legislatures and the Congress. Whatever happens, we’ll be there, trying to figure out what’s really happening.

by Doug Bock Clark and Heather Vogell

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.

In an ornate room in Georgia’s Capitol, Julie Adams — a member both of the election board serving the state’s most populous county and of a right-wing organization sowing skepticism about American elections — got the news she was waiting for. And she couldn’t wait to share it.

With pink manicured nails that matched her trim pink blazer, she tapped out a message on her phone to a top election lawyer for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. “Got it passed,” she wrote to Gineen Bresso, photographs reviewed by ProPublica show.

What had passed that September afternoon in Atlanta was a state rule, championed by Adams, that would allow poll watchers like those she’d trained to gain greater access to sensitive areas in counting centers where votes were being tallied. The rule was a priority for supporters of former President Donald Trump who are looking to pave the way to challenge election results if their candidate loses this week’s vote.

The win was one in a string of them for Adams, who quickly ascended from a little-known, financially troubled conservative activist to a surprise appointee to the Fulton County board of elections. Her note to Bresso signaled not just this particular victory but the extent to which the 61-year-old has used her new perch to carry out the efforts of national players seeking to tilt the election in Trump’s favor.

Fulton itself is significant in state and national politics for a host of reasons: its sheer concentration of Democratic voters (380,000 in 2020, more than any other Georgia county), the scrutiny it received from national election skeptics after Trump lost the state by fewer than 12,000 votes — and, now, its newest election board member’s outsize role in trying to influence Georgia’s election processes.

Her actions in her nine months on the Fulton County board have been prodigious. She secretly helped push another, arguably higher-stakes rule through the state election board that vastly expanded the authority of county board members to refuse to certify votes they deem suspicious. She herself refused to certify the results of the presidential primary in March (though the board’s Democratic majority overruled her), and then she sued her board and election director, asserting local officials should be allowed to refuse to certify vote totals if there are discrepancies, which experts say are almost always innocuous. Some of her lawyers in that case work for the America First Policy Institute, an advocacy group staffed with former Trump officials.

So far, Adams’ efforts have mostly failed. Two judges have invalidated rules that Adams backed, with one calling them “illegal, unconstitutional and void.” But other efforts are still underway. The month after joining the Fulton County election board, Adams became regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network, the group founded by lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who joined Trump on a call when he asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” him enough votes to overturn the 2020 election results there.

In that role, Adams runs weekly calls for Republican activists who have described Georgia’s voting as rigged, and she has pulled conservative members of local election boards into a loose coalition, many of whom have challenged results in their counties, too. And prominent conservative election lawyers, writers and national groups have used Adams’ push against certification in Georgia as the basis for a national argument.

Adams did not respond to numerous requests for comment or a detailed list of questions. Nor did representatives for the Election Integrity Network.

The Georgia-based group that hired Adams in 2022, Tea Party Patriots Action, has received millions of dollars from organizations closely tied to conservative legal activist and fundraiser Leonard Leo and billionaire Richard Uihlein, tax records show. Uihlein-backed groups launched unsubstantiated attacks on the legitimacy of voter rolls in at least a dozen states after the 2020 election.

A representative for Uihlein did not respond to questions. A representative for Leo would not elaborate on his contributions to organizations that supported Tea Party Patriots.

The true test of Adams’ effectiveness will come on Election Day — and, if the results in Georgia are anywhere near as close and consequential as they were in 2020, in the days and weeks beyond.

“She’s trying to help Trump win or trying to create chaos in the administration of the election in order to cast aspersions on it if he doesn’t win,” said Patrise Perkins-Hooker, who served as chair of the county election board when Adams joined. Perkins-Hooker described Adams’ work as centered on carrying out the agenda of right-wing activists and not making “the elections run smoothly or transparently.”

In response to ProPublica’s questions, the Republican National Committee provided a statement that said: “The Georgia state election board passed commonsense safeguards to secure Georgia's elections. The Trump-Vance Campaign and RNC supported these rules to bring transparency and accountability to the election process.” It also said, “The RNC defended these rules in court against attacks from Kamala and the DNC and will continue to fight against Democrat election interference.”

Back in 2020, Mitchell and others challenging the results across the country had to rely on disorganized groups of Trump supporters who came together at the last minute and were mostly unfamiliar with election systems. Experts now warn about the more pronounced impact that election deniers like Adams will have, given that they have come to occupy positions of power in local election administration. As Trump said at an October rally in North Carolina: “The vote counter is far more important than the candidate.”

When Adams placed her hand on a Bible in February and took an oath to fairly administer Fulton County’s elections, voting rights advocates and Democrats thought they had scored a victory. Eight months earlier, they had twice swatted back efforts by the county GOP to install an activist who’d made his name challenging residents’ voter registrations. The Republicans had sued to force the election board to accept him, then relented and put Adams forward instead.

“It was universal support for Julie,” said Earl Ferguson, a vice chair of the Fulton County Republicans, who has also filed challenges to voters’ eligibility and repeated debunked conspiracy theories about the reliability of voting machines at election board meetings. (Ferguson does not agree that the points he made about the machines were not valid.) “She is honest and very capable, and very pleasant.”

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Adams and a small group of conservative activists became regular attendees at election board meetings. On a few occasions, she addressed the board during the public comment period, questioning the integrity of the county’s elections and its certification process. But she was much less outspoken than other activists in the group.

“When Adams was appointed, little was known about her connections to election deniers to justify opposition,” said Max Flugrath, spokesperson for Fair Fight, the Georgia-based voting advocacy organization. “Voting rights groups instead focused on opposing candidates with documented anti-voter records.”

Adams had worked in human resources and executive recruiting. Records show she also had experienced major financial setbacks. She’d filed for bankruptcy in 2005, and her mortgage company had auctioned her Cobb County home on the courthouse steps in 2010. A landlord later sued her, and she agreed to pay more than $13,000 in back rent, according to a 2021 consent agreement.

That same year, she trained 32 poll watchers to monitor the 2021 municipal elections. And she told county commissioners that she believed some tally sheets from an audit of the 2020 election had been “falsified.”

In 2022, Tea Party Patriots Action, the politically active arm of one of the largest national Tea Party groups, hired Adams as a field director, paying her about $124,000 a year according to tax filings.

Her hire came at a time when the group was pulling in cash and intensifying its focus on election issues. Groups funded by Leo, who is seen as the architect behind the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, provided the Tea Party group and a related foundation at least $1.1 million between 2020 and 2022, records show, including a 2021 grant related to election integrity. The group also hired Leo’s firm as consultants.

In 2022, Tea Party Patriots Action more than doubled its annual revenue, thanks in part to a $2.5 million grant from Restoration of America — which is backed by Uihlein, the billionaire owner of the packing supplies company Uline. That year, former Trump campaign official Gina Swoboda was a Restoration for America executive director. Restoration has spent the years since Trump lost in 2020 pushing the unfounded idea that discrepancies in voter roll data between the number of votes and the number of ballots cast are evidence of fraud, despite insistence by elected officials from both parties that the claims are baseless.

That year, the Tea Party group added a program to bring in poll watchers and workers in Georgia, records show. And it had Adams in place.

Representatives for the Tea Party group and Restoration of America did not respond to requests for comment. Swoboda did not respond to questions.

Adams has run scores of poll watcher and worker online trainings, with some drawing dozens of people, records reviewed by ProPublica show. In a May training, Adams listed over 10 things that she wants trainees to report, from the serial numbers on voting machines to the names of poll managers. “There’s no such thing as too much documentation,” she said in a recording of a May training. “If something doesn’t feel right to you, you need to write it out.”

At an October training, she told the roughly three dozen attendees, including those joining from out of state, to first report discrepancies to their state GOP and RNC hotlines and then to VoterGA, an organization whose leader has cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 election. The Republican Party and right-wing organizations plan to use the poll watchers’ reports in post-election litigation, ProPublica has reported.

“VoterGA has an 18-year proven track record of nonpartisan activity,” said co-founder Garland Favorito. “Republicans and Democrats are told to call their own party hotlines for election issues. We have no plans or resources to file any type of speculative litigation in any matter.”

While working for the Tea Party, Adams also led weekly meetings frequented by prominent state activists, RNC officials, GOP county heads, conservative election board members and voter registration challengers, according to records including emails obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and shared with ProPublica.

Agendas included subjects such as “Voter Integrity concerns for 2024 Elections” and warnings like “New York Times Reporter traveling to several counties in Georgia.”

In 2022, Adams had appeared at the Election Integrity Network’s Georgia chapter launch and was described the following year as its state liaison in social media posts by other activists.

But much of her work was done behind the scenes. So when the county GOP nominated her to join the election board in the heavily Democratic Fulton County, commissioners approved the choice 6-0.

After Adams joined the board in February, it did not take long for fellow members to begin worrying about her intentions. The board is made up of four political appointees, two by each party, led by a chair chosen by the Democratic-majority county commission. Traditionally, the board’s primary goal has been to make Fulton elections run smoothly, past and present board members said.

However, Perkins-Hooker, the chair when Adams joined, said that during meetings, she could see Adams receiving text messages from a Republican activist “telling her what to say, and what to do.” After Perkins-Hooker stepped down in April, the new chair banned board members from using phones during meetings.

“She came with a mission to try and paint our elections as being fraught with fraud and incompetency,” said Perkins-Hooker, an opinion echoed by other board members.

Adams had been on the board for just a few weeks when, in March, she was elevated to regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network, the organization that Mitchell, Trump’s lawyer, had launched. The new position put her near the top of the leadership’s organizational chart.

Adams quickly began pushing conservative priorities at election board meetings. She wanted poll watchers to have more access to vote tallies from election machines. And she was very concerned about the mechanics of certifying elections. Though a century of case law says that certification is a mandatory duty for officials like her — whom experts compare to scorekeepers, not referees — Adams began questioning if she had to do it. She demanded reams of information she said that she needed to be certain of the results before certifying.

At Adams’ third meeting, in March, she and the other Republican board member shocked Democratic board members by voting against the certification of the presidential primary election — though the Democratic majority overruled them.

Adams’ push to have power over certification of election results couldn’t succeed under the state’s current rules, so she set out to change them.

To do so, she lobbied to remake the body that determined them, the State Election Board, which at the time was composed of two moderate Republican members, two MAGA-aligned members and a Democrat. She activated the coalition she had been building with the support of national Republicans, inviting them to a March meeting where the goal was to ensure that the moderate Republican on the State Election Board was replaced. “The Georgia House of Representatives needs to take action immediately!!!!” the meeting invitation read, providing the phone number of the speaker of the house.

Not long afterward, the speaker replaced that board member with a conservative media personality whom Trump would soon praise by name at a rally.

The new Trump-backed majority quickly began passing rules that the prior board had criticized as illegal, including one, originally pushed by Adams, expanding the power of county board members to refuse to certify votes they found suspicious. It was passed by the new board along with another rule potentially allowing county board members to delay certification.

A national outcry ensued, with The New York Times calling it “The Republican Plan to Challenge a Harris Victory.”

Three of the nation’s leading conservative election lawyers backed the new rules. A conservative group ran ads targeting swing state election officials that echoed the lawyers’ arguments. And the certification rule Adams pushed became a talking point for conservative media outlets. One article in The Federalist argued that it “could stop leftists from bullying election officials into certifying results without completing their duties.” Lawyers for the Republican National Committee and a Trump-aligned conservative think tank also defended the certification rules in Georgia superior court, testing arguments that certifying election results was optional.

Adams’ arguments that certification is not mandatory inspired David Hancock, a GOP member of Gwinnett County’s election board, to vote against certifying the same presidential primary as Adams. (He described several minor inconsistencies as sufficient reason for him not to certify.) “It was, like, a big deal,” Hancock said of Adams’ decision to vote against certifying.

Because two judges in October invalidated the new rules passed by the State Election Board, the mechanics of the election this week will be the same as before Adams’ pushes to empower poll watchers and county election board members.

But at a combative Fulton County board meeting the week before the election, Adams made clear that she wasn’t going to let the judge’s rulings stop her from continuing her campaign. Despite the county’s lawyer telling her that the certification rule she had pushed had been stayed, she argued that it had actually not been, citing her lawyers. “I’ve learned how the system works — or at least how it was supposed to work,” Adams said. “I’ve learned how sometimes it doesn’t work as the law requires, right here in Fulton County.”

Mollie Simon contributed research and Andy Kroll contributed reporting.

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.

In public remarks, former President Donald Trump has repeatedly made unfounded claims about the threat of widespread voting by “illegal aliens” and noncitizens in the 2024 election.

Away from the spotlight, though, at least one Republican National Committee official is telling volunteer poll watchers a completely different story: that such voting is close to impossible.

In a private Oct. 29 training session for poll watchers in Pennsylvania, an RNC election-integrity specialist told volunteers not to worry about noncitizen voting in the 2024 election because the electoral system had safeguards in place to prevent illegal votes.

ProPublica obtained a recording of the training session. The RNC official’s comments have not been previously reported.

Watch Footage From an RNC Election Training Session (Obtained by ProPublica)

The RNC official’s assurance contradicts statements made by Trump and his Republican allies warning about “illegal aliens” casting ballots this year and potentially swinging the election in favor of Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.

“It is good to see the RNC official recognizing the truth, in contrast to the many lies about noncitizen voting coming from Trump and his allies,” said Rick Hasen, a professor and election-law expert at the UCLA School of Law. “It would be even better for the officials to say it publicly.”

The RNC official who led the training session and a spokesperson for the RNC did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to ProPublica that Democrats were “pushing for non-citizens to vote and influence the future of our country,” adding, “President Trump and the RNC will continue the fight to secure tomorrow’s election so that every American vote is protected.”

Voting by noncitizens is illegal under federal law and it almost never happens. State and federal elections require voters to be U.S. citizens. Government election officials from both parties have emphasized that there are protections in place across the country to prevent noncitizens from casting a ballot.

Yet that hasn’t stopped Trump and some of his most high-profile supporters from making unfounded claims that noncitizens are registering and voting in large numbers this year. “THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS,” Trump posted on Truth Social in September. Other prominent Trump supporters, including billionaire tech investor Elon Musk and House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, have also amplified unfounded claims about Democrats seeking to “import” such voters.

But on the ground, Trump’s own party, at least in the important battleground state of Pennsylvania, is undercutting those dark visions of illegal voting. During the Oct. 29 training session, Joe Neild, a member of RNC’s election integrity team in the state, said such a scenario is nearly impossible.

A participant in the training session asked Neild about the potential for noncitizens to cast votes in the election and what poll watchers could do to stop them.

Neild replied that, in Pennsylvania, undocumented people can’t legally register to vote and so they would not be included in the list of eligible voters used at voting precincts, known as poll books.

Here is the exchange:

Training participant: “I have two questions. The first one is: How do you know if they are illegal aliens or not, like, when they’re voting, as far as what you were explaining with the ID? And if they’re from another country it was OK as long as they had an ID. How do you know if they’re illegal aliens? How can you stop that?”

Neild: “Well, if they’re illegal aliens, they’re not going to be inside the poll book. Because if they’re illegal aliens, they’re not going to be able to register to vote, because they’ll need a driver’s license number or a Social Security number.

“And since the recent litigation in the years past, you do have — to be able to get a driver’s license here in Pennsylvania, you have to show proof of citizenship. So that is one way that they will not be able to get a driver’s license.

“And then you have to be — since they’re illegal, they’re not going to be able to get a Social Security number either.”

Three election-law experts reviewed the exchange between Neild and the poll-watcher trainee. All of them said that Neild’s description of the law and the safeguards in place against noncitizen voting were accurate.

Adam Bonin, a lawyer in Philadelphia who practices election law, said Neild gave an accurate description of Pennsylvania law and the safeguards against noncitizen voting there. Bonin said Neild’s comments were “absolutely consistent” with what Pennsylvania’s secretary of the commonwealth, Al Schmidt, a Republican, has said about preventing noncitizen voting.

"As has been the case before, Trump has local experts on his team who know what the law is here in Pennsylvania and who understand the reality of how our elections work,” Bonin said.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School and an expert on voting rights who worked in the Obama and Biden administrations, said he applauded Neild for using factual information in his training session. Levitt added that he was not surprised to hear Republican volunteers raising fears of noncitizen voting given Trump’s campaign rhetoric.

“There’s been a very effective effort to misinform,” Levitt said. “But I’m glad that when push comes to shove and it comes time to really get training, they’re being set straight.”

In addition to the registration hurdles Neild pointed out, Levitt explained that there are clear incentives to discourage noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections. Criminal penalties can include a hefty fine and prison time as well as deportation and losing the ability to become a U.S. citizen in the future. What’s more, Levitt added, the very act of voting creates a clear and obvious paper trail, making it that much easier for law enforcement to bring criminal charges for illegal voting.

“Every once in a blue moon you see noncitizens showing up on the rolls,” he said. “It’s usually by mistake because it’s just not worth it, and they’re gonna get caught, guaranteed.”

Levitt said that he only wished the factual information given out by the RNC at the grassroots level was also reaching the party’s presidential nominee. “It sounds like the former president should be sitting in on some sessions with the people training his poll watchers,” Levitt said.

Do you have information about the Trump campaign or voting irregularities that we should know? Andy Kroll can be reached by email at andy.kroll@propublica.org and by phone or Signal at 202-215-6203.

by Anjeanette Damon, photography by Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica

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For months, Venezuelan migrants had been arriving in Denver with nowhere to go. At first, they came in groups small enough to escape notice by most. A few immigrant aid groups with connections on the U.S.-Mexico border warned city officials to prepare for more but were ignored.

Then, in December 2022, a busload of about 90 migrants stepped into the freezing night, bound for Denver Rescue Mission. The shelter, which serves the city’s growing unhoused community, was full.

City officials and local aid organizations scrambled, filling a recreation center with beds to keep migrants from sleeping on the streets. A week later, their growing numbers prompted an emergency declaration, freeing up state and federal resources to help. The city filled a second recreation center with beds and transformed a third into an intake center. By the end of the month, city shelters housed nearly 500 migrants.

It was just the beginning.

Most of the migrants crossed into the U.S. in El Paso, Texas, which is an easy bus ride away from Denver compared with Chicago or New York. Through the winter and early spring, they arrived in the high-plains city largely on their own accord, drawn by word of mouth that Denver had jobs.

Then in May 2023, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began sending busloads of migrants to Denver, seeking to score political points by forcing liberal cities to share in what he saw as a burden being foisted on border states.

Mike Johnston became Denver’s mayor two months later. An ambitious politician with big ideas and a flair for poignant speeches, Johnston was a fluent Spanish speaker who had been principal of a high school with mostly immigrant students. He was determined to do right by the people arriving in his city, the “newcomers,” as the city took to calling them. If Abbott thought he was sending a “plague” to “somehow destroy” Denver, Johnston said, the city would prove the migrants’ arrival to be the opposite. He believed that with a little help getting settled, they would fuel Denver’s economy and enrich its culture as generations of immigrants had before.

As Johnston mobilized the city to care for the newcomers, he was also grappling with a growing unhoused population. More than 5,800 people were experiencing homelessness; many lived in downtown encampments. Johnston had declared a state of emergency on his first day in office, and promised to house 1,000 people by the end of 2023.

But by the following January, Denver was feeling the full weight of being a welcoming city. More than 300 migrants a day were rolling into Denver, just over 4,000 were living in shelters and hundreds more were sleeping on the street. The city had spent $42 million to help them, with no sign of meaningful alternatives from the federal government. And with record numbers of asylum seekers arriving at the border, it seemed likely more would make their way to Denver. Local newscasters called it a crisis. Aid workers reported flaring tensions between migrants and the unhoused at food banks and shelters.

This was the moment that Monica Navarro and her family arrived.

She and her partner, Miker Silva, had just $10 between them. But because Denver wasn’t leaving migrants without support, the couple and their two children, ages 13 and 9, were quickly given a free room at the Comfort Inn. They could stay for six weeks. The city hoped that would be enough for the family to find their own housing, either in Denver or elsewhere. Navarro and Silva had no idea how they would support themselves, but they were grateful for the help and determined to make it on their own.

“We came here to make a new life, not so much for ourselves but for our daughters,” Navarro said.

Tim Rogers, a Denver native, was riveted by media coverage of the arriving migrants. The stories focused not just on what the mayor was spending, but on how the community was rallying to support newcomers. Residents delivered food, knitted winter hats and even opened spare bedrooms to them.

Watching these families shuttled into hotels and shelters, Rogers couldn’t help but think about his own decade-long battle with homelessness. He had nothing against the migrants and grasped their plight in a way only someone who’s lived on the streets can. But he had spent years on a waiting list for housing assistance. He still had friends living on the streets. And he couldn’t reconcile how the city would spend so heavily on the newcomers when its homeless population had long been desperate for that kind of help.

“It ain’t fair,” he said. “We got guys doing what they’re supposed to do, seeing their case managers and trying to get housing. If they ask to get a pair of shoes they get a big runaround.”

Even Johnston wondered how long the city could keep it up. At the end of 2023, hundreds of migrants who had timed out of the shelters had erected a sprawling tent encampment, where families with small children were living in the dead of winter. Under mounting political and humanitarian pressure, he organized a city effort to disband the camp and in one day got all of the migrants sheltered again.

But as Johnston touted the city’s accomplishment to reporters, two more buses pulled up with more newcomers in need of help.

“‘It was like, ‘Will there ever be an end?’” Johnston told ProPublica. “That was a moment where, even when we were creating heroic solutions, we weren’t sure how sustainable they would be.”

Denver’s mayor Mike Johnston believes the city has a duty to care for its newcomers. A Sanctuary City

Colorado was once openly hostile to immigrants. English-only and show-me-your-papers laws were strictly enforced. Businesses faced stiff penalties for hiring undocumented workers, and immigration officers routinely raided restaurants, farms and factories across the state.

Then, about 15 years ago, immigrant rights activists pushed back, organizing campaigns to shield migrants from the raids and galvanizing support to repeal the anti-immigration laws. The state’s Latino population grew by 25% in the last decade. Activists organized immigrants and residents alike to support pro-immigration policies. Over the next decade, Denver adopted some of the most progressive protections in the country. Local police are barred from cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement on civil deportations or detainers, and undocumented migrants can’t be arrested based on their status. During the Trump administration, churches and community aid groups formed networks to host refugees and protect people from deportation.

Both the community and Denver’s largely Democratic elected leaders were proud of its reputation as a sanctuary city (they prefer the term “welcoming city”). When Abbott began busing migrants to Denver, they weren’t about to be cowed.

But the newcomers weren’t like past immigrants, who typically chose a destination based on the advice of family or friends who had established lives in the U.S. and could help with a job and place to stay. Such people arrived in immigrant neighborhoods and agricultural towns without drawing much attention and with most everything they needed.

The Venezuelans had instead been driven from their country in overwhelming numbers by the almost complete collapse of the economy, arriving conspicuously by the busload and without a network to put them on a path to self-sufficiency. The Biden administration lifted pandemic-era restrictions on border crossings for such asylum-seekers with no federal plan for their resettlement during the years-long wait to have their cases heard.

As a result, they ended up concentrating in a few cities. Denver was one of a handful of places where the number of new migrants commanded an exceptional and visible government response. Taxpayers had to step in for missing family and federal government support, a dynamic that seemed to harden public opinion against immigration in other Colorado cities and the rest of the country.

And in many ways, Denver was in no position to take in thousands of new residents. Rents are high; housing prices have soared; and the job market is tighter than in many U.S. cities. The newcomers needed far more than the city had set aside to help its existing residents contend with those realities.

Since Denver opened the first emergency shelter, it has provided assistance — from a bus ticket to another city, to six months of free rent — to nearly 43,000 migrants at a cost of $76 million. That’s in addition to the $155 million the city is projected to spend on Johnston’s program to shelter the unhoused swept from downtown encampments.

“Cities have now had to air their dirty laundry, that they've never figured out how to deal with their unhoused population. They've never figured out how to properly serve their undocumented population,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “It's unfortunate that these communities end up sort of pitted against each other, rather than us having the bigger conversation of ‘how do we make sure that housing is accessible for all people and affordable for all people?’”

Monica Navarro and Miker Silva on a Sunday, their one day off each week. “We Migrants Did Not Come To Be a Burden for You”

Navarro and Silva met years ago at a party in the Venezuelan state of Miranda. They fell in love and built a life together but never married. Their hometown of Cua wasn’t far from the beach, where they would picnic and wade in the warm Caribbean Sea. She did promotions for well-known brands and he worked as a bricklayer. Their first child died as an infant. They had two more daughters — whose names are tattooed over Navarro’s heart — before the country’s economy collapsed. Once it did, everything they needed to do to raise their girls became impossible. Hyperinflation put buying food, diapers and medicine out of reach. When a clinic offered free sterilization to women, Navarro decided to go even though she still wanted a son.

“It was very difficult to sustain a child in Venezuela,” said Navarro, whose dark eyes and warm smile are framed by a cloud of curly hair. “There were no diapers. There was no milk. The little children got too sick. So I decided not to have any more babies.”

In 2018, they left for Peru, but after five years the economy there also turned sour. They decided to follow the millions of others on the journey to seek asylum in the United States: making the treacherous hike through the Darién jungle, encountering militias who stole everything, clinging to the roof of a train through Mexico. Penniless at points along the way, Navarro sold candy on the streets. She watched over her daughters as they slept on the ground outside gas stations. But Navarro knew they were among the lucky ones. She had passed the bodies of migrants, including children, who had died attempting to reach America.

As the family traveled, Navarro searched social media for a good place in the United States to settle, using terms such as “jobs,” “good apartments,” “good economy.” She watched TikTok videos from migrants who had successfully settled in Denver and decided that’s where her family would go.

Instead of attempting to slip across the border illegally, the family followed the Biden administration’s guidance to use a smartphone app called CBP One to make an appointment to enter the United States and file an asylum claim. They crossed the border at Calexico, California, and were immediately eligible for Social Security cards and work authorization because they had used CBP One. Other asylum-seekers who didn’t use CBP One typically have to wait six months.

The couple didn’t have friends or relatives to turn to for help as past immigrants had, but they received critical assistance from an array of other sources. An immigrant aid group paid to fly the family to Denver, where the city set them up in a shelter and paid the fees for their work authorization cards. Volunteers helped them fill out the seven-page applications written in English.

They were in a safe and stable place for the moment. But they only had six weeks to find work, otherwise they would end up on the streets as they’d seen happen to so many others. “Many of them ran out of time and slept in the cars, or you saw them leaving the hotel and looking for a tent to sleep,” Navarro said.

After a week at the shelter, Silva met a construction worker at Popeye’s who threw the family a lifeline: a spot for Silva on his crew. It wasn’t a steady job but it delivered something as important as income. Local nonprofits were providing rent assistance to migrants who had a proof-of-employment letter. Silva got one from the lead contractor, ensuring his family’s rent would be covered for six weeks.

In March, the family moved into a two-bedroom apartment in a sprawling complex of 1970s low-rise buildings in Aurora, a suburb just outside Denver. The lawns were well kept, and the managers were diligent about the rules. They once fined Navarro for putting a grill on her porch. Most of the neighbors were immigrants. Navarro’s daughters had good schools to attend. The rent was $1,800 a month.

Silva and Navarro rearrange their apartment to make space for their daughters’ beds. Monica brushes Sheleska’s hair as she eats breakfast before leaving for school. Sheleska smiles from the bus as she heads to school.

The quiet apartment complex in Aurora bore no resemblance to the fabricated picture Donald Trump would paint of their new hometown. During the presidential debate in September, the Republican presidential nominee described Aurora as overrun by Venezuelan prison gangs, making the city a focus of anti-immigrant furor. Local officials described Venezuelan gang crime in the city as concerning but isolated. The most excitement Navarro had seen at her complex was when a neighbor accidentally set her kitchen on fire.

Once settled, she tapped into a network of community members who were helping migrants. Through Facebook, she found free furniture for the apartment: a charcoal sofa, a beanbag chair, an oversized mirror in the living room and bookshelves that hold brightly colored flowers. She also befriended two women – members of the Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church — from the Facebook groups. Janice Paul would send odd jobs their way. Susie Pappas would drive Navarro to food banks when Silva’s checks didn’t cover the bills.

“They are my angels,” Navarro said.

When the six weeks of rent assistance ran out, the couple had difficulty meeting their expenses. Silva had fairly steady work with the man he had met at Popeye’s, but Navarro’s work authorization card had been lost in the mail. Even with Pappas’ help battling the federal agency in charge of replacing it, the process was dragging on. Navarro grew anxious over her inability to help support her family.

Then, the man stopped paying Silva. He looked for a new job but finding one wasn’t as easy as TikTok had led them to believe.

Silva networked with their immigrant neighbors and stood outside hardware stores hoping to be picked up. Paul helped him write a resume and submit job applications. The family fell behind on their electricity bill. And then their rent. In August, Paul lent the couple $1,000.

Johnston insisted that expediting work authorization and matching migrants with employers was key to moving newcomers off city assistance. On paper, jobs abound: The region’s employment website lists 4,800 more openings than applicants. But Silva’s experience didn’t reflect Johnston’s rhetoric.

Silva also wasn’t having much luck in Denver’s “shadow economy” of cash jobs, which had supported immigrants before the newcomers’ arrival. It seemed saturated by the sheer number of new arrivals. Migrants without work authorization huddled in Home Depot parking lots and stood at intersections washing windshields for tips. Abbott’s buses exacerbated this. He only sent migrants who weren’t yet eligible for work cards.

Navarro was grateful for “the support and the love” she found in Denver, but she didn’t migrate to the city to rely on the government or the kindness of strangers.

“We migrants did not come to be a burden for you,” she said.

In August, the family caught a break. Three weeks after Pappas wrote U.S. Rep. Jason Crow’s office asking for help with Navarro’s work authorization, a new card landed in her mailbox.

Shantal and Navarro visit a food bank with their friend Susie Pappas. “I Wish I Was The Mayor. I’d Switch It All Around”

A blue canvas fishing chair in the corner of Rogers’ sunny apartment is a reminder of his old life on the streets of Denver. A reminder to keep doing the hard work of staying sober.

Since becoming housed, Rogers has built new routines. He still rises early, but now he makes coffee in his own kitchen and from the couch organizes his day with local TV news playing in the background. Sometimes he visits his mother. Other days, he’s with his daughter and grandson — relationships built anew after his drinking put them on pause.

Rogers, a slight man with wiry muscles built over decades of manual labor, moved into the apartment just before migrants from Venezuela began rolling into Denver. He watched the city mobilize to keep migrants sheltered and fed in a way it never had for him or his friends.

“I’m sorry to say it, I know we’re all human, but to me it ain’t fair,” he said.

“Back in our day, you’d go up to a cop and he’d say, ‘We got a place for you,’” meaning jail, Rogers said. “They never threw us on a bus and took us to a motel.”

Rogers looks out the window of his new apartment in Denver, which he feels is too big for him.

Rogers grew up with well-to-do parents, who divorced when he was young. His drinking started early. But he almost always held down a job — at a lube shop or as a machinist making rifle scopes. He lived with his mother for a long time, but his drinking was hard on her and he felt it was best to leave.

Rogers’ time on the street runs together in his mind and he has difficulty putting dates to significant events in his life. But he estimates he spent more than a decade living outside. For a long while, he slept in what he called “the cubby” — a concrete entryway on the side of a historic mansion turned office building near City Park. To avoid bothering the office workers, he left before sunup and returned after sundown. But the owner of the building turned out to be kind, leaving food and plastic bags to keep Rogers’ belongings dry.

The cubby was near his “office,” Ready Man day labor on Colfax Avenue.

“I built that hospital — well, helped build it,” he said, pointing to St. Joseph’s, which was under construction from 2012 to 2014. Rogers ran a jackhammer, cutting down concrete floors and carrying the pieces out in a wheelbarrow. After a day of hard labor, he’d return to his bed on a sidewalk.

First image: Rogers walks his dog, Cloud, along a path near his new home. Second image: Rogers spent years on a crew building St. Joseph’s Hospital while living in his “cubby” two blocks away.

Rogers was well known to downtown outreach workers, one of whom put him on the waiting list for a housing voucher. He spent years going to required check-ins, but according to eligibility assessments, Rogers was never quite vulnerable enough to qualify.

In February 2022, his caseworker presented a different option: an ice fishing tent at a safe camp run by a nonprofit. There, he became friends with Ian Stitt, the camp manager, who would help put him on the road to sobriety.

Rogers kept working. He also kept drinking — often with his buddies sitting around in canvas fishing chairs — until Stitt found him in such a stupor he called paramedics to take him to a detox center. Rogers blew a .40, a blood alcohol level that could kill a person less accustomed to drinking.

This was Rogers’ rock bottom. His sobriety didn’t happen all at once, but he took medication to reduce cravings and talked to a therapist regularly. Unexpectedly, other doors opened.

“Come on, you’ve got a meeting,” Stitt told Rogers one morning at the camp.

“Well, I’m getting kicked out, I guess,” he thought as he followed Stitt.

It wasn’t bad news. Federal pandemic relief money had funded more vouchers than usual, and Rogers was getting one. His excitement was mixed with self-doubt.

“I thought, ‘Knowing me, I’ll screw this up, too,’” he said.

Housed and sober, Rogers volunteers on Friday nights at the Network Coffee House, where Stitt is now the executive director. He serves hot brew to people living on the streets, including some of his old “sidekicks” from his unhoused days. There’s Patrick, who Rogers worked with at Ready Man and who still lives outside. Another friend has an apartment but can’t afford food on his disability checks.

“Did you check in on Jimmy?” Rogers asks Stitt as he changes a coffee filter. Jimmy is one of Rogers’ “sidekicks” from the safe camp. He, too, got a voucher and beat an addiction, but had started using again, Rogers heard. Stitt says he hasn’t had a chance to catch up with Jimmy.

It’s tough for Rogers to see his friends still in need.

“I wish I was the mayor,” he said. “I’d switch it all around.”

First image: People gather at the Network Coffee House in downtown Denver on a chilly October evening. The nonprofit opens to the unhoused community five days a week. Second image: Amy Beck, an advocate for Denver’s unhoused community, volunteers at the Network Coffee House. Rogers volunteers at the Network Coffee House on Friday nights, serving coffee to visitors. “It Was Not Sustainable”

As the staggering number of buses rolled into Denver last winter, nearly overwhelming the city’s shelters, Johnston put his hope for more resources in an immigration and border security reform bill in Congress. He wanted three things: faster work authorization so migrants could be self-sufficient; more money for cities responding to the crisis; and a system that would distribute asylum-seekers across the country, instead of concentrating them in a few cities.

But Trump, hoping to campaign on the crisis, successfully pressured GOP lawmakers to kill the measure. Denver was on its own.

Johnston called a news conference to announce that in order to afford his migrant resettlement efforts, he’d have to make significant budget cuts: reduced hours at recreation centers, closed motor-vehicle offices, cuts to recreation programming and elimination of the city’s flower-planting program. Fighting back tears, Johnston implored the community not to blame the newcomers for the budget cuts.

“I want it to be clear to Denverites who is not responsible for this crisis that we’re in: the folks who have walked 3,000 miles to get to this city,” he said. “They have asked for nothing but the ability to work and support themselves.”

But Denver was about to roll up its welcome mat. In March, a video surfaced of Johnston’s political director imploring a group of migrants at the city’s intake center to leave Denver. The city would pay for bus tickets. “The opportunities are over,” the staffer said.

About a week later, Johnston announced that arriving migrants would get a bus ticket to a new city or 72 hours in a shelter. Gone was the 42-day stay in a hotel. City representatives traveled to El Paso to spread the word: Denver was no longer offering long-term shelter and housing. The city had already begun closing its hotel shelters.

“We were to the point where we are out of shelters. We are out of space. We are out of staff. We are burning through cash to keep the shelters open and running. And it was not sustainable,” city spokesperson Jon Ewing said.

Johnston was acknowledging the city couldn’t continue to house thousands of people indefinitely. But he wasn’t abandoning the effort entirely. Instead, he came up with a plan to provide more services to a smaller number of migrants. The 850 in this new program would have their rent and living expenses covered for six months — not six weeks. They’d also get English classes and job training.

He didn’t call it a surrender, though some of his critics did. Instead, he framed it as an evolution to a more sustainable program — one that other cities could replicate.

“We can't solve this for the whole country” by taking in more newcomers than the city is able to support, Johnston told ProPublica. “But we can help figure out a system that could work for the whole country if we all adopted it.”

By summer, it was still too early to tell whether Johnston’s new resettlement program was any better than the city’s initial approach. Participants were just starting their English classes and job training. And now migrants arriving in the city for the first time had much less support. Outside city hall, there were signs that while Johnston was supporting a small number of people, the burden of aiding new arrivals shifted to others in the community.

On Mondays, aid workers like Amy Beck would gather on the lawn outside city hall to serve food and provide clothing to the unsheltered. Migrants would show up, too. Some would try to snag produce or baked goods without standing in line. Shoving matches had ensued over bags of donated clothes. The tensions worried Beck.

“I spend a lot of time peace-making because it is so important to me that Denver remain peaceful over this topic,” Beck said.

But as the city dialed back its resources for migrants, Beck was left to catch those who fell through the gaps — both newcomers and the unhoused. Migrant families no longer eligible for shelter space called her looking for a place to sleep. She has unhoused friends who just missed a shot at moving inside with the city’s help because they weren’t in a camp about to be swept.

“Everybody wants off the street,” she said.

First image: A hotel previously used to house newly arrived migrants to Denver. By September, the city had closed all of its migrant shelters. Second image: Makeshift shelters outside the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless location in downtown Denver. “It’ll Get Better”

At the end of July, Johnston invited more than 100 people to a luncheon at city hall to thank them for supporting the newcomer response. Some had fed and housed migrants. Some had put on legal clinics for work authorization and asylum applications. Some had raised money for rental assistance. As the mayor celebrated their hard work, he had the bearing of someone taking a victory lap. Invitations to the event claimed incorrectly that “none” of the newcomers were living on the streets. But some advocates felt painting a “perfect picture of things” ignored the people who still needed help.

The number of migrants arriving in Denver has slowed to a trickle since the Biden administration cracked down on the number of asylum seekers entering the country. Those who do arrive have no dedicated shelter. The city closed the last one in September. Others trying to establish roots in Denver were facing eviction after rental assistance had run out. More than 1,700 people have moved out of encampments and into shelter or housing thanks to Johnston’s program for the unhoused, but nearly four times that number still need help.

Johnston acknowledged that some of the unhoused who had struggled on the city’s streets for far longer had reason to feel forgotten amid Denver’s migrant response. “There is a very fair outcry from folks to say, ‘There are many of us suffering in this condition and we need to fix all of it.’ And we agree with that,” he said.

“Of course the work is far from over,” Johnston said. “We have families here that are scraping through every day to pay the rent and get their kids into school. But I feel like we are meeting the challenge. And for that I’m incredibly proud.”

Rogers and Navarro are among those “scraping through.”

Rogers continues the hard work of maintaining his sobriety, visiting a therapist and staying connected with family. He’d like to return to work eventually, but the day labor he used to rely on isn’t an option. Under the terms of his voucher, if he earns money, he must contribute a percentage toward rent. Day labor isn’t stable enough to hold up his end of the bargain. Although he sometimes wonders whether he’s competing with migrants for work, he doesn’t resent anyone’s hustle for a job.

“We’re all human,” he said. “It’ll get better.”

Less than three weeks after she got her work card, Navarro landed a job through an employment agency that caters to immigrants. She works the night shift at a dessert factory. The agency takes about 30% of her wage. She comes home in the morning exhausted and sore in time to get her girls off to school. But she is finally earning money to support her family. Within a month, Silva also had a job at the factory.

“It’s going to be better next year,” she said.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Gerardo del Valle, ProPublica, and Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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This video 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.

Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez has served four terms as the top law enforcement officer in Val Verde County, Texas, a sprawling rural territory that shares 110 miles of border with Mexico. It is a position his father dreamed of holding before he died at the age of 51. Martinez says his father, a staunch Democrat, raised him and his nine siblings to serve their community.

Martinez describes himself as “Catholic and pro-life and pro-gun.” He’s also committed to his father’s party. His relationships in Val Verde County have repeatedly propelled him into office, thanks to support from both Democrats and Republicans. But this year, Martinez’s victory is less certain because some in Val Verde County don’t think he’s tough enough on immigration — even though securing the border is not a local sheriff’s responsibility.

This short documentary follows Joe Frank, along with his brothers David and Leo Martinez, as they wrestle with the tensions around immigration in Del Rio, nearly three hours west of San Antonio. Martinez’s run for office provides a glimpse at how new patterns of immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border have coincided with, if not driven, changing attitudes among voters who live there. Some communities once considered Democratic strongholds have begun to turn red, a trend bolstered by Republican efforts to court Latino voters.

Those efforts are changing politics in Val Verde County. A political action committee called Project Red TX has backed a candidate named Rogelio “Roger” Hernandez to run against Martinez. Since 2018, the PAC has been recruiting and financially supporting Republican candidates in local races across majority Latino border counties. This year, it has backed 50 local candidates, including three in Val Verde County. Hernandez’s signs have appeared all over town, with his slogan of “bringing order to the border.”

As border towns become the backdrop of a national immigration debate, how will it shape Del Rio? Watch this pressing short film presented by ProPublica, in partnership with The Texas Tribune, and go deeper by reading this story.

Lisa Riordan Seville, Mauricio Rodriguez Pons, Liz Moughon and Katie Campbell contributed to the production.

Update, Nov. 12, 2024: Joe Frank Martinez was reelected as sheriff of Val Verde County on Nov. 5. His support likely included crossover Republican voters as the county tipped strongly for Donald Trump.

Correction

Nov. 2, 2024: This story originally misstated the direction that Del Rio is from San Antonio. It is west, not south.

by Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, photography by Gerardo del Valle, ProPublica

Leer en español.

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

DEL RIO, Texas — In 2008, Joe Frank Martinez beat a Republican incumbent to become the first Latino elected sheriff along this 110-mile stretch of border. Nearly 16 years later, in mid-September, Martinez stood in front of several dozen voters at the San Felipe Lions Club, having to campaign harder than ever before, and on an issue that wasn’t a factor in his previous elections: immigration.

The 68-year-old Democrat had been in law enforcement for nearly five decades, and save for a little more than a year when he was stationed elsewhere as a state trooper, Martinez told the audience, he’d spent them ensuring the safety of residents in Val Verde County. He had mastered politics in this place nearly three hours west of San Antonio, where residents prided themselves on voting for the person they liked best instead of a party. He’d handily won each of his elections and ran unopposed four years ago when the county tipped for Donald Trump.

Since then, it had been a tumultuous time, Martinez acknowledged to those assembled in the cafeteria-like space. They’d gone through a pandemic. They’d contended with a winter storm that had left hundreds of Texans dead. And then, he said, “We faced the Haitians.”

He didn’t explain what he meant, and he didn’t have to. The memory of nearly 20,000 primarily Haitian immigrants — the equivalent of more than half of the population in Del Rio — arriving at the border almost all at once and held under the international bridge for two weeks in September 2021 has been seared into the minds of residents here. Many feared it could happen again and questioned whether Martinez was tough enough on immigration.

Immigration is not part of Martinez’s job. But in Del Rio, like in other majority Latino border communities across the country, the issue is high on voters’ minds and is disrupting long-standing political allegiances. The barrel-chested lawman with a booming voice has experienced those disruptions firsthand. In a community where about 80% of residents are Latino, some had begun painting the Democratic sheriff as soft on immigration and falsely accused him of aiding unauthorized crossings.

The majority Latino border town is highly dependent on government jobs, many of which are tied to military readiness and immigration enforcement. (Liz Moughon/ProPublica)

Sometimes the attacks happened openly. When he pulled immigrants who had arrived at the banks of the river out of the water to keep them from drowning, Republicans accused him of helping people enter the country illegally. Some residents, including supporters, criticized Martinez on social media when they learned he would be endorsed by the Bexar County sheriff based in San Antonio who, during a speech at the Democratic National Convention, called Trump self-serving and accused the former president of making border sheriffs’ jobs harder when he killed a bipartisan border security deal earlier this year.

Other times, some of those who turned against Martinez did so without saying a word. A sign he placed at a longtime friend’s house had been replaced by one with his opponent’s slogan about “bringing order to the border.”

Standing in front of the crowd gathered at the Lions Club, Martinez shared a dizzying array of charts he’d brought along to respond to his critics. Things were in order at the border. Val Verde was seeing some of the lowest numbers of immigrants crossing in years, even lower than in neighboring counties where sheriffs had gone as far as to allow militias to operate.

As for whether the Haitian migrant episode could happen again — the question he knew was looming in people’s minds — he reminded them that it was federal authorities, not his office, who controlled border crossings.

He was as upset as they were with President Joe Biden’s response, and he’d been very public about saying as much. He hoped that when it came to the race for sheriff, they would judge him on how he’d handled the responsibilities assigned to him. How he’d served Val Verde, like his father before him, as a lawman, neighbor, husband and father; that who he was outweighed his affiliation with any party.

This time, however, he wasn’t sure the pitch would work.

“I want to try to keep my campaign at the local level,” Martinez said in an interview.

“I might be blind to the fact that it can’t be done.”

From left: Leo, Joe Frank and David Martinez reminisce about the family’s history and growing up only a couple of minutes from the border in a home where immigrants would often come by asking for a meal or temporary work. Shifting Politics

It’s long been understood that the Latino vote is neither monolithic nor reliably Democratic. Places such as Del Rio, a deeply Catholic border city whose economy depends heavily on law enforcement jobs, have always held conservative views. Republicans like former President George W. Bush won here by appealing to those views while arguing for a compassionate approach to immigration.

Until recently, the party’s far-right shift on immigration hadn’t managed to make significant inroads in border communities. Conservative assertions about the issue, particularly those that painted immigration as an “invasion,” had failed to resonate with people on the border precisely because they knew better from living there. To them, the border was a fundamental feature of their day-to-day lives and an engine of their economies, not something to be afraid of. A decade ago, the overwhelming majority of immigrants who crossed the border were from Mexico. And the majority of the Latinos living on the United States side of the border had roots in Mexico as well.

That’s changed, as have other immigration patterns at the border, and so have the attitudes of those who live here. Democratic politics have been slow to keep up — at least rhetorically — with those shifts. But Republicans have seized on them to move more voters into their camp. The state’s Republican Party no longer attempts to strike a balance on immigration. In fact, during this presidential cycle, it has gone even further by using the issue as a litmus test for whether it can turn border communities red, not just in their choices for state and federal candidates but for local ones too.

Beginning in 2014, the numbers of Central American families and unaccompanied minors arriving at the border started to increase. The sight of juveniles held in makeshift camps on area military bases stirred political tensions in border communities and beyond. Later, the border became ground zero for Trump’s anti-immigration efforts, which involved separating children from their parents and forcing Central American asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico until they were given a date to appear in U.S. immigration court. Neither of those efforts had a lasting impact on the number of people arriving at the border, but they forced more immigrants to be stuck on the Mexican side for longer periods of time — and disruptions on the Mexican side of the border almost always ripple into the U.S. side.

In an unprecedented effort to help the United States keep immigrants from arriving at the border, Mexico began detaining them and transporting them farther south. It also allowed the United States to turn back Mexican nationals and some Central Americans, but not most other immigrants. When word got out among would-be immigrants in South America, West Africa, China and Haiti, they began arriving in such large numbers that they overwhelmed the border, along with several of the U.S. towns and cities where they ultimately landed.

The thousands of Haitians who arrived in Del Rio three years ago shook the city because it was like nothing people there had experienced in recent history. And like Martinez, a lot of residents here have histories that go back a long way.

The Martinez siblings pose for a family photo during Easter Sunday in 1966. (Courtesy of the Martinez family)

His grandparents migrated from Italy and Mexico more than 100 years ago, attracted by the area’s fertile land and ranches. One grandmother fled instability and violence leading up to the Mexican Revolution. Growing up, Martinez recalls immigrants knocking on the door of his family's home, asking for a meal and temporary work. Sometimes that meant a little less food on the table or that the shed in the backyard got yet another fresh coat of paint it didn’t really need.

Martinez and his nine siblings learned to move easily in two cultures.

“My dad always emphasized to us: We’re in this country, we’re Americans first,” said his brother Leonel Martinez Jr., 67, who runs a binational company that makes leather horse saddles in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, and sells them in the United States. “He also stressed that we should never forget our roots.”

A staunch Catholic and Democrat, the family patriarch looms large in the choices the siblings make. He was active in fighting for equal rights at a time when Mexican Americans were excluded from many activities and did not have a voice in government. He co-founded a civic group to help bring sewer lines, paved roads and mailboxes to his predominantly Mexican American neighborhood; helped elect the city’s first Mexican American mayor; and dreamed of becoming the first elected Hispanic sheriff for Del Rio — a dream he held on to until his death at the age of 51.

Because of him, the brothers are Democrats too, but in varying ways.

Leonel, who wears a goatee and goes by Leo, voted for Barack Obama and then voted twice for Trump, saying he aligns more closely with the latter on the economy and immigration. He believes U.S. policy has become such that it is easier for people from far-off countries to come and stay than it is for Mexicans.

“Why would you do that?” he said. “I mean, if I see my neighbor having a problem, he’s the first one I think I want to help. If I see somebody on the other side of the world that needs help, I don’t know.”

Leo Martinez, who runs a binational factory and describes himself as an ultra-super-conservative Democrat, believes the U.S. needs workers but people need to come in an orderly way. “What we are doing is out of control,” he said. (From left: Liz Moughon/ProPublica, Gerardo del Valle/ProPublica, Liz Moughon/ProPublica)

Another brother, David, was elected four years ago as Val Verde county attorney. The 60-year-old with graying hair is among the more progressive of his siblings. He opposed efforts to prosecute some people seeking asylum and said that as far as he’s concerned, what’s been going on at the border is not an immigration crisis. It’s “a human crisis.” And in responding to it, he said while choking back tears, “We can’t be inhuman. We can’t put our compassion aside.”

Joe Frank, whose given name is Jose Francisco, straddles his brothers’ views. He’s pro-gun, is anti-abortion and has a son who works as a Border Patrol agent. He believes that there should be a path for people to make their case for starting new lives in the United States but that the current system is too chaotic and doesn’t move fast enough to remove those who don’t qualify.

That position had always worked for him among voters because that’s where they seemed to be too — until the Haitian immigrants arrived.

Unfolding Crisis

On a chilly morning in January 2021, Martinez stood at the edge of the riverbank as a rescue boat brought in the body of a 33-year-old Haitian woman. She wore red tennis shoes and blue and white basketball shorts. Her shirt was pushed above her bulging belly. The woman, who drowned while trying to reach Del Rio, had carried twin babies nearly to term.

Martinez was shaken by the loss of three lives all at once. He felt people either didn’t know or didn’t care what was going on at the border.

He began capturing photos on his phone of the crisis he saw unfolding before him: parents with their babies struggling to wade through the Rio Grande and other immigrants who were not lucky enough to survive the river’s currents. There were also the images of a human smuggler who was arrested three times after she kept getting released, young girls traveling alone and a high-speed chase that left eight immigrants dead.

In the months that followed, Border Patrol encounters in the Del Rio sector, which stretches 245 miles along the Rio Grande through Val Verde and two other border counties, doubled from 11,000 that January to nearly 22,000 in April 2021. Frustrated, Martinez wrote his first-ever opinion piece, for USA Today. In it, he called on Washington politicians to visit his county rather than just pass through for a photo opportunity, and he pleaded with them to put their egos aside and pass comprehensive immigration reform.

“If they could stay a few days and see the madness and mayhem going on right now, there’d be no more wasting time trying to decide whether the border situation is a ‘crisis’ or not,” he wrote. “If they could have witnessed my deputies pull a full-term pregnant woman’s body out of the Rio Grande, maybe they could put their differences aside.”

It wasn’t just a humanitarian issue, Martinez explained in an interview on Fox News that month. It was a resource issue. “When I have four deputies working, and three of them are tied up for the majority part of the day, we can’t serve our citizens and our community the way we need to be serving them,” he told the cable news network.

Joe Frank Martinez appeared on Fox News in April 2021 to talk about the resource constraints his sheriff’s office was experiencing. (Via Fox News)

No Washington decision-makers visited. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, however, seized the moment. A loyal Trump supporter and one of Biden’s fiercest critics, Abbott traveled to Del Rio that June to hold a border security summit. He praised Martinez, saying he appreciated “all that he and every man and woman involved in law enforcement are doing, especially to step up and help secure our border.”

The governor described what was happening as an invasion. He then announced that the state would build its own wall and arrest immigrants for trespassing as part of Operation Lone Star, a multibillion-dollar state initiative he’d launched earlier that year. “We are going to do everything we can to secure the border,” Abbott said to a boisterous crowd, “and it begins immediately today right here in Val Verde County.”

But three months later, little had changed.

Immigrants started to arrive in Del Rio by the hundreds, then by the thousands. Instead of being processed and leaving the city almost as soon as they arrived, as they typically did, they waited with Border Patrol-issued color-coded raffle-like tickets for the opportunity to turn themselves over to federal authorities so they could request legal protections, including asylum.

They lay on pieces of cardboard under makeshift tents fashioned from river cane they’d cut from the banks of the Rio Grande. Parents and their children vomited and passed out from dehydration in the triple-digit heat. There were no showers, and only about one portable toilet was available for every 140 people.

The arrival of immigrants in September 2021 overwhelmed the Border Patrol, which directed people to wait to be processed in an area around the international bridge in Del Rio. With nowhere to sleep, many made their own huts with river cane they’d cut from the banks of the Rio Grande. (Jordan Vonderhaar for The Texas Tribune)

Some Del Rio residents asked how they could help, while others called for the immediate deportation of all of the immigrants. One woman fired her revolver in the direction of a group of Haitians, claiming she had panicked.

The swift and sudden arrival of so many immigrants also tested the Martinez family.

When the federal government announced the temporary closure of the international bridge, Leo Martinez called the sheriff, hoping that his brother had information on how long the closure would last. Joe Frank Martinez didn’t know.

While he waited to learn more, Leo Martinez was forced to divert U.S. deliveries of saddles through another international bridge more than 50 miles away, where the driver had to wait upwards of 12 hours to cross. The closure cost the company several thousand dollars in fuel and additional staff time.

“We are pawns in this game that the federal government’s playing,” said Leo Martinez, a self-described ultra-super-conservative Democrat, later adding that much like in a game of chess, border residents are “the ones that you sacrifice up front.”

The Sunday after the bridge closed, David Martinez, the county’s top attorney, was packing for a conference when he got a call from a city official. Abbott wanted police to arrest thousands of immigrants under the bridge for trespassing, and the city official asked if he would prosecute them.

The county attorney didn’t directly say no, but his response left no doubt.

The federal government had created the circumstances that had caused the immigrants to remain there, he told the city official. It had brought in portable toilets and provided some food and water. For police to arrest them, officials needed to make it clear they were no longer allowed on city property. Besides, the county attorney said, the crushing workload on his three-person legal team would inevitably lead to a backlog that would force immigrants to stay in detention longer than is legal. Without proper notice, “I would have been violating people’s constitutional rights by the thousands, and I wasn’t willing to do it.”

Val Verde County Attorney David Martinez believes immigrants continue to play an important role in the country. “We're here because of a country that was more accepting of immigrants and I think that a lot of people in our country, if they truly look at their roots and are honest with themselves, would have to come to the same conclusion.” (From left: Mauricio Rodriguez Pons/ProPublica, Liz Moughon/ProPublica, Liz Moughon/ProPublica)

Two days later, Abbott was back in Del Rio, where he accused Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris of “promoting and allowing open-border policies.” He touted the arrests of immigrants under his state initiative, one that counted work that had nothing to do with the border as part of its metrics for success.

The sheriff stood behind him.

Losing Ground

While on his way to a doctor’s appointment last fall, Joe Frank Martinez got a call from an unknown number. It was a Republican operative inviting him to run on behalf of the other team.

The state’s Republican leaders, including its two U.S. senators, loved him, Martinez recalled the operative telling him. He’d taken positions as conservative as theirs on the issues they cared most about. If he agreed to switch parties, the political action committee would cover his filing fees and help fund his campaign.

He’d certainly had serious differences with Democrats in recent years. The party had changed in ways he didn’t like. But leaving felt too much like a dishonor, not only to his father’s memory, but to his ideals.

He said no.

As part of his efforts to counter the discourse around immigration, Joe Frank Martinez hit the streets, knocking on doors to ask people for their support. In a place where a few hundred votes can make a difference, he knew turnout would be key.

Shortly afterward, the PAC, known as Project Red TX, placed its support behind a 56-year-old police officer named Rogelio “Roger” Hernandez. The Republican challenger was born in Del Rio but had spent his law enforcement career in San Antonio. Hernandez said he was planning to retire and move back to the border city to be near his mom. He couldn’t recall if Project Red TX approached him or if he approached the group.

Project Red TX began to more aggressively target border communities after Trump made gains in the traditionally Democratic strongholds during the 2020 presidential election. The group, which helps elect Republicans in local races in Latino communities, has raised more than $2.5 million. The bulk of that money comes from a political action committee whose biggest donors include Texas real estate businessmen Harlan Crow and Richard Weekley.

This year alone, the group has spent about $370,000 on advertising for about 50 local candidates, primarily in border counties, according to campaign finance reports. Three of the candidates, including Hernandez, are in Val Verde County.

The message seems to be resonating. This year, for the first time in decades, more people voted in the Val Verde County Republican primary than in the Democratic primary — in fact, twice as many did.

Republican Primary Turnout is Rising in Val Verde County

More than 2,000 people voted in Republican primaries in Val Verde County each year Donald Trump appeared on the ballot.

Note: Presidential primary elections shown (Source: Texas Secretary of State. Chart: Dan Keemahill.)

As part of his campaign to bring “order to the border,” Hernandez has promised to secure additional resources for the sheriff’s office.

“I’ll get them better training, better equipment, better vehicles, better everything,” Hernandez said, without offering specifics on how he would meet that promise, saying only “there’s grants out there that you can get.”

Martinez said his office has worked diligently to secure available grants, including those that are designated for border security. Altogether, Val Verde County and the city of Del Rio have received more than $13 million in state and federal grants since 2021, about half of which can be attributed to Operation Lone Star. That exceeds what they got in total the previous 13 years.

“That individual hasn’t lived here in over 30 years, and all of a sudden he shows up in the ninth inning. Come on, give me a break,” Martinez said.

As the race heated up this summer, Wayne Hamilton, a longtime Texas Republican operative who heads Project Red TX, posted a photo of himself and Hernandez on social media. Behind them was a stack of the candidate’s campaign signs. Hernandez was committed to border security, Hamilton wrote, then added, “The incumbent Sheriff was featured in a documentary helping migrants enter the country illegally. It’s time for change.”

Hamilton declined multiple interview requests and did not reply to questions about the race or about which documentary he was referring to. News footage from the 2021 immigration spike shows Martinez extending his hand to help people in the Rio Grande, who had already reached the U.S., safely onto land. He then turned those immigrants over to Border Patrol.

During the summer of 2021, a Fox News camera captured the moment when Joe Frank Martinez helped pull immigrants already in the United States out of the Rio Grande. Republicans later used the image to accuse him of helping people enter the country illegally. (Via Fox News)

“Once you are in the United States, in the middle of that river, I’ve got to protect you,” Martinez said, questioning what people would have said if he hadn’t done so and one of the immigrants had drowned. “It’s a human being at the end of the day.”

The attacks are particularly upsetting for Martinez, who prides himself on having friends from the right and left. Among Martinez’s backers is the Republican sheriff he beat in 2008. “It’s about relationships, something I’ve been building since 1977,” he said.

Some of those relationships turned out to be more fragile than Martinez was aware.

On a recent afternoon in mid-September, Mary Fritz, a fourth-generation rancher and Trump supporter, picked up a sign for his opponent during a meet-and-greet at a local burger restaurant.

Fritz, a petite 62-year-old with weathered skin, and Martinez have been friends for about four decades. She has voted for him every time — even against Republicans.

He’s a good sheriff, Fritz says. She appreciates how he’s readily available and out in the community where constituents can talk to him and voice their concerns. “I just wish he would have pressed the border issue more,” Fritz said as she walked on a patch of the 2,000 acres of desert scrubland that abuts the Rio Grande where her family raises sheep and goats.

Martinez didn’t hold back his frustration. If voters were willing to disregard his decades of service and judge him on something he had no control over, “God bless them.”

Joe Frank Martinez patrols in Val Verde County, a sprawling rural territory three times the size of Rhode Island that shares 110 miles of border with Mexico. (Liz Moughon/ProPublica) Broken System

When politicians, government bureaucrats or reporters come to Del Rio and ask the sheriff to show them whether the billions of dollars spent by successive presidents have made the border more secure, he piles them into his white Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck and drives them down to the so-called wall so that they can see for themselves.

“All this right here,” Martinez says, pointing to an expanse of land where ranches once stood about a mile north of the Rio Grande, “used to be little ranchitos that went all the way to the river. I think the U.S. government made something like 13 millionaires when they purchased all this property.”

In their place, there is now a jumble of fencing.

The black wrought iron panels about 14 feet tall were erected during the administration of former President George W. Bush, who was trying to funnel immigrants into areas where Border Patrol could more easily catch them. Martinez thinks those worked.

The Trump administration tore down some of them to build sections twice as high of the “big, beautiful wall” he promised voters. But Trump left office before completing the project. Biden then came in and immediately paused construction, pledging to not build “another foot” of wall. In Del Rio, that meant that workers left stacks of construction materials behind and gaps between the panels of fencing wide enough for tractor-trailers to drive through them. The Biden administration attempted to close those gaps by hanging flimsy wire mesh that is already sagging in some areas from people climbing over it.

An area west of the port of entry in Del Rio where multiple administrations have built and torn down panels of fencing. On the left are parts of the 14-foot-tall fence erected under George W. Bush. On the right are taller bollards built under Donald Trump. Pieces of the fence are connected with mesh put in place during Joe Biden’s administration.

For Martinez, all of this reflects a political system bent on fighting over border security rather than achieving it.

“Do we really have a system that’s broken, or do we have a political machine that’s broken?” he said. “The far right is pushing and the far left is trying to push back, but what happened to working together?”

Answering his own question, he later said, “We’re going to continue with this mess probably long after I’m dead and gone.”

Update, Nov. 6, 2024: Joe Frank Martinez was reelected as sheriff of Val Verde County on Tuesday. His support likely included crossover Republican voters as the county tipped strongly for Donald Trump.

Gerardo del Valle of ProPublica contributed reporting. Dan Keemahill of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune contributed data reporting and research. Lexi Churchill of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune contributed research.

Correction

Nov. 2, 2024: This story originally misstated the direction that Del Rio is from San Antonio. It is west, not south.

by Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

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

Former President Donald Trump’s social media company outsourced jobs to workers in Mexico even as Trump publicly railed against outsourcing on the campaign trail and threatened heavy tariffs on companies that send jobs south of the border.

The firm’s use of workers in Mexico was confirmed by a spokesperson for Trump Media, which operates the Truth Social platform. The workers were hired through another entity to code and perform other technical duties, according to a person with knowledge of Trump Media. The reliance on foreign labor was met with outrage among the company's own staff, who accused its leadership of betraying their “America First” ideals, the person said.

The outsourcing to Mexico helped prompt a recent whistleblower letter from staff to Trump Media’s board that has been roiling the company.

That complaint, reported by ProPublica last month, calls for the board to fire CEO Devin Nunes, a former Republican congressman. The letter alleges he has “severely” mismanaged the company. It also asserts the company is hiring “America Last” — with Nunes imposing a directive to hire only foreign contractors at the expense of “American workers who are deeply committed to our mission.”

“This approach not only contradicts the America First principles we stand for but also raises concerns about the quality, dedication, and alignment of our workforce with our core values,” the complaint reads.

A Trump Media spokesperson said the company uses “two individual workers” in Mexico. “Presenting the fact that [Trump Media] works with precisely two specialist contractors in Mexico as some sort of sensational scandal is just the latest in a long line of defamatory conspiracy theories invented by the serial fabricators at ProPublica,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson declined to answer other questions about the company’s Mexican contractors, including how much they’ve been paid, how many have been used over time and how their hiring squares with Trump’s promises to punish firms that send jobs outside of the U.S. The Trump campaign did not respond to questions.

For a company of its prominence, Trump Media has a tiny permanent staff, employing just a few dozen people as of the end of last year, only a portion of whom work on the Truth Social technology.

Trump Media’s hiring of Mexican coders also prompted frustration within the staff, the person with knowledge of the company said, because they were perceived by staff to not have the technical expertise to do the work.

On its homepage, Truth Social bills itself as “Proudly made in the United States of America. 🇺🇸”

The homepage of Truth Social displays “Proudly made in the United States of America.” (Screenshot highlighted by ProPublica)

Both as president and in his campaign for a second term, Trump has criticized companies that send jobs abroad, particularly to Mexico. If elected, he has pledged to “stop outsourcing” and “punish” companies that send jobs abroad.

For example, Trump recently threatened agricultural machinery giant John Deere with tariffs if it went through with plans to move some of its manufacturing to Mexico.

“I’m just notifying John Deere right now, if you do that, we’re putting a 200 percent tariff on everything you want to sell into the United States,” Trump said.

He has made a similar threat against automakers building cars in Mexico, demanding they hire American workers and manufacture domestically.

“I'm not going to let them build a factory right across the border,” Trump promised, “and sell millions of cars into the United States and destroy Detroit further."

Trump owns nearly 60% of the social media company, a stake worth around $3.5 billion at the stock’s Friday closing price — more than half of the former president’s net worth.

The results of the election are widely seen as a major factor in the future value of the company. As the Nov. 5 election draws closer, Trump Media’s stock price has fluctuated wildly even as little or nothing has changed in the company’s actual business, which generates scant revenue. The stock closed Friday down 40% from its recent peak on Tuesday. Despite that drop, it has still nearly doubled since the beginning of October.

One Trump Media board member, Eric Swider, offered a defense of relying on foreign labor in a statement to ProPublica from his lawyer.

“President Trump maintains an America First policy, which includes prioritizing American workers. Trump Media, however, is a global multi-media company. For a global multi-media company to utilize subcontractors, which in turn may utilize coders located in a foreign country, is a practice common to the industry,” the statement said. “Such global multi-media companies like Trump Media would have no right to control the employment decisions of its subcontractors, which may employ workers in a multitude of different countries in addition to the United States.”

Swider, a businessman based in Puerto Rico, serves on the board alongside better known figures such as Donald Trump Jr. and Linda McMahon, the former Trump cabinet member who is now co-chair of his transition team.

The outsourcing to Mexico is not the only instance of Trump Media relying on foreign workers. ProPublica previously reported that the company used a foreign firm to source labor in the Balkans.

Nunes, for his part, is quoted in a new book about Truth Social, “Disappearing the President,” boasting about his ability to keep costs down at Trump Media, though he didn’t mention outsourcing.

“Nobody grew as fast as we did. I don't think there's any other example even close to us out there, especially with as little money as we spent,” Nunes said. “Don't forget that. We built this for a fraction of what these other companies were built for.”

Do you have any information about Trump Media that we should know? Robert Faturechi can be reached by email at robert.faturechi@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 213-271-7217. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

Mica Rosenberg contributed reporting.

by Anjeanette Damon and Nicole Santa Cruz

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

A new centralized voter registration system in the key swing state of Nevada is getting its first real-world test in a major presidential election, after practice runs in recent months showed significant problems in transferring data accurately.

State officials said the problems, which included assigning voters to the wrong precincts and mislabeling voters as “inactive,” have been addressed and that they expect Tuesday’s vote to go smoothly.

But Cari-Ann Burgess, the former interim Washoe County registrar who has been on administrative leave since September facing charges of insubordination and poor job performance, said that she believes the shortcomings have not been fully addressed. Burgess said she plans to file a whistleblower complaint soon asking for federal oversight of Nevada’s future elections. (Washoe County, home to Reno, is the largest county to attempt the data transfer this year.)

Burgess said she has no direct knowledge of what her office has done since her last day at work on Sept. 25, but believed the issues were so daunting, they likely couldn’t be fixed by the county’s understaffed registrar’s office before early voting began on Oct. 19.

The Voter Registration and Election Management Solution, mandated by the Nevada legislature, centralizes voter registration data from 16 of the state’s 17 counties and promises to vastly improve the efficiency and security of elections. Even Burgess acknowledges how badly the state needed to modernize its voter registration system.

Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, ran in 2022 on a promise to secure Nevada’s elections and rebuild voter confidence following efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to cast doubt on the 2020 election.

The new voter registration system, which is separate from the machines used to vote, better tracks who is eligible to submit a ballot. Aguilar was determined to have it in place for the 2024 general election. It went live eight weeks before early voting began.

But the launch, which involves transferring massive voter datasets from antiquated county systems to the new centralized one, has strained understaffed county clerk offices already contending with their routine general election responsibilities.

Mock elections in the spring uncovered enough issues that clerks pressured Aguilar’s office to delay the “go-live” date until after the June primary. That gave the state enough time to address 20 issues revealed by the test runs. But it also meant the system’s first use in a real election comes during a contentious presidential contest in which one side is laying the groundwork to challenge unfavorable results.

“This is a project that we cannot get wrong,” Aguilar’s deputy in charge of elections told lawmakers in early 2024. “It has to be done right the first time.”

Three election experts contacted by ProPublica said they weren’t in a position to judge whether Nevada made the right call in pushing out such a significant project in an election year. While there’s “never a good time” to change systems, one said, it appears that Nevada has put significant time and resources into the transition. Another said success is largely dependent on how well-staffed and funded local election offices are. A recent report by the Institute for Responsive Government found other states implementing such systems experienced similar problems.

Nevada has spent $30 million on the project, which was launched in early 2023. The secretary of state’s office worked closely for months with each county participating in the new system and has provided significant ongoing support during the transition.

Early and mail-in voting has been underway since Oct. 19 with only isolated reports of balloting errors. In the last presidential election, nearly 90% of Nevada voters cast their ballot before Election Day. A lack of widespread voter complaints in the weeks since early voting began confirms that the new system is working as intended, said Gabriel Di Chiara, Nevada’s chief deputy secretary of state.

But that hasn’t quieted Burgess, who says incorrect voter data wound up in the new system.

Burgess alleges the state rushed implementation, potentially creating a litany of problems as ballots are cast. State and county officials both denied the allegations and provided documentation indicating deadlines for critical data transfers were met across the state. They did, however, acknowledge they continued to discover problems before voting began and were working to correct them.

Burgess said testing of the new system revealed errors affecting tens of thousands of voters in Washoe County, including voters assigned to the wrong precincts and active voters labeled as inactive or vice versa. If a voter was incorrectly marked inactive, they wouldn’t receive a mail-in ballot but could still vote in person. She also said the new system lacks safeguards meant to keep noncitizens off the voter rolls. The secretary of state’s office denied that allegation, noting the new system is no different than the old system in that regard.

“I’m incredibly worried that this is going to hurt this election,” Burgess said. “But I’m also worried that people who should not be voting are voting.”

Burgess said Washoe County didn’t have time to ensure that information for each of the county’s 384,000 voters had transferred properly to the new system. She acknowledged that her office was working tirelessly to correct the errors when she left and said she did not have firsthand knowledge of the progress made after she was placed on leave.

Clark County, home to Las Vegas, is using the same vendor as the state but will wait until next year to transfer its data to the new system.

Burgess is the only county election official to publicly raise such concerns. Other clerks have criticized the timeline of the transition but haven’t reported problems with the data transfers. After persuading Aguilar to delay the launch until after the primary, the clerks promised to “work their butts off” to get the system ready for the general election, said Douglas County Clerk-Treasurer Amy Burgans. Clerks conducted four mock elections this year to ensure that “the integrity of the system was where it needed to be,” she said.

“It’s a frustrating time to switch to a new system when we are a purple state that really makes big decisions when it comes to a presidential election,” Burgans said. “The clerks have put the time and effort into ensuring that the integrity of the election is intact.”

She said the new system is instrumental in catching voters who attempt to vote in multiple counties.

Jim Hindle, the clerk-treasurer for Storey County, which has a population of about 4,100, also said he doesn’t have reservations about the new voter registration system. “It has been working fine for the last two weeks. We’ve had nothing come up that would cause us to lack any confidence,” he said.

The rollout hasn’t been free of issues, however. In Nye County, when voters arrived for the first day of early voting, the wrong election popped up on check-in kiosks, prompting the clerk to postpone opening the polls. In Lyon County, roughly 1,100 voters were given the wrong ballot because their precinct was placed in an incorrect district for the State Assembly. Although the problem was discovered this week, it dated back to the legacy system and wasn’t caused by the new system, state officials said. The error will only affect two legislative races and will have no impact on the presidential election.

While it wasn’t ideal to transition to a new system during a presidential election year, errors identified during testing were anticipated, identified and addressed, Di Chiara said. He added that there were risks associated with continuing to use the counties’ legacy voter management systems. Washoe County’s vendor, for example, had stopped supporting software used by the voter registrar’s office and fixes over the years had been piecemeal.

During February’s presidential primary election, some voters who hadn’t cast a ballot were incorrectly labeled by the legacy system as having voted. That mistake did not affect the vote totals. And during local primary elections, some voters were mailed the wrong ballots because of errors updating their addresses following redistricting. They received correct ballots before Election Day.

“The lesser of the two risks was getting everyone on the new system and providing them support,” Di Chiara said.

Mock elections conducted before the system went live resulted in a list of 20 issues the state and its vendor had to resolve. Di Chiara refused to provide a description of the issues, citing statutes that say documents on the inner workings of election systems are confidential. But he provided ProPublica a progress report from Aug. 23, which indicated 18 of the 20 issues had been fixed by the go-live date. The remaining two were resolved before ballots were mailed to voters, he said.

Despite the fixes, messy data in Washoe County’s legacy system made its way into the new system. For example, Washoe County’s legacy system had labeled apartment buildings as commercial addresses. As a result, voters in those buildings were marked inactive in the new system. A county spokesperson said that problem was fixed before ballots were mailed. But it was just one of a multitude of data errors that forced the registrar’s staff to review individual records to ensure voters were properly categorized. “Issues identified during the rollout and extensive testing periods were addressed and resolved prior to the 2024 general election,” a Washoe County spokesperson said.

Efforts to lay the groundwork for election challenges in key states by the Trump campaign, the national Republican Party and their allies has been well documented. The implementation of Nevada’s new voter management system is already on the Republican National Committee’s radar. The party filed a public records request for documents associated with the mock elections run to test the new system. A common tactic by those trying to undermine confidence in voting is to amplify or exaggerate human errors that are routine in running elections, democracy protection experts say.

Burgess’ decision to go public follows a tumultuous 10 months as the chief elections officer for Washoe County, which she said culminated in her being forced out by county management. She also said she plans to file a lawsuit contesting what she sees as her probable termination after the election.

Under the strain of transferring to the new system, Burgess said she missed a federal deadline to clean the rolls of inactive voters. During a meeting to discuss it, she offered to step down to her former position of deputy registrar but was told to take stress-related leave. When she tried to return to work with a doctor’s note, she was given a letter from the county manager detailing a number of performance issues, including the missed deadline, insubordination for prematurely telling her staff about her leave and excessive use of overtime. She was also accused of trying to help several churches set up ballot drop-off boxes, which aren’t allowed under state law. Burgess said she was simply helping them with third-party ballot collection, which is legal in Nevada.

“You have been insubordinate, and your ability to competently carry out your duties is in question,” Brown wrote in a letter Burgess provided to ProPublica. “Washoe County will allow you to remain on paid leave until the completion of the general election, after which these issues will be reviewed and decisions about your continued employment will be determined.”

Burgess said she sought the job of registrar to help restore voter confidence in elections. Burgess is a registered nonpartisan. She said she voted for Trump this year as well as for U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen, a Democrat. She said she investigated every complaint, even those from some of the county’s most radicalized election deniers, and did her best to keep operations transparent.

Craig Silverman contributed reporting.

by ProPublica

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With just days to go before Election Day, political coverage is everywhere. At ProPublica, we avoid horse race reporting and focus on telling stories about deeper issues and trends affecting the country.

Here are some stories from the last year about issues that are important to voters.

Abortion

Candace Fails visits the grave of her 18-year-old daughter, Nevaeh Crain, who_ _died after trying to get care for pregnancy complications in three visits to Texas emergency rooms. (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica)

When the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1970s-era ruling that guaranteed access to abortion throughout the country, states quickly enacted a patchwork of laws restricting the procedure. In all, 13 states now have a total ban on abortion.

ProPublica has thoroughly examined the impact of those laws over the last two years. Doctors have told ProPublica that confusion and fear about the potential for legal repercussions are changing the way their colleagues treat pregnant patients who have complications.

• In Tennessee, we followed one mother, Mayron Hollis, for a year after she was denied an abortion because of the state’s newly enacted ban. She had become addicted to drugs at 12, and the state had already taken away several of her children. Doctors were concerned that this latest pregnancy, which had implanted in scar tissue from a recent cesarean section, could kill her. The story and visual narrative follows Hollis’ struggles to get care following the birth of her daughter.

• In Georgia, Amber Thurman took abortion medication to end a pregnancy but died of an infection after her body failed to expel all of the fetal tissue, a rare complication that the suburban Atlanta hospital she went to was readily equipped to treat. But earlier that summer, the state had made abortion a felony, and with Thurman’s infection spreading, doctors waited nearly 20 hours before operating. When they finally did, it was too late. Thurman was the mother of a 6-year-old son. U.S. senators are examining whether the hospital broke federal law by failing to intervene sooner, and an official state committee concluded that her death was preventable. Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care declined to explain their thinking and did not respond to questions from ProPublica. Communications staff from the hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Georgia’s Department of Public Health, which oversees the state maternal mortality review committee, said it cannot comment on ProPublica’s reporting because the committee’s cases are confidential and protected by federal law.

• Most abortions in the U.S. take place in the early weeks of pregnancy, and roughly 63% are done using medication. We recently examined how abortion pills work and answered common questions about them.

• In Texas, Josseli Barnica is one of at least two pregnant women who died after doctors delayed emergency care. She’d told her husband that the medical team said it couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped. The doctors involved in Barnica’s care at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest did not respond to multiple requests for comment on her case. In a statement, HCA Healthcare said, “Our responsibility is to be in compliance with applicable state and federal laws and regulations,” and said that physicians exercise their independent judgment. The company did not respond to a detailed list of questions about Barnica’s care.

• In a second Texas case, 18-year-old Nevaeh Crain, who was six months pregnant, visited two emergency rooms a total of three times after experiencing abdominal cramps and other troubling symptoms. The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without evaluating her pregnancy. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave. On Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before offering a procedure called a dilation and curettage to remove the fetus. Hours later, Crain was dead. Doctors involved in Crain’s care did not respond to several requests for comment. The two hospitals, Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas and Christus Southeast Texas St. Elizabeth, declined to answer detailed lists of questions about her treatment.

Immigration

Delmis Jiménez stands on top of the international bridge that divides Ciudad Juárez and El Paso as her family waits for U.S. customs officers to allow them into the United States. Her husband died in a fire at an immigration detention facility while attempting to reach the U.S. eight months earlier. (Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

As the number of migrant encounters at the U.S. border has surged under the Biden administration, immigration has become a top issue for voters. ProPublica has recently explored how this increase differs in key ways from past surges. In recent years, more of the people crossing the border have been turning themselves in and claiming asylum rather than trying to avoid arrest.

• The U.S. faces a shortage of skilled workers, and immigrants have helped fill that gap. Even areas critical to national security, such as Navy shipbuilding, are struggling to find enough qualified workers. So undocumented workers have stepped in as contractors, but that means they get fewer protections if something goes wrong on the job.

• Cities and towns far from the southern border are facing new challenges with the arrival of significant numbers of immigrants. In the small town of Whitewater, Wisconsin, several hundred immigrants from Nicaragua have arrived — mostly looking for low-paying jobs in factories and farms. Police say the biggest challenge has been strained resources and immigrants driving without licenses — not a wave of crime, as falsely claimed by former President Donald Trump.

• For decades, lobbyists from the business community shaped immigration legislation and moderated the contours of the debate. But in the Trump era, businesses see far more risk in advocating for these policies, a change that’s made it even harder to get to consensus on immigration reforms, even as businesses in a variety of sectors say they need more immigrant workers.

Economy

Tire technician Juan Cantu works at Tire Town Auto Service in Picayune, Mississippi, last year. Customers there saw price hikes as the shop dealt with supply chain problems, the rising cost of raw materials and trouble finding workers. (Daniella Zalcman, special to ProPublica)

The condition of the U.S. economy is the top concern for voters, according to multiple polls. Across the world, inflation — the rate at which prices increase — surged beginning in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, brought on by supply chain disruptions, surges in demand for goods and services, and the war in Ukraine.

• Last year, ProPublica looked at inflation through the lens of the humble automobile tire, tracing the raw materials from a rubber plantation in Southeast Asia to a repair shop in Mississippi to try to answer the question: Why are prices so high?

• For a time in 2022, a cadre of ocean carriers were charging exorbitant, potentially illegal, fees on shipping containers stuck because of congestion at ports, another reason the price of goods rose so quickly. That congestion has now eased considerably.

• Surveys also suggest housing costs are a primary concern to many Americans. While most economists agree that the lack of housing supply and a decade of low interest rates have fueled increases in housing prices and rents, there may be another factor at work: the use of algorithms to determine the price of your rent through the company RealPage.

• Democrats, including Ohio’s Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Marcy Kaptur, face tough reelection fights in states that have shifted swiftly toward Trump, despite investments from the Biden administration in reviving manufacturing through the Inflation Reduction and CHIPS acts. National Democrats often overlook how important the place you live can be: Even if your own finances are secure, if you look out your window and see your city or town struggling, you believe you are, too. Some academics have referred to this as a sense of “shared fate,” and it could be a powerful force in this election, especially in small cities in the industrial Midwest.

Health Care

Dr. Debby Day said her bosses at Cigna cared more about being fast than being right: “Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,” Day said. (Andrea Bruce for ProPublica)

Fourteen years after the Affordable Care Act passed, more Americans have health care coverage, but the system itself remains as broken and fractured as ever. ProPublica has investigated various players in the health care system, from doctors accused of wrongdoing to insurers refusing to cover lifesaving treatments. We’ve also extensively explored mental health treatment this year and how, despite rising needs, America’s health care infrastructure can’t provide meaningful support.

• When companies such as Aetna or UnitedHealthcare want to rein in costs, they turn to EviCore, whose business model depends on turning down payments for care recommended by doctors for their patients. EviCore counters that it develops its guidelines for approvals with the input of peer-reviewed medical studies and professional societies, and that they are routinely updated to stay current with the latest evidence-backed practices. It said its decisions are based solely on the guidelines and are not interpreted differently for different clients.

• For Americans searching for mental health providers, many of the lists compiled by insurance companies are misleading or outdated. It’s a “ghost network” that leaves patients frustrated and unable to get timely care.

• Health insurer Cigna tracks every minute that its staff doctors spend deciding whether to pay for health care. One doctor who used to work for the company, Debby Day, said her bosses cared more about being fast than being right: “Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,” Day said. In written responses, Cigna has said its medical directors are not allowed to “rubber stamp” a nurse’s recommendation for denial. In all cases, the company wrote, it expects its doctors to “perform thorough, objective, independent and accurate reviews in accordance with our coverage policies.” In 2023, ProPublica revealed how Cigna rejects claims from patients without even reading them. In written responses about this program, Cigna said the reporting by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum was “biased and incomplete.” Cigna said its review system was created to “accelerate payment of claims for certain routine screenings,” Cigna wrote. “This allows us to automatically approve claims when they are submitted with correct diagnosis codes.”

Education

Angelica Zavala, a West Phoenix home cleaner and mother of two, considered sending her daughter to a private school using vouchers before deciding her neighborhood school was the better option. (Ash Ponders, special to ProPublica)

Few issues ignite as much passion as educating America’s schoolchildren. ​​School boards and districts are facing battles over school vouchers, book bans and COVID-19 — conflict that is slowly changing how the U.S. educates kids, leaving them on different and unequal paths at school.

Many states led by conservative legislators and governors have pushed a rapid expansion of school voucher programs that promise to allow students and their parents to put state money toward the school — private or public — of their choice.

• The model for voucher programs in the country has been Arizona, which now offers vouchers to all students. But the state has spent so much money paying private schoolers’ tuition that it’s now facing hundreds of millions in budget cuts to critical state programs and projects.

• A ProPublica analysis shows that low-income families are using the system far less than wealthier families, in part because the location of private schools and the additional costs for transportation, tuition and meals makes using the vouchers more difficult.

• School choice advocates are intent on expanding the availability of vouchers to fund private education at the expense of public schools, but they’re facing a surprising pocket of resistance: Some conservative, rural residents are fighting the program, fearing their tax dollars will flow from the only public school in their area to benefit people in cities.

• Texas, however, remains one of the biggest holdouts against a school voucher program in which state tax dollars could be used to pay for private schools. Gov. Greg Abbott aggressively campaigned against members of his own party who did not support voucher programs. This fall, Abbott may finally get the votes needed to pass a bill, fulfilling a decadeslong wish of conservative donors in the state.

• We told the story of Courtney Gore, a Texas school board candidate who won her seat after claiming on the campaign trail that children were being indoctrinated. She later disavowed her party’s far-right platform after finding no evidence of such efforts.

• After COVID-19 school closures ended, absenteeism nearly doubled. With state and federal governments largely abdicating any role in getting kids back into classrooms, some schools have turned to private companies for a reimagined version of the truant officer.

Foreign Policy

A relative holds the body of a 4-year-old Palestinian girl who died of malnutrition. Earlier this year, two U.S. government bodies concluded that Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, but Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. (Ashraf Amra/Anadolu/Getty Images)

The now yearlong war between Israel and Hamas has left tens of thousands dead, and Gaza is facing massive shortages of food, water and medical care. The war has sparked infighting in the Democratic Party and debates within the State Department over how best to manage the situation given the U.S.’s longtime trade and military ties to Israel. Both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have signaled their desire to end the war soon, though what will get both sides to agree isn’t entirely clear.

• The U.S. has long supported Israel with weapons. In January, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew urged Washington to give thousands more bombs to the Israelis because they have a “decades-long proven track record” of avoiding killing civilians, a request that came, at the time, amid the deaths of at least 25,000 Palestinians in the war.

• The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza. But Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding.

by Eli Hager

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

When Donald Trump was president, he repeatedly tried to raise the rent on at least 4 million of the poorest people in this country, many of them elderly or disabled. He proposed to cut the federal disability benefits of a quarter-million low-income children, on the grounds that someone else in their family was already receiving benefits. He attempted to put in place a requirement that poor parents cooperate with child support enforcement, including by having single mothers disclose their sexual histories, before they and their children could receive food assistance.

He tried to enact a rule allowing employers to pocket workers’ tips. And he did enact a rule denying overtime pay to millions of low-wage workers if they made more than $35,568 a year.

Trump and his vice presidential pick JD Vance have been running a campaign that they say puts the working class first, vowing to protect everyday Americans from an influx of immigrant labor, to return manufacturing jobs to the U.S., to support rural areas and families with children and, generally, to stick it to the elites.

Critics reply by citing Project 2025, a potential blueprint for a second Trump presidency that proposes deep cuts to the social safety net for lower-income families alongside more large tax breaks for the wealthy. But Trump, despite his clear ties to its authors, has said that Project 2025 doesn’t represent him.

Still, his views on working-class and poor people can be found in specific actions that he tried to take when, as president, he had the power to make public policy.

ProPublica reviewed Trump’s proposed budgets from 2018 to 2021, as well as regulations that he attempted to enact or revise via his cabinet agencies, including the departments of Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services, and also quasi-independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Social Security Administration.

We found that while Trump was in the White House, he advanced an agenda across his administration that was designed to cut health care, food and housing programs and labor protections for poor and working-class Americans.

“Trump proposed significantly deeper cuts to programs for low- and modest-income people than any other president ever has, including Reagan, by far,” said Robert Greenstein, a longtime federal poverty policy expert who recently published a paper for the Brookings Institution on Trump’s first-term budgets.

Get in Touch

No matter who wins the presidential election, ProPublica is planning to deepen its reporting on poverty issues, from housing to child support to Social Security benefits and Medicaid. We will be covering how the incoming administration handles federal poverty policy, as well as state and local social services agencies and private companies that profit off of the poor. Are you a current or former federal employee with insight into federal poverty programs? Are you someone with stories to pitch us on any of these topics? Reach out directly at Eli.Hager@propublica.org.

Trump was stymied in reaching many of these goals largely because he was inefficient about pursuing them until the second half of his term. According to reporters covering him at the time, he’d been unprepared to win the presidency in 2016, let alone to fill key positions and develop a legislative and regulatory strategy on poverty issues.

He did have control of both the House and Senate during his first two years in office, but he used his only shots at budget reconciliation (annual budget bills that can’t be filibustered by the opposing party) to cut taxes for the rich and to try to repeal Obamacare. By 2019, there wasn’t much time left for his cabinet agencies to develop new regulations, get them through the long federal rulemaking process and deal with any legal challenges.

Trump and his allies appear focused on not repeating such mistakes should he win the White House again. Republican leaders in Congress have said that this time, if they retake majorities in both chambers, they’ll use their reconciliation bills to combine renewed tax cuts with aggressive cuts to social spending. Meanwhile, Trump would likely put forward new regulations earlier in his term, in part so that legal challenges to them get a chance to be heard before a Supreme Court with a solid conservative majority he created.

If he relies on his first-term proposals, that would mean:

• Cutting the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, by billions of dollars.
• Rescinding nearly a million kids’ eligibility for free school lunches.
• Freezing Pell grants for lower-income college students so that they’re not adjusted for inflation.
• Overhauling and substantially cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, colloquially known as food stamps, in part by defining people with assets exceeding $2,250 as not being poor enough to receive aid and reducing the minimum monthly food stamp amount from $23 to zero.
• Eliminating multiple programs designed to increase the supply of and investment in affordable housing in lower-income communities.
• Eliminating a program that helps poor families heat their homes and be prepared for power outages and other energy crises.
• Shrinking Job Corps and cutting funding for work-training programs — which help people get off of government assistance — nearly in half.
• Restricting the collective bargaining rights of unions, through which workers fight for better wages and working conditions.

Trump also never gave up on his goal of dismantling the Affordable Care Act, which disproportionately serves lower-income Americans. He cut in half the open-enrollment windows during which people can sign up for health insurance under the ACA, and he cut over 80% of the funding for efforts to help lower-income people and others navigate the system. This especially affected those with special needs or who have limited access to or comfort with the internet.

As a result of these and other changes, the number of uninsured people in the U.S. increased in 2017 for the first time since the law was enacted, then increased again in 2018 and in 2019. By that year, 2.3 million fewer Americans had health insurance than when Trump came into power, including 700,000 fewer children.

President Joe Biden has reversed many of these changes. But Trump could reverse them back, especially if he has majorities in Congress.

Perhaps the main thing that Trump did with his administrative power during his first term — that he openly wants to do more of — is reduce the civil service, meaning the nonpolitical federal employees whom he collectively calls “the Deep State.”

This, too, would have a disproportionately negative impact on programs serving poor and working Americans. Agencies like the Social Security Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provide disability and survivor benefits and housing assistance to lower-income families in times of need, rely heavily on midlevel staff in Washington, D.C., and local offices to process claims and get help to people.

Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not respond to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica about whether Trump wants to distance himself from his first-term record on issues affecting working-class people or whether his second-term agenda would be different.

Instead, she focused on Social Security and Medicare, saying that Trump protected those programs in his first term and would do so again. “By unleashing American energy, slashing job-killing regulations, and adopting pro-growth America First tax and trade policies, President Trump will quickly rebuild the greatest economy in history,” Leavitt said.

One new ostensibly pro-worker policy that Trump, as well as his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, have proposed: ending taxes on tips.

Trump officials and Republican politicians have long said that more federal spending on safety net programs is not the solution to poverty and that poor people need to be less dependent on government aid and exercise more personal responsibility.

And working-class voters — especially white men without a college degree who feel that their economic standing has diminished relative to other demographic groups — have joined the Trump movement in increasing numbers. What’s more, some counties that have seen large upticks in food stamp usage in recent years continue to vote for him, despite his attempts to shrink that program and others that people in these places rely on. (All that said, Trump’s supporters are better off on average than the media often portrays them to be.)

Meanwhile, pandemic relief, including stimulus checks, did start during the Trump administration and helped reduce poverty rates. But those efforts were temporary responses to a crisis and were mostly proposed by Democrats in Congress; they were hardly part of Trump’s governing agenda.

Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

Amid a presidential race that has at times focused on forgotten, high-poverty communities — with Vance repeatedly touting his Appalachian-adjacent roots — it is surprising that journalists haven’t applied more scrutiny to Trump’s first-term budgets and proposals on these issues, said Greenstein, the poverty policy expert.

Would Trump, given a second term, continue the Biden administration’s efforts to make sure that the IRS isn’t disproportionately auditing the taxes of poor people? Would he defend Biden’s reforms to welfare, aimed at making sure that states actually use welfare money to help lower-income families?

Trump hasn’t faced many of these questions on the campaign trail or in debates or interviews, as the candidates and reporters covering them tend to focus more on the middle class.

by Emily Green for ProPublica

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TAPACHULA, Mexico — It was Jan. 17 when Nevy de Zelada, a migrant from Guatemala, and her family were walking on the edge of a four-lane highway in southern Mexico in blistering, 100-degree heat. It was the first leg of their journey to the United States, where they hoped to seek asylum. Her 21-year-old son was pushing her paraplegic husband in his manual wheelchair, and the family’s beloved dog was nestled on her husband’s lap. Earlier that day, they had crossed the river that divides Guatemala from Mexico on a rickety raft. But her husband’s condition made traveling difficult — he had been shot by gang members — and for now they just wanted to reach the closest city, a place 20 miles north of Mexico’s southern border where they could seek shelter and food.

Then, in broad daylight, a four-door truck sped by and slammed to a halt, blocking the family’s path. “Where are you going? I will help you get there,” one of three men inside yelled. But it wasn’t really a question. Their faces were covered with bandanas, except for their eyes. They wore bulletproof vests with a picture of a Mexican flag and a skull. The men got out of the truck and pointed guns at the family. “You can get in the car the easy way or the hard way,” one said. Zelada, crying, her ankles swollen and clothes soaked with sweat, didn’t try to fight. She and her nephew, son and daughter-in-law squeezed into the truck’s back seat after helping Zelada’s husband into the front. She estimates they drove for 45 minutes, mostly on isolated dirt roads, until they stopped at an abandoned ranch scattered with luxury cars and dozens of terrified migrants locked up in a large pen made for livestock.

“The first thing that came to my mind was my son,” Zelada said. “I had a life — my home, my children — but my son is just starting.

“I said to God, ‘Lord, please help us. Help us get out of here.’”

Mexico has long been known as a dangerous transit country for migrants because of the threat of cartel violence and extortion from immigration agents and police. But through interviews with more than 70 migrants over seven months this year, as well as U.S. and Mexican officials, ProPublica found that a new phase of mass kidnapping for profit has emerged at the country’s southern border that is different in character and scale than what has happened in the past, underscoring how effective Mexican cartels are in adapting their strategies to exploit new policies from Washington.

Along Mexico’s border with Guatemala, organized gangs affiliated with drug cartels have created an industrial-size extortion racket that involves kidnapping large numbers of migrants as soon as they set foot in the country. It is a volume business, one that its victims rarely denounce because of the relatively small ransom amounts and distrust of Mexican authorities. Immigrant advocates and church leaders say the criminal groups have created a virtual dragnet that makes kidnapping the rule rather than the exception.

Immigration has become a top issue for U.S. voters ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election — and a political liability for the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris. In December 2023, amid a record number of border crossings, the Biden-Harris administration sent a delegation to Mexico to push the Mexican government to drastically ramp up immigration enforcement, according to a high-ranking Mexican official with knowledge of the talks.

Mexico’s foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment about the negotiations.

In the months following the December negotiations, Mexico dramatically decreased the number of humanitarian visas it issued to asylum-seekers, which many used to transit the country on the way to the U.S. border, according to government data. Authorities also increased the number of checkpoints to detain more migrants, immigrant rights activists said.

This year through September, Mexican authorities reported a record 925,000 apprehensions, a number that likely includes people caught more than once and many who were only briefly detained.

But Mexico deports just a tiny fraction of the migrants it encounters — less than 2% of total encounters this year resulted in deportations, according to Mexican government data. Limited resources and court decisions restricting Mexico’s right to detain families has hampered the Mexican government’s ability to carry out wide scale returns of migrants to their home countries.

So instead, Mexican authorities are forcibly busing tens of thousands of migrants to southern Mexico, far from the U.S. border, and leaving them there. During the first nine months of this year, Mexico bused over 60,000 migrants from other parts of Mexico to the southern states of Chiapas and Tabasco, more than in all of 2023 and close to double the number bused there in 2022, according to an analysis of Mexican government data. The analysis did not include people bused from those two southern states to elsewhere in Mexico. The data was first reported by Reuters.

With the busing, migrants are circled around inside Mexican territory in a merry-go-round strategy that forces them to repeatedly pay off immigration agents, kidnappers and smugglers.

Migrants walk along a highway in southern Mexico. (Fred Ramos for ProPublica) Migrants pass a checkpoint on a highway in southern Mexico. (Fred Ramos for ProPublica)

It’s “designed to deter migrants by making it harder and even more expensive to get through Mexico,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a D.C.-based think tank, of the busing practice. But the result, he said, “gives organized crime groups a second bite at the apple to extort migrants.”

The busing strategy is also sending migrants back to a region that is increasingly violent, where they face threats not just from organized crime but from authorities. In October, Mexican soldiers opened fire on a tractor trailer just north of Tapachula, killing six migrants, including at least one from Egypt. Mexican authorities vowed to investigate the killings. The uptick in violence coincides with a pitched battle between the Sinaloa cartel and Jalisco New Generation cartel for control of migrant-, drug- and gun-smuggling routes in southern Mexico, sending the homicide rate soaring in the southern states of Chiapas and Tabasco, according to security experts and Mexican government data.

A trip to Mexico’s southern border earlier this year provided a glimpse of how brazen organized crime has become — and how easy it is to make money off migrants. ProPublica interviewed 35 migrants in eight families who were kidnapped trying to make their way over the 20-mile stretch from Ciudad Hidalgo, which borders Guatemala, to Tapachula, the closest nearby city. ProPublica interviewed another 16 migrants in Mexico City who were kidnapped along the same stretch. The victims were from Central America, Venezuela and Colombia and included mothers traveling with babies, elderly people and large families.

A migrant woman shows a photo of the stamp that kidnappers gave her after she paid to be released. She was kidnapped shortly after entering Mexico. (Fred Ramos for ProPublica)

They told nearly identical stories of being ambushed, often by bus and taxi drivers who turned them over to armed men on an abandoned ranch with fighting cocks, where they were ordered to pay a ransom for their freedom. Migrants who weren’t carrying cash, or who weren’t carrying enough of it, were given Wi-Fi and a Mexican bank account number so that they could call their families and ask them to cover the ransom. The kidnapping is so widespread and open that migrants walk around Tapachula with stamps of a bird on their forearms as a sign that they paid the ransom. Many refer to the kidnapping ranch they were brought to as the “gallinero,” or chicken coop.

The mass kidnappings in southern Mexico started in mid-2023 and began picking up by the end of that year, according to immigrant rights activists monitoring the situation. By 2024 — after Mexico and the U.S. entered into the agreement to stop migrants from reaching the U.S. border — nearly every migrant who attempted to cross into Mexico through Ciudad Hidalgo without a smuggler was kidnapped and held on an isolated ranch, they said.

U.S. officials have indicated that they’re aware of the extent of the dangers migrants face in Mexico but they say they cannot interfere with how or whether the government there protects them. Blas Nuñez-Neto, a senior administration official, said in a Spanish-language call with reporters in July that it is “impossible” for migrants traveling by “illegal means” to the U.S. border to arrive without “passing through the cartels’ hands.”

Still, senior U.S. and Mexican officials credit the busing and stepped-up enforcement cooperation between the two governments — coupled with new restrictions on asylum put in place by the Biden administration — with contributing to the dramatic decline in migrants illegally crossing the U.S.’ southwest border. Migrant apprehensions by U.S. Border Patrol have fallen 78%, from around 250,000 in December 2023 to nearly 54,000 in September 2024, U.S. data shows.

White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández said the “administration’s coordination and collaboration with Mexico is incredibly strong, built on mutual respect, shared interests, and common goals.”

A spokesperson for the Mexican president’s office referred questions to the Interior Department, which did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Mexico’s national immigration agency said that it does not receive any economic support from the U.S. for the busing operation and referred questions about the kidnappings to Chiapas’ state prosecutor.

The Chiapas state prosecutor’s unit in charge of investigating crimes against migrants said it has not received any complaints about individual or mass kidnappings in the stretch between Ciudad Hidalgo and Tapachula. The unit, however, said that it had facilitated the rescue of nine migrants from Nepal, India and Bangladesh who had been victims of a suspected kidnapping in Tapachula.

Enrique Vidal Olascoaga, director of the Fray Matías de Córdova human rights center in Tapachula, said that in September Mexican authorities raided and closed down one of the principal kidnapping ranches in the region. But, he said, others continue to operate, and migrants are still regularly kidnapped and extorted trying to reach Tapachula.

A young girl holds a dove at a basketball court where migrants shelter in the town of Huixtla, Chiapas. (Fred Ramos for ProPublica) First image: Children play at a park in Tapachula, Chiapas, the first city many migrants arrive at in Mexico. Second image: Sisters from El Salvador show the sandals they wear while they walk for miles in an effort to leave southern Mexico. (Fred Ramos for ProPublica) Ransom in Bulk

Trapped at the ranch on that January day, Zelada worried she’d made a fatal mistake. Her family wasn’t wealthy, but back in Guatemala, her husband had sold bananas out of a truck and they had never wanted for “a plate of beans,” she said. Then, in October 2021, members from the powerful street gang Barrio 18 attacked her husband because he couldn’t pay the gang’s extortion fees, shooting him and leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Still, the family stayed — until gang members started harassing her 19-year-old daughter. Zelada’s family scraped together money for her daughter to travel with a smuggler to the U.S. on her own while the rest of the family fled two months later. Zelada didn’t think traveling through Mexico could be any more dangerous than the life they’d left behind.

But as Zelada and her family found themselves held hostage on the abandoned ranch hours after entering Mexico, she questioned their decision to make the risky journey north. Most of the migrants on the ranch were Spanish speaking, but a handful of others appeared to be from China, and she saw the kidnappers using a translation app on their cellphones to communicate with them, she said. One guard told them that if they turned over all their cash, they would be released to continue on their way. Zelada and her relatives gathered all the money they had brought with them — $2,700 — and handed it over.

Isabel, a Colombian woman who agreed to be identified only by her middle name, said that as soon as she crossed Mexico’s southern border in May with her husband and two young children — a 3-year-old and an 11-month-old — two motorcycle taxi drivers offered to take her family to Tapachula. She realized they’d been tricked when the drivers approached a dilapidated ranch. She tried to run, but gunmen forced her back. The guards used two-way radios to communicate with one another and monitored the hostages’ phones for any signs they were trying to take photos, she said. She and her family were fed rice twice a day for three days while she waited for her mother-in-law in Venezuela to scrounge together the ransom demanded by the kidnappers.

Most migrants said the kidnappers had a set rate: $75 per person, half-price for kids under 10. But the exact price depended on the day, the circumstances and the victims’ nationality — Cubans and Haitians were charged more because it is assumed they have family in the U.S., and Chinese migrants were also quoted a higher price because they tend to have more money, according to immigrant activists who work in the region. Still, the kidnappings in southern Mexico are a volume business. By charging even relatively small amounts of money and moving migrants through as quickly as possible, the criminal groups make enormous profits with little risk.

Heyman Vázquez, a Catholic priest working in southern Mexico, has been alarmed by the new phenomenon of mass kidnappings. (Fred Ramos for ProPublica)

Heyman Vázquez, a Catholic priest who works in Ciudad Hidalgo, along the Guatemalan border, said criminal groups in southern Mexico have gone so far as to set up checkpoints along the main highway in an effort to identify migrants. “The authorities are involved,” he said about the kidnappings, adding that there’s a blurry line between the authorities charged with protecting migrants and the cartels exploiting them. “You never know who you’re talking to,” he said.

The state of Chiapas’ anti-kidnapping unit said it had no information about Mexican authorities being involved in migrant kidnappings.

Migrants crossing Mexico have long faced horrific acts of violence in their efforts to reach the U.S., mostly in northern Mexico. In 2022, 12 Mexican police officers were charged with murdering 16 Guatemalan migrants, including one who was identified as working with the smugglers, whose bodies were found shot and incinerated south of the U.S. border.

No one knows exactly how much money Mexican criminal groups make off of migration, including smuggling and kidnapping. According to a 2021 congressional statement from the acting director of Homeland Security Investigations, U.S.-bound human smuggling and related criminal activities produce an estimated $2 billion to $6 billion in yearly revenue. But most officials believe those profits have surged as the numbers of migrants passing through Mexico soared in recent years — a record 2.5 million people arrived at the southern U.S.border in fiscal year 2023.

Dana Graber Ladek, chief of mission for the International Organization for Migration in Mexico, said cartels see migrants purely as “opportunities to make money at a very grand scale.” She said because of this, some of the migrants that the organization has encountered in Mexico describe the country as a “second jungle” after the dangerous stretch of rainforest, called the Darién Gap, between Colombia and Panama that has become a major thoroughfare for migrants trying to reach the U.S.

Nature is one of the main threats in the Darién Gap, she said. “In Mexico,” she said, “the main threat is people.”

The dozens of migrants who spoke to ProPublica after being abducted in southern Mexico said that in most cases, after paying the ransom, the kidnappers arranged for them to be driven to Tapachula. They said they were squeezed into sedans — sometimes 10 or more people in a car — and dropped at a corner store near one of the city’s main plazas.The kidnappers told them the stamp on their forearm would protect them from being kidnapped again in the Tapachula area. But that protection lasted only as long as they stayed in town.

After handing over all their money, Zelada’s family was held at the ranch for less than half an hour, she estimates. Still, she said, “it felt like an eternity.”

She and her family then spent two months trying to apply for asylum in Mexico before giving up and joining a group of around 2,000 other migrants walking north as part of a caravan. From March through July, Zelada and her family walked more than a thousand miles through sweltering summer days, sleeping outside in parks and beside train tracks, until they were finally able to cross into the U.S. using a U.S. government mobile app called CBP One. They are currently living in South Carolina while they apply for asylum.

But for other migrants, the kidnapping in southern Mexico derailed their lives. Jennifer, a 23-year-old Honduran woman who asked to be identified only by her first name, said that her daughters, ages 4 and 5, were traumatized after being held at gunpoint for four hours in a livestock pen. When kidnappers dropped the three of them off in Tapachula after paying the ransom, they found a spot at a migrant shelter. But she and her children are too terrified to leave. Seven months later, they are still living in the shelter. Smugglers have offered to ferry the family to the U.S. border, but she doesn’t have enough money to pay. They are scared to move forward on their own for fear of being kidnapped again, but also can’t fathom returning to Honduras. “You can’t trust anyone,” she said.

Help ProPublica Reporters Investigate the Immigration System

Update, Nov. 5, 2024: This story has been updated to include comments from the prosecutor’s office in Chiapas, Mexico.

by Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana

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Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.

Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.

The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.

Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.

By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.

Hours later, she was dead.

Fails, who would have seen her daughter turn 20 this Friday, still cannot understand why Crain’s emergency was not treated like an emergency.

But that is what many pregnant women are now facing in states with strict abortion bans, doctors and lawyers have told ProPublica.

“Pregnant women have become essentially untouchables,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a health law and policy professor emerita at George Washington University.

Texas’s abortion ban threatens prison time for interventions that end a fetal heartbeat, whether the pregnancy is wanted or not. It includes exceptions for life-threatening conditions, but still, doctors told ProPublica that confusion and fear about the potential legal repercussions are changing the way their colleagues treat pregnant patients with complications.

In states with abortion bans, such patients are sometimes bounced between hospitals like “hot potatoes,” with health care providers reluctant to participate in treatment that could attract a prosecutor, doctors told ProPublica. In some cases, medical teams are wasting precious time debating legalities and creating documentation, preparing for the possibility that they’ll need to explain their actions to a jury and judge.

Dr. Jodi Abbott, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston University School of Medicine, said patients are left wondering: “Am I being sent home because I really am OK? Or am I being sent home because they’re afraid that the solution to what’s going on with my pregnancy would be ending the pregnancy, and they’re not allowed to do that?”

There is a federal law to prevent emergency room doctors from withholding lifesaving care.

Passed nearly four decades ago, it requires emergency rooms to stabilize patients in medical crises. The Biden administration argues this mandate applies even in cases where an abortion might be necessary.

No state has done more to fight this interpretation than Texas, which has warned doctors that its abortion ban supersedes the administration’s guidance on federal law, and that they can face up to 99 years in prison for violating it.

ProPublica condensed more than 800 pages of Crain’s medical records into a four-page timeline in consultation with two maternal-fetal medicine specialists; reporters reviewed it with nine doctors, including researchers at prestigious universities, OB-GYNs who regularly handle miscarriages, and experts in emergency medicine and maternal health.

Some said the first ER missed warning signs of infection that deserved attention. All said that the doctor at the second hospital should never have sent Crain home when her signs of sepsis hadn’t improved. And when she returned for the third time, all said there was no medical reason to make her wait for two ultrasounds before taking aggressive action to save her.

“This is how these restrictions kill women,” said Dr. Dara Kass, a former regional director at the Department of Health and Human Services and an emergency room physician in New York. “It is never just one decision, it’s never just one doctor, it’s never just one nurse.”

While they were not certain from looking at the records provided that Crain’s death could have been prevented, they said it may have been possible to save both the teenager and her fetus if she had been admitted earlier for close monitoring and continuous treatment.

There was a chance Crain could have remained pregnant, they said. If she had needed an early delivery, the hospital was well-equipped to care for a baby on the edge of viability. In another scenario, if the infection had gone too far, ending the pregnancy might have been necessary to save Crain.

Doctors involved in Crain’s care did not respond to several requests for comment. The two hospitals, Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas and Christus Southeast Texas St. Elizabeth, declined to answer detailed lists of questions about her treatment.

Fails and Crain believed abortion was morally wrong. The teen could only support it in the context of rape or life-threatening illness, she used to tell her mother. They didn’t care whether the government banned it, just how their Christian faith guided their own actions.

When they discovered Crain was pregnant with a girl, the two talked endlessly about the little dresses they could buy, what kind of mother she would be. Crain landed on the name Lillian. Fails could not wait to meet her.

But when her daughter got sick, Fails expected that doctors had an obligation to do everything in their power to stave off a potentially deadly emergency, even if that meant losing Lillian. In her view, they were more concerned with checking the fetal heartbeat than attending to Crain.

“I know it sounds selfish, and God knows I would rather have both of them, but if I had to choose,” Fails said, “I would have chosen my daughter.”

Fails says that Crain, shown here as a child with her mother, was “the gravity” in her life. “She would put her arms around me like she was the adult and I was the kid and tell me I was strong.” (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica) “I’m in a Lot of Pain”

Crain had just graduated from high school in her hometown of Vidor, Texas, in May of 2023 when she learned that she was pregnant.

She and her boyfriend of two years, Randall Broussard, were always hip to hip, wrestling over vapes or snuggling on the couch watching vampire movies. Crain was drawn to how gentle he was. He admired how easily she built friendships and how quickly she could make people laugh. Though they were young, they’d already imagined starting a family. Broussard, who has eight siblings, wanted many kids; Crain wanted a daughter and the kind of relationship she had with her mom. Earlier that year, Broussard had given Crain a small diamond ring — “a promise,” he told her, “that I will always love you.”

On the morning of their baby shower, Oct. 28, 2023, Crain woke with a headache. Her mom decorated the house with pink balloons and Crain laid out Halloween-themed platters. Soon, nausea set in. Crain started vomiting and was running a fever. When guests arrived, Broussard opened gifts — onesies and diapers and bows — while Crain kept closing her eyes.

Around 3 p.m., her family told her she needed to go to the hospital.

Broussard drove Crain to Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas. They sat in the waiting room for four hours. When Crain started vomiting, staff brought her a plastic pan. When she wasn’t retching, she lay her head in her boyfriend’s lap.

A nurse practitioner ordered a test for strep throat, which came back positive, medical records show. But in a pregnant patient, abdominal pain and vomiting should not be quickly attributed to strep, physicians told ProPublica; a doctor should have also evaluated her pregnancy.

Instead, Baptist Hospitals discharged her with a prescription for antibiotics. She was home at 9 p.m. and quickly dozed off, but within hours, she woke her mother up. “Mom, my stomach is still hurting,” she said into the dark bedroom at 3 a.m. “I’m in a lot of pain.”

Fails drove Broussard and Crain to another hospital in town, Christus Southeast Texas St. Elizabeth. Around 4:20 a.m., OB-GYN William Hawkins saw that Crain had a temperature of 102.8 and an abnormally high pulse, according to records; a nurse noted that Crain rated her abdominal pain as a seven out of 10.

Her vital signs pointed to possible sepsis, records show. It’s standard medical practice to immediately treat patients who show signs of sepsis, which can overtake and kill a person quickly, medical experts told ProPublica. These patients should be watched until their vitals improve. Through tests and scans, the goal is to find the source of the infection. If the infection was in Crain’s uterus, the fetus would likely need to be removed with a surgery.

In a room at the obstetric emergency department, a nurse wrapped a sensor belt around Crain’s belly to check the fetal heart rate. “Baby’s fine,” Broussard told Fails, who was sitting in the hallway.

After two hours of IV fluids, one dose of antibiotics, and some Tylenol, Crain’s fever didn’t go down, her pulse remained high, and the fetal heart rate was abnormally fast, medical records show. Hawkins noted that Crain had strep and a urinary tract infection, wrote up a prescription and discharged her.

Hawkins had missed infections before. Eight years earlier, the Texas Medical Board found that he had failed to diagnose appendicitis in one patient and syphilis in another. In the latter case, the board noted that his error “may have contributed to the fetal demise of one of her twins.” The board issued an order to have Hawkins’ medical practice monitored; the order was lifted two years later. (Hawkins did not respond to several attempts to reach him.)

All of the doctors who reviewed Crain’s vital signs for ProPublica said she should have been admitted. “She should have never left, never left,” said Elise Boos, an OB-GYN in Tennessee.

Kass, the New York emergency physician, put it in starker terms: When they discharged her, they were “pushing her down the path of no return.”

“It’s bullshit,” Fails said as Broussard rolled Crain out in a wheelchair; she was unable to walk on her own. Fails had expected the hospital to keep her overnight. Her daughter was breathing heavily, hunched over in pain, pale in the face. Normally talkative, the teen was quiet.

Crain’s boyfriend, Randall Broussard, and mother at Fails’ home in Vidor, Texas (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica)

Back home, around 7 a.m., Fails tried to get her daughter comfortable as she cried and moaned. She told Fails she needed to pee, and her mother helped her into the bathroom. “Mom, come here,” she said from the toilet. Blood stained her underwear.

The blood confirmed Fails’ instinct: This was a miscarriage.

At 9 a.m, a full day after the nausea began, they were back at Christus St. Elizabeth. Crain’s lips were drained of color and she kept saying she was going to pass out. Staff started her on IV antibiotics and performed a bedside ultrasound.

Around 9:30 a.m., the OB on duty, Dr. Marcelo Totorica, couldn’t find a fetal heart rate, according to records; he told the family he was sorry for their loss.

Standard protocol when a critically ill patient experiences a miscarriage is to stabilize her and, in most cases, hurry to the operating room for delivery, medical experts said. This is especially urgent with a spreading infection. But at Christus St. Elizabeth, the OB-GYN just continued antibiotic care. A half-hour later, as nurses placed a catheter, Fails noticed her daughter’s thighs were covered in blood.

At 10 a.m., Melissa McIntosh, a labor and delivery nurse, spoke to Totorica about Crain’s condition. The teen was now having contractions. “Dr. Totorica states to not move patient,” she wrote after talking with him. “Dr. Totorica states there is a slight chance patient may need to go to ICU and he wants the bedside ultrasound to be done stat for sure before admitting to room.”

Though he had already performed an ultrasound, he was asking for a second.

The first hadn’t preserved an image of Crain’s womb in the medical record. “Bedside ultrasounds aren’t always set up to save images permanently,” said Abbott, the Boston OB-GYN.

The state’s laws banning abortion require that doctors record the absence of a fetal heartbeat before intervening with a procedure that could end a pregnancy. Exceptions for medical emergencies demand physicians document their reasoning. “Pretty consistently, people say, ‘Until we can be absolutely certain this isn’t a normal pregnancy, we can’t do anything, because it could be alleged that we were doing an abortion,’” said Dr. Tony Ogburn, an OB-GYN in San Antonio.

At 10:40 a.m, Crain’s blood pressure was dropping. Minutes later, Totorica was paging for an emergency team over the loudspeakers.

Around 11 a.m., two hours after Crain had arrived at the hospital, a second ultrasound was performed. A nurse noted: “Bedside ultrasound at this time to confirm fetal demise per Dr. Totorica’s orders.”

When doctors wheeled Crain into the ICU at 11:20 a.m., Fails stayed by her side, rubbing her head, as her daughter dipped in and out of consciousness. Crain couldn’t sign consent forms for her care because of “extreme pain,” according to the records, so Fails signed a release for “unplanned dilation and curettage” or “unplanned cesarean section.”

But the doctors quickly decided it was now too risky to operate, according to records. They suspected that she had developed a dangerous complication of sepsis known as disseminated intravascular coagulation; she was bleeding internally.

Frantic and crying, Fails locked eyes with her daughter. “You’re strong, Nevaeh,” she said. “God made us strong.”

Crain sat up in the cot. Old, black blood gushed from her nostrils and mouth.

Fails visits the grave of her daughter and granddaughter, Lillian Faye Broussard, in Buna, Texas. (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica) “The Law Is on Our Side”

Crain is one of at least two pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, ProPublica found.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has successfully made his state the only one in the country that isn’t required to follow the Biden administration’s efforts to ensure that emergency departments don’t turn away patients like Crain.

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, the administration issued guidance on how states with bans should follow the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. The federal law requires hospitals that receive funding through Medicare — which is virtually all of them — to stabilize or transfer anyone who arrives in their emergency rooms. That goes for pregnant patients, the guidance argues, even if that means violating state law and providing an abortion.

Paxton responded by filing a lawsuit in 2022, saying the federal guidance “forces hospitals and doctors to commit crimes,” and was an “attempt to use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”

Part of the battle has centered on who is eligible for abortion. The federal EMTALA guidelines apply when the health of the pregnant patient is in “serious jeopardy.” That’s a wider range of circumstances than the Texas abortion restriction, which only makes exceptions for a “risk of death” or “a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”

The lawsuit worked its way through three layers of federal courts, and each time it was met by judges nominated by former President Donald Trump, whose court appointments were pivotal to overturning Roe v. Wade.

After U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix, a Trump appointee, quickly sided with Texas, Paxton celebrated the triumph over “left-wing bureaucrats in Washington.”

“The decision last night proves what we knew all along,” Paxton added. “The law is on our side.”

This year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the order in a ruling authored by Kurt D. Engelhardt, another judge nominated by Trump.

The Biden administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, urging the justices to make it clear that some emergency abortions are allowed.

Even amid news of preventable deaths related to abortion bans, the Supreme Court declined to do so last month.

Paxton called this “a major victory” for the state’s abortion ban.

He has also made clear that he will bring charges against physicians for performing abortions if he decides that the cases don’t fall within Texas’ narrow medical exceptions.

Last year, he sent a letter threatening to prosecute a doctor who had received court approval to provide an emergency abortion for a Dallas woman. He insisted that the doctor and her patient had not proven how, precisely, the patient’s condition threatened her life.

Many doctors say this kind of message has encouraged doctors to “punt” patients instead of treating them.

Since the abortion bans went into effect, an OB-GYN at a major hospital in San Antonio has seen an uptick in pregnant patients being sent to them from across Southern Texas, as they suffer from complications that could easily be treated close to home.

The well-resourced hospital is perceived to have more institutional support to provide abortions and miscarriage management, the doctor said. Other providers “are transferring those patients to our centers because, frankly, they don’t want to deal with them.”

After Crain died, Fails couldn’t stop thinking about how Christus Southeast Hospital had ignored her daughter’s condition. “She was bleeding,” she said. “Why didn’t they do anything to help it along instead of wait for another ultrasound to confirm the baby is dead?”

It was the medical examiner, not the doctors at the hospital, who removed Lillian from Crain’s womb. His autopsy didn’t resolve Fails’ lingering questions about what the hospitals missed and why. He called the death “natural” and attributed it to “complications of pregnancy.” He did note, however, that Crain was “repeatedly seeking medical care for a progressive illness” just before she died.

Last November, Fails reached out to medical malpractice lawyers to see about getting justice through the courts. A different legal barrier now stood in her way.

If Crain had experienced these same delays as an inpatient, Fails would have needed to establish that the hospital violated medical standards. That, she believed, she could do. But because the delays and discharges occurred in an area of the hospital classified as an emergency room, lawyers said that Texas law set a much higher burden of proof: “willful and wanton negligence.”

No lawyer has agreed to take the case.

Mariam Elba contributed research. Cassandra Jaramillo contributed reporting. Andrea Suozzo contributed data reporting.

by Max Nesterak, Minnesota Reformer, and Jessica Lussenhop, ProPublica

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.

At the vice presidential debate against Republican Sen. JD Vance this month, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz did something he’s done throughout his nearly 20-year career in politics: name-drop the Mayo Clinic.

“If you need heart surgery, listen to the people at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, not Donald Trump,” Walz said.

Later in the debate, he did it again, after Vance criticized the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 law that expanded access to health coverage.

“I come from a major health care state, home of the Mayo Clinic,” said Walz. “We understand health care.”

Walz’s high regard for the world-renowned hospital system in southeastern Minnesota makes sense — he represented the Rochester area in Congress for 12 years, and it’s where he and his wife, Gwen, sought fertility treatment before having their daughter, Hope. The nonprofit Mayo is the state’s largest employer with more than 50,000 employees.

On various occasions, Walz has also acquiesced to the wishes of Mayo, even when those were at odds with the goals of other allies. In 2023, for example, Mayo leveraged its plans for a $5 billion expansion in Minnesota to muscle Walz into helping kill a bill aimed at slowing the speed of rising health care costs, which had passed the state House and Senate.

Years earlier, while still in Congress, Walz tried to push back against Mayo when it consolidated services after gobbling up local hospitals across southern Minnesota. When Mayo announced in 2017 that it intended to close labor and delivery, surgery and intensive care units in the city of Albert Lea, Walz supported workers protesting the reductions as a part of a contract fight with the hospital. But Mayo did not change course.

“He probably could have done more,” said Brad Arends, one of the leaders of a group in Albert Lea called Save Our Hospital that tried to preserve services. “Mayo was the bright shining star and now Mayo is literally a four-letter word in Albert Lea.”

“Mayo," he added, "has a way of hypnotizing people, especially probably politicians."

Gov. Tim Walz, center front, poses for a photo with Mayo Clinic leaders at a celebration for a $5 billion expansion at its flagship Rochester campus on Nov. 28, 2023. (Max Nesterak/Minnesota Reformer)

Mayo’s lobbying abilities extend beyond Walz and Minnesota’s borders. The hospital system has resisted proposals aimed at reining in the cost of health care, and has found success with Democrats in getting its way. Vice President Kamala Harris is running for president in part on lowering health care costs — it's listed third on her policy agenda — and her plan is built around expanding government subsidies and the Affordable Care Act.

When the ACA was first being debated, Mayo helped beat back an attempt to include a national public option, or an insurance plan run by the government. Today, the cost of care at Mayo is 88% higher than the state average, according to health care industry analysts at the nonprofit MN Community Measurement.

“Moderate Democrats, they haven’t been able to stand up to the hospital industry. That’s a pattern all over the country,” said Gillian Mason, the executive director of Healthcare NOW, which advocates for the creation of single-payer, federally managed universal healthcare coverage.

Kendall Witmer, the Minnesota senior communications adviser for the Harris-Walz campaign, said in a statement that Walz “has championed expanding access to affordable and high-quality healthcare, particularly for rural Minnesotans and veterans across the country.” She added that, under Walz, “Minnesota is recognized as a top 5 business state, a top 3 state to raise a child, and the best state for health care in the country.”

Andrea Kalmanovitz, director of communications for the Mayo Clinic, said its physicians treat “some of the most serious and complex medical conditions in the world.” The MN Community Measurement analysis that shows Mayo’s costs are higher than the state average does take into account how sick a hospital’s patients are.

“Mayo Clinic is guided in all we do by our primary value — the needs of the patient come first,” Kalmanovitz said in a statement. “As a nonprofit, we are strongly nonpartisan and work with policymakers to promote understanding of how policy proposals affect our patients and impact Mayo Clinic’s ability to fulfill its mission and further advance the transformation of healthcare.”

Walz siding with the Mayo Clinic reflects the deference he sometimes pays industry giants in Minnesota, a state that claims the fifth-most Fortune 500 companies per capita in the U.S. The headquarters of General Mills, U.S. Bancorp, 3M and Target are in Minnesota. UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest health insurance company, and the food conglomerate Cargill, which is estimated to be the largest private company in the country, also have their headquarters in the state.

Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said the governor has demonstrated a willingness to water down progressive policies to appease big business.

“Is that caving or is that pragmatism?” asked Jacobs. “I think what you're seeing is how you govern the progressive way in the real world.”

During the 2023 Legislative session, the Minnesota Nurses Association felt confident that it could finally pass legislation requiring hospitals to increase nurse staffing levels after 15 years of losing that fight to the hospital lobby. The 2022 elections months earlier had handed Walz a second term as governor, and for the first time in a decade, voters also gave control of both the state Senate and House to Democrats. The Keeping Nurses at the Bedside Act seemed destined to become law after it sailed through the House and Senate.

But two and a half weeks before the end of the session, an email from a Mayo lobbyist landed in the inboxes of Walz’s most senior advisers and set off a panic. “Mayo has long been planning significant facilities and infrastructure investments in Minnesota,” the lobbyist, Kate Johansen, wrote. Without changes to the bill, she added, Mayo would need to take its “enormous investment to other states.”

Mayo was asking for a special exemption from the nurse staffing bill, and it said that it wanted a second bill, which would empower the state to penalize hospitals for raising prices faster than targets set by a newly created commission, scrapped entirely.

If the pressure on Walz wasn’t enough, Johansen also forwarded the message to the state’s top Democratic leaders stressing the urgency. “The decision to withdraw the planned investment described below is, unfortunately, time sensitive and will be resolved in the next few days,” she wrote.

According to Mary Turner, then president of the state nurses union, Walz reached out the next day. He told her he supported the nurses — he had walked a picket line with them months earlier during what was then the largest private sector nurses strike in U.S. history — but that Mayo doesn’t bluff.

Nurses organized a sit-in at the governor’s Capitol office, an effort they nicknamed “Occupy Walz Street.” Although Walz met with some of the nurses, by all accounts the Mayo ultimatum became the final word on the matter. After initially resisting, the bill’s authors drafted the exemption Mayo demanded in response to pressure from Walz.

Minnesota Nurses Association President Mary Turner speaks at a news conference on April 26, 2023, before the House debate of a bill giving nurses more power over hospital staffing levels. (Max Nesterak/Minnesota Reformer)

Mayo said that all hospitals should be able to earn exemption from the law by using advanced staffing software, which Mayo said was more effective in determining staffing needs. But the bill’s authors rejected that proposal, choosing to only carve out Mayo. That upset other hospital leaders, who’d been lobbying against the bill for months. The measure then unraveled in the Senate.

Mayo has another leg up when it comes to influence: Mayo lobbyist Sarah Erickson, who’s with the firm United Strategies, was previously the operations director of Walz’s campaign for governor.

That close contact with the governor’s office can be in the public’s interest. The Mayo Clinic was instrumental in Walz’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, providing regular updates and expertise on infection rates. It also helped roll out the COVID-19 vaccine.

Setting aside his relationship with Mayo, Walz’s record of standing up to big business is mixed. His sole veto in the 2023 Legislative session was for a bill setting minimum wages and labor standards for Uber and Lyft drivers, after Uber threatened to pull out of Minnesota entirely and set off fears that residents with disabilities and tourists would be left stranded. The following year he signed a compromise version of the bill with lower pay rates that Uber and Lyft ultimately agreed to.

He’s also drawn criticism from the state’s environmental community for not challenging permits issued for a proposed copper-nickel mine formerly known as PolyMet (now called NewRange Copper Nickel), owned by Glencore, one of the largest multinational corporations in the world, which pleaded guilty in 2022 to bribery and corruption charges brought by the U.S. government.

Uber, Lyft and Glencore declined to comment.

Walz signed one of the nation’s strictest bans on PFAS, the forever chemical born at 3M, although the company had already said it would “exit all PFAS manufacturing globally by the end of 2025.” He also signed another prohibiting for-profit health insurance companies from selling plans as a part of Minnesota’s Medicaid program. The only company affected was UnitedHealthcare, the health insurance arm of UnitedHealth Group, which sued the state over the law. That lawsuit is pending and the company said in a statement that it strongly believes “that Minnesotans deserve the right to choose among health plans that offer the broadest access to care, the most innovative services and the highest quality benefits to meet their health care needs.”

Walz’s relationship with Mayo, however, has potentially far-reaching implications for federal health care reform. Mayo was hugely influential on the Obama administration when the ACA was being drafted, arguing that the focus of new policy should be delivering more efficient care, not lowering prices. In the summer of 2009, Mayo Clinic leaders voiced strong opposition to the creation of a public option, which advocates say would have helped pull down the ballooning price of both health care treatments and insurance.

Rather than risk losing the hospital’s support, the Obama administration drew Mayo even closer into the process. “They said, ‘Tell us exactly what you want,’” Denis Cortese, Mayo’s CEO at the time, told the Washington Post. By the end of 2009, any plans for including a public option were dead.

In the roughly 15 years since the ACA was born, Mayo Clinic has demonstrated resistance to further efforts to rein in health care spending while stirring up repeated questions about its commitment to rural health care and serving poor patients.

Since 2017, Mayo has closed at least more than a dozen rural clinics and a hospital in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa, citing staffing issues. In 2017, the Star Tribune reported that then-CEO Dr. John Noseworthy told employees that patients with private insurance would be given preference over those with Medicaid or Medicare, which pay less for care than private plans.

The hospital has also sued low-income patients for medical debt even though they were eligible for free or discounted care, which nonprofit hospitals are required to offer under the ACA, according to an investigation by the Rochester Post Bulletin. In response, Minnesota lawmakers passed a bill requiring hospitals to screen patients for eligibility for financial assistance before pursuing collections, which Walz signed.

Mayo Clinic's higher costs don’t just affect its patients. The hospital’s significant market share and high prices have contributed to a higher cost of living for families without employer-funded insurance in the Rochester area than in the Twin Cities, even though housing, food and other necessities are cheaper, according to the nonprofit economic think tank Economic Policy Institute’s family budget calculator.

That’s true even for healthy residents who rarely see their doctor, because insurance premiums for individual plans are higher in the Rochester area, which is about 90 miles from St. Paul and Minneapolis. Southeastern Minnesota has the highest average premiums for individual insurance plans in the state, with residents paying nearly 60% more before subsidies than people living in the Twin Cities metro area, according to data from MNsure.

Arends, now the president of the nonprofit Albert Lea Healthcare Coalition, said he would like to see politicians from both parties spend more time pressuring Mayo to lower their costs. “All of them — not just Tim Walz,” he said.

In response to questions about the higher cost of health care plans in southern Minnesota, Kalmanovitz wrote that the premium costs are beyond Mayo’s control. “Providers do not have any input into this process.” She said Mayo has a “robust” financial assistance program that patients can apply for online.

Whether a Harris-Walz administration would try to enact the kind of aggressive cost-saving reforms that Mayo might oppose remains to be seen. While Walz supports a state public option in Minnesota, Harris has backed off of previous support for a federal single-payer system such as Medicare for all. Instead, the campaign has pledged to renew the tax credits that President Joe Biden enacted to lower insurance premium payments, which are set to expire after 2025.

“Vice President Harris’s plans will make prescription drugs less expensive, expand access to health care, reduce medical debt, and continue strengthening the Affordable Care Act, while Donald Trump’s ‘concept’ of a health care plan will raise costs and remove peace of mind for millions of Americans,” Witmer, the campaign spokesperson, said in a statement.

Absent from Harris’ plan, however, is any mention of lowering hospital rates.

Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the nonprofit KFF, adds that Democrats forged bonds with the hospital industry to beat back nearly 15 years’ worth of efforts by Republicans to repeal the ACA.

“Democrats and hospitals have fought side by side during the battles over the ACA,” he said. “I'm sure that goodwill will help the industry in the future.”

In November 2023, Walz attended Mayo Clinic’s unveiling of its $5 billion expansion, a project that CEO Dr. Gianrico Farrugia called a once-in-three-generations opportunity to “redefine the future of health care.”

“There is no more important place on the planet and no more important work being done for humanity than is being done in this spot in Rochester, Minnesota,” Walz said at the event.

Turner, the former Minnesota nurses union leader who is now a president of National Nurses United, anticipates that what was once a local political fight for Walz will travel with him to a national stage should he and Harris take the White House.

“The bean counters are running health care right now. And they're trying to run it, and I've said this before, they're trying to run it like it's a frickin’ factory,” she said. “Once it gets to the federal level, if it isn't Mayo that's going to try to influence it, it's going to be Kaiser or Sutter, or any other huge, huge health care operation.”

by Craig Silverman, ProPublica, and Priyanjana Bengani, Tow Center for Digital Journalism

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 was reported in collaboration with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.

In December, the verified Facebook page of Adam Klotz, a Fox News meteorologist, started running strange video ads.

Some featured the distinctive voice of former President Donald Trump promising “$6,400 with your name on it, no payback required” just for clicking the ad and filling out a form.

In other ads with the same offer, President Joe Biden’s well-known cadence assured viewers that “this isn’t a loan with strings attached.”

There was no free cash. The audio was generated by AI. People who clicked were taken to a form asking for their personal information, which was sold to telemarketers who could target them for legitimate offers — or scams.

Klotz’s page ran more than 300 of these ads before ProPublica contacted the weather forecaster in late August. Through a spokesperson, Klotz said that his page had been hacked and he was locked out. “I had no idea that ads were being run until you reached out.”

Klotz’s page had been co-opted by a sprawling ad account network that has operated on Facebook for years, churning out roughly 100,000 misleading election and social issues ads despite Meta’s stated commitment to crack down on harmful content, according to an investigation and analysis by ProPublica and Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, as well as research by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit that researches large tech platforms. The organizations combined data and shared their analyses. TTP’s report was produced independently of ProPublica and Tow’s investigation and was shared with ProPublica prior to publication.

The network, which uses the name Patriot Democracy on many of its ad accounts, is one of eight deceptive Meta advertising operations identified by ProPublica and Tow. These networks have collectively controlled more than 340 Facebook pages, as well as associated Instagram and Messenger accounts. Most were created by the advertising networks, with some pages masquerading as government entities. Others were verified pages of people with public roles, like Klotz, who had been hacked. The networks have placed more than 160,000 election and social issues ads on these pages in English and Spanish. Meta showed the ads to users nearly 900 million times across Facebook and Instagram.

The ads are only a fraction of the more than $115 billion Meta earns annually in advertising revenue. But at just over $25 million in total lifetime spend, the networks collectively rank as the 11th-largest all-time advertiser on Meta for U.S. elections or social issues ads since the company began sharing data in 2018. The company’s failure to block these scams consistently highlights how one of the world’s largest platforms struggles to protect its users from fraud and deliver on its nearly decadelong promise to prevent deceptive political ads.

Most of these networks are run by lead-generation companies, which gather and sell people’s personal information. People who clicked on some of these ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges, among many other schemes. Some, for example, were conned by an unscrupulous insurance agent into changing their Affordable Care Act health plans. While the agent earns a commission, the people who are scammed can lose their health insurance or face unexpected tax bills because of the switch.

The ads run by the networks employ tactics that Meta has banned, including the undisclosed use of deepfake audio and video of national political figures and promoting misleading claims about government programs to bait people into sharing personal information. Thousands of ads illegally displayed copies of state and county seals and the images of governors to trick users. “The State has recently approved that Illinois residents under the age of 89 may now qualify for up to $35,000 of Funeral Expense Insurance to cover any and all end-of-life expenses!” read one deceptive ad featuring a photo of Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois state seal.

More than 13,000 ads deployed divisive political rhetoric or false claims to promote unofficial Trump merchandise.

A deceptive ad used the image of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and the state seal. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Meta removed some of the ads after initially approving them, the investigation found, but it failed to catch thousands of others with similar or even identical content. In many cases, even after removing the violating ads, it allowed the associated Facebook pages and accounts to continue operating, enabling the parent networks to spawn new pages and ads.

Meta requires ads related to elections or social issues like health care and immigration to include “paid for by” disclaimers that identify the person or entity behind the ads. But its rules for verifying advertisers and publicly disclosing who paid for such ads are less stringent than those of its main competitor, Google, ProPublica and Tow found. Many of the disclaimers on Facebook ads listed nonexistent entities.

A Meta spokesperson said it invests heavily in trust and safety and uses a mix of humans and technology to review election and social issues ads.

“We welcome ProPublica’s investigation into this scam activity, which included deceptive ads promoting Affordable Care Act tax credits and government-funded rent subsidies,” spokesperson Margarita Franklin said in an emailed statement. “... [A]s part of our ongoing work against scams, impersonation and spam, our enforcement systems had already detected and disabled a large portion of the Pages — and we reviewed and took action against the remainder of these Pages for various policy violations.”

Our analysis showed that while Meta had removed some pages and ads, its enforcement often lagged or was haphazard. Prior to being contacted by ProPublica and Tow, Meta had taken action against roughly 140 pages affiliated with these eight networks, representing less than half of the total identified in the investigation.

By then, the ads on those pages had been shown hundreds of millions of times, resulting in financial losses for an untold number of people.

Meta ultimately removed a substantial portion of pages flagged by this investigation. But after that enforcement, ProPublica and the Tow Center found that four of the networks ran more than 5,000 ads in October. Patriot Democracy alone activated two pages a day on average in the first half of this month.

“Their enforcement here is just super spotty and inconsistent, and they’re not actually attacking root problems,” said Jeff Allen, the chief research officer of the Integrity Institute, a nonprofit organization for trust and safety professionals.

He said networks like Patriot Democracy exploit the fact that a single Facebook page can be connected to multiple ad accounts and user profiles, creating a complex challenge for enforcement. “But these cracks have existed for the past eight years,” said Allen, a former Meta data scientist who worked on integrity issues before departing in 2019.

“There are a lot of gaps in the system, and Facebook’s overall strategy is to play Whac-A-Mole.”

Franklin noted that scammers use a variety of tactics to conceal their activity. Meta constantly updates its detection and enforcement systems and works with industry and law enforcement partners to combat fraudulent activity, she said.

“This is a highly adversarial space, and we continue to update our enforcement systems to respond to evolving scammer behavior,” Franklin said. She added that Meta has taken legal action against several operators.

Meta’s Rules

Misleading election ads have posed a challenge for Meta since at least 2016, when Russian trolls purchased thousands of Facebook and Instagram ads targeting Americans ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Amid public outcry and pressure from Congress, Meta has created special rules for political and social issues advertisers, launched a public Ad Library to archive such ads and hired additional people to review ads. An integrity team has been tasked with enforcing Meta’s community and advertising standards.

In 2022 and 2023, Meta laid off over 20,000 employees, including members of its integrity team. The company said it has more than 40,000 people working on safety and security around the world, an increase since 2020. It declined to say whether it has more people working on election ad reviews this cycle compared with the last presidential election.

One of the team’s key responsibilities is to verify that election and social issues advertisers are who they say they are, and that their ads adhere to the company’s rules. Since 2019, Meta has required political and social issues advertisers to submit an Employer Identification Number, a government or military website and an associated email address, or a Federal Election Commission registration number.

Meta also allowed state and local organizations and candidates who aren’t federally registered to run ads by providing a corresponding website and email address, a “valid” phone number and a mail-deliverable address. It later relaxed the rules to allow advertisers to simply display the name of their Facebook page as the entity that paid for the ad.

Google, Meta’s main U.S. election ads competitor, doesn’t have similar carve-outs for ad disclaimers. It accepts only an FEC registration number, state elections ID or EIN to verify an organization. Google’s political ad disclaimers list the organization name or the name of a person who completed the ID verification process.

Franklin said Meta has rules to ensure that page name disclaimers aren't abused. The company’s guidelines say that regardless of how much information advertisers disclose, the ads must “Accurately represent the name of the entity or person responsible for the ad.” But more than 100,000 ads identified by ProPublica and the Tow Center did not.

Patriot Democracy

Adam Klotz’s Facebook page and an example of an ad featuring a deepfake version of President Donald Trump’s voice (Screenshots by ProPublica)

The “paid for by” disclaimers on the ads that mysteriously started appearing on weather forecaster Klotz’s hijacked page listed “Klotz Policy Group” as the advertiser. Klotz Policy Group is not affiliated with Adam Klotz, and the email and website address in the disclaimer do not point to a dedicated website. The group is also not listed in OpenCorporates or other business registration databases.

The advertiser disclaimer information for Klotz’s page listed the email admin@patriotdemocracy.com and the website patriotdemocracy.com/klotzpolicygroup. That URL led to a page that promoted dental coverage for Medicare recipients and used the branding of a site called Saving Tips Daily. Similar URLs with the patriotdemocracy.com domain appeared across other pages in the network, which enabled ProPublica, Tow and the Tech Transparency Project to link them to the same network. (For more details on how the ads and networks were identified, see the methodology section at the end of this story.)

Patriot Democracy is the biggest of the eight networks identified during the course of the investigation and has been active on Meta’s platforms for nearly five years. It includes 232 pages that have spent more than $13 million on more than 110,000 ads.

Allen said operations like Patriot Democracy spend millions on Meta ads because it helps them find victims.

“If they gave over $10 million to Facebook, then they may have extracted $15 million from American seniors with this garbage,” he said. “The harms add up.”

The pages often have official-sounding names such as “Government Cash Program,” “US Financial Relief” and “USA Stimulus Fund,” and their ad disclaimers list organization names that do not correspond to registered entities or websites.

Meta also allowed the page owners to falsely identify themselves as affiliated with the federal government. If a user looked up the page details of “Government Cash Program,” they would see a notation showing that it’s a “Government Website.” US Financial Relief is listed as a “Government organization.” More than 20 pages claimed to be a “Public Service.”

The Government Cash Program Facebook page falsely listed itself as a “Government Website.” (Screenshot by ProPublica)

One of the most common types of ads run by Patriot Democracy pages is for Trump merchandise, including coins, flags and hats.

One of these ads ensnared Sam Roberson, a 57-year-old Texas resident, last month. While browsing Facebook, Roberson was drawn to an offer for a Trump coin from a page called Stars and Stripes Supply. The coin was embossed with an image of the former president raising his fist after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. One click took him to the site patriotprosnetwork.com, where Roberson paid $39.99 for 11 coins that he planned to give to his grandkids. He received the coins. But two weeks later, his card was charged another $29.99.

Roberson told ProPublica that he didn’t realize that he had signed up for a subscription. He contacted customer support to request a refund, but is skeptical the company will follow through.

“With these knuckleheads and how deep they are dug in, I may end up having to cancel the card,” he said.

When ProPublica called the site’s customer service line, a person who did not give their name said that customers who choose the “VIP” checkout option receive a discount on their purchases and are automatically enrolled in a monthly membership. The spokesperson said that customers are informed on the site and by email “how they got involved [in the membership] and how they can cancel.”

They said that someone else from the company could answer questions about advertising but hung up when asked how often they receive customer complaints about the membership fee.

An example of a Trump coin ad run by the Stars and Stripes Supply Facebook page (Screenshot by ProPublica)

ProPublica also sent an email with detailed questions about the coin offer and the subscription but did not receive a response.

The Stars and Stripes Supply page spent over $700,000 on Meta ads for Trump merchandise and ran ads as recently as Sept. 28 before it was removed by Meta. The page and the store have received online complaints about the billing scheme. It’s unclear who controls the page or the store, or how they are connected.

In addition to the billing schemes, the Trump merchandise ads often draw clicks with false claims and divisive language. Stars and Stripes Supply ran ads for Trump and JD Vance yard signs that falsely claimed “liberal activists are ripping Trump-Vance yard signs from the ground, sparking a wave of controversy across the nation.”

A page called Truly American ran a video ad for a “free” Trump flag and coin offer that was narrated by a female voice claiming to be Melania Trump. “Today we see free thinkers and independent voices like gay conservatives and Log Cabin Republicans silenced, censored and bullied by cancel-culture mobs. Donald stood against this and they tried to silence him for good,” the voice intoned, as the ad showed an image of Trump with his bloodied ear.

It’s unclear who ultimately controls the Patriot Democracy pages and associated Instagram accounts or who paid for the ads. Along with listing fake advertiser names, Patriot Democracy ad disclaimers show addresses that often correspond to WeWork co-working spaces or UPS stores. And the phone numbers, which are shared among multiple pages, led to generic voicemail messages — with one exception.

A man who answered one number said he’d never run ads on Meta and didn’t know why his phone number was listed. He said he was on his way to court and asked the reporter to call back later. He did not answer a subsequent call, and the phone number was soon disconnected.

The ownership information for patriotdemocracy.com and its related domains is also private, making it impossible to know who registered the domain. Meta did not answer specific questions about the network.

Before ProPublica and Tow reached out, Meta had removed less than half of Patriot Democracy pages for violating its advertising standards. It also failed to take action against the larger network, even after some of its pages were exposed in earlier reports by Forbes and researchers at Syracuse University.

Of the more than 110,000 ads on Patriot Democracy pages identified by ProPublica and Tow, Meta stopped just over 7,000, or roughly 6%, from running for violating standards. These ads were shown nearly 60 million times before Meta took action. Meta also consistently failed to detect and remove copies of ads it had previously banned due to policy violations, according to the analysis.

Franklin said Meta uses a variety of automated approaches to detect and remove duplicate ads. This includes training systems to recognize the images and videos used in previously removed ads in order to prevent them from running again. It also looks at a variety of signals, including user and payment information and the devices used to access accounts, to restrict or ban people who break its rules, she said.

Two ads run by the Patriot Democracy network falsely promised government subsidy checks. (Screenshots by ProPublica)

One of the most popular lures used by Patriot Democracy and other networks is the promise of free government cash.

More than 30,000 ads across the networks identified by ProPublica and Tow falsely claimed that nearly all Americans could receive government subsidies or are eligible for a “FREE Health Insurance Program.” People who clicked were often directed to unethical insurance agents who altered their existing ACA plan details or signed them up for plans they weren’t eligible for, pocketing a commission in the process. These ads were shown to users at least 38 million times.

The scheme has caused victims to lose their existing ACA health insurance or to be hit with unexpected tax bills from the IRS. In those cases, the agent falsely reported a lower income to enroll clients and secure a commission. In response to the surge in fraudulent enrollments, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the federal agency that administers the ACA, implemented stricter rules this summer for insurance agents.

A CMS spokesperson declined to comment on specific ads or platforms. But insurance marketers and other industry experts told ProPublica that Facebook ads are a scammer’s preferred method for ensnaring victims. Meta declined to comment on whether it’s in touch with CMS.

“It’s clear from speaking with a lot of different consumers that were ripped off that the Facebook ads played a big part,” said Jason Doss, an Atlanta lawyer who filed a class-action suit against a group of companies and individuals who allegedly used online ads, high-pressure insurance call centers and other methods to commit mass ACA enrollment fraud. The companies have moved to dismiss the case, citing a lack of jurisdiction and failure to show that any laws were broken, among other defenses. “We deny the allegations made and will be defending the case,” the CEO of one company named in the suit told ProPublica. The suit is ongoing.

Since 2021, Google has required U.S. health insurance advertisers to verify their identity and license status prior to running ads. Meta does not have this requirement. The company did not respond to questions about health insurance advertisers.

Taking on a Network

Meta’s failure to stop deceptive ads about government programs has forced some state and local officials to step in.

In January 2023, investigators in the Alaska Division of Insurance received complaints from consumers who said they were shown misleading ads on Facebook.

The ads used the state seal of Alaska and in some cases a photo of the governor to falsely claim that the state was offering new funeral and burial benefits. “The State of Alaska approved NEW affordable Funeral programs, designed to cover 100% final expenses up to 25,000 or more. Not just a portion,” read one ad.

As with other types of deceptive ads, the burial ads tricked people into filling out a form. In this case, they often ended up on the phone with someone trying to sell life insurance.

Alex Romero, Alaska’s chief insurance investigator, was alarmed. There weren’t any “new” state benefits. It’s also illegal in Alaska, and just about every state, to use a state seal without permission.

Searching the Meta Ad Library, he found hundreds of deceptive ads that used state seals. Romero warned his fellow state insurance investigators on a scheduled conference call soon after his discovery. “There was a proliferation of advertising using the same deceptive marketing,” Romero told ProPublica.

Around the same time, officials in Ventura County, California, were alerted to the unauthorized use of its county seal in Facebook ads. A local news outlet sent the county examples of burial insurance ads that used the Ventura County seal. Tiffany North, the county counsel, began an inquiry. She and Romero connected last spring and realized the same person was connected to the Facebook ads: a lead-generation marketer and insurance broker named Abel Medina.

Officials in Alaska and Ventura County, California, were alarmed by ads that used their seals without permission. (Screenshots by ProPublica)

Public records show that Medina, 35, owns companies such as Heartwork Global and Kontrol LLC, which have run election and social issues ads on several Facebook pages.

Romero said his research showed that Kontrol LLC was a key source of Facebook ads with state seals and images of governors. “Practically every state, a bunch of counties, several cities, they’re all getting tagged by this guy Medina,” he said.

Two other companies, Final Expense Authority LLC and American Benefits & Services LLC, ran similar ads on some of the same Facebook pages, ProPublica and Tow found. Their websites had text that was nearly identical to text on Heartwork Global’s site.

Corporate records show that Final Expense Authority LLC is registered to Tiffani Panyanouvong, a 24-year-old former insurance broker. She told ProPublica that Medina registered the entity in her name without her permission when they were dating.

American Benefits & Services LLC is registered in Delaware and does not publicly list an owner. Panyanouvong said that Medina used that company and Final Expense Authority to run ads on Meta and that she “had nothing to do with his lead-generation services.”

“This is all because of him, and I was just his girlfriend at the time,” Panyanouvong told ProPublica in a WhatsApp message. “And he used me as another person to hide behind to get through the Facebook advertising loop holes.”

On his LinkedIn profile, Medina touts his Facebook ad expertise. He says he generated “$1.6 Million in sales in under eight months with only Facebook Final Expense Media Buying and growing other verticals.”

He’s also teaching others how to do it — for a fee. His profile points to a website, Scale Kontrol, which promises to help clients create a “cash cow advertising machine” by using Facebook ads to generate customer leads. The site also assures customers that it knows “work arounds” to avoid having ads “flagged, banned, restricted.”

Medina did not respond to phone messages or to a detailed list of questions sent to three email addresses, his Facebook account and a home address.

ProPublica and Tow found that the four companies have operated at least 40 Facebook pages and spent $2.1 million on more than 21,000 election and issues ads. Thousands of ads reviewed by ProPublica and Tow across pages linked to the companies made deceptive claims and appeared to break one or more Meta rules.

A deceptive ad for car insurance falsely suggested that President Joe Biden was sending government checks to pay for gas. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

The pages used deepfake audio of Biden to make false claims about government subsidies, ran deceptive auto insurance ads that promoted nonexistent “Biden Gas Relief Checks” using images of a U.S. Treasury check, and falsely claimed that “The State has approved a NEW Mortgage Protection Plan that protects your home and family in the event of an unexpected tragedy.” No such state plan exists.

Prior to being contacted by ProPublica, Meta had removed about half of the pages. Ten pages connected to these companies ran ads in the last three months.

In March 2023, North sent a cease-and-desist letter to Final Expense Authority. “Your use of the County’s official seal and your actions in misleading the public are unauthorized and unlawful,” she wrote.

The following month, Romero sent a similar letter to Medina, Panyanouvong and three of the companies. It cited five criminal and civil statutes that the state of Alaska believed they had violated and demanded they stop running ads with the state seal and images of the governor.

North and Romero said the ads with their respective seals stopped soon after the letters were sent. (Neither contacted Meta directly, telling ProPublica they focused on the companies running the ads.)

Final Expense Authority, the company registered to Panyanouvong, is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Monterey County district attorney’s office over its use of the California county’s seal. Emily Hickok, Monterey County’s chief deputy district attorney, confirmed the investigation to ProPublica and said her office reported the ads to Meta in February. She declined to comment further, citing the ongoing investigation.

Panyanouvong’s California insurance license was revoked in January. An attorney for the state Department of Insurance cited the use of Ventura County and Alaska seals in ads, among other alleged violations, state records show. Due to a prior criminal conviction for petty theft, records show that in 2019 Medina received a California insurance license on a probationary basis. It has been inactive since last November. He holds an active license in Texas.

Panyanouvong, who now works as a waitress, said she hopes to get her license back. “I’m pretty disheartened about this matter constantly haunting me,” she said.

The California Department of Insurance declined to comment on any investigations into the companies. “While we do not comment on open investigations, deceptive advertising on social media platforms can be a cause for licensing action or criminal prosecution,” it said in a statement to ProPublica.

Meta removed all of the active pages linked to the four companies after ProPublica and Tow shared them. It declined to say whether it had taken additional action. But as recently as early October, an ad from American Benefits & Services offered $100K to homeowners: “Claim cash back with these new home owners benefits programs that just became available.”

Still Locked Out

After ProPublica emailed Klotz, the meteorologist, in August to ask about the ads running via his page, his employer, Fox News, contacted Meta to get the ads removed and to restore his access. His verified page continued running ads promising easy money to Americans until early October. As of this week, he still doesn’t have access to his page.

“As far as I know the account is still hacked and in their control,” Klotz said.

Methodology

The pages and networks included in this investigation were identified by searching Meta’s Ad Library for keywords including “benefits,” “subsidy,” “stimulus,” “$6400” and “burial.” The initial keywords were chosen based on examples sourced from reports, FTC investigations and lawsuits. Each page added to the initial seed set was vetted by viewing its ads, advertiser disclaimer information, and page content and manager information.

Using this initial set, we expanded the list of keywords based on ads run by the pages and by searching the Ad Library for websites that the ads linked to. We then used the Ad Library Report interface to identify all pages for each advertiser. We also looked for pages that ran ads using the same advertiser disclaimer information.

Patriot Democracy

In the case of the Patriot Democracy network, we connected the pages and ads together via three domains that were used in “paid for by” ad disclaimers: informedempowerment.com, tacticalempowerment.com and patriotdemocracy.com. The disclaimers that used these domains often used the same phone numbers or addresses. Additionally, a Domain Name System analysis showed that all three domains resided on the same server.

Pages in the Patriot Democracy network often used identical advertiser disclaimer information such as addresses and phone numbers. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Determining Metrics

To determine the total number of ads, ads removed and impressions, we relied on the Meta Ad Library application programming interface. For each page identified using the above methodology, we pulled all the ads via the API. To ascertain which ads had been removed, we filtered out ads that had the text “This content was removed because it didn’t follow our Advertising Standards.” However, if Meta had taken action at the page level, this ad text would not update.

Meta’s Ad Library does not offer exact numbers for impressions of individual election and social issues ads. Instead, it offers ranges. We used the most conservative number offered by Meta, the “lower bound.” This means that cumulatively, these ads likely had tens of thousands more impressions.

The Ad Library provides the total spending for election and social issues ads run on a page, which is the source of all of the dollar amounts cited in this investigation.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

Data collection and analysis for this story was done in conjunction with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.

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

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

In late September, Torri was driving down the highway with her 11-year-old son Junior in the back seat when her phone started ringing.

It was the Hamilton County Sheriff’s deputy who worked at Junior’s middle school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Deputy Arthur Richardson asked Torri where she was. She told him she was on the way to a family birthday dinner at LongHorn Steakhouse.

“He said, ‘Is Junior with you?’” Torri recalled.

Earlier that day, Junior had been accused by other students of making a threat against the school. When Torri had come to pick him up, she’d spoken with Richardson and with administrators, who’d told her he was allowed to return to class the next day. The principal had said she would carry out an investigation then. ProPublica and WPLN are using a nickname for Junior and not including Torri’s last name at the family’s request, to prevent him from being identifiable.

When Richardson called her in the car, Torri immediately felt uneasy. He didn’t say much before hanging up, and she thought about turning around to go home. But she kept driving. When they walked into the restaurant, Torri watched as Junior happily greeted his family.

Soon her phone rang again. It was the deputy. He said he was outside in the strip mall’s parking lot and needed to talk to Junior. Torri called Junior’s stepdad, Kevin Boyer, for extra support, putting him on speaker as she went outside to talk to Richardson. She left Junior with the family, wanting to protect her son for as long as she could.

Richardson quickly made his intentions clear. “We’re coming to arrest him,” he told the parents.

In Torri’s memory, everything that happened next is a blur. Both parents began pleading with the officer: They told him Junior is autistic and would feel claustrophobic in the back of a police car in handcuffs. They said he wasn’t a danger to anyone. Could they drive him to the juvenile detention center themselves? “‘There’s no reason for you to put bracelets on an 11-year-old. He doesn’t understand,’” Boyer recalls saying.

It didn’t work. Torri went inside to get Junior, holding back tears as she tried to explain what was happening. Boyer heard Junior crying on the other end of the phone and began to give him a pep talk. “‘Hey, listen, they got it wrong. I’m on my way down to the jail, and I will not leave until you come home with us. But you have to go with them,’” he recalls telling Junior. “‘Just let them take you.’” Family members followed Torri and Junior into the parking lot to see what was happening, and strangers watched from their cars. Junior’s 5-year-old brother was sobbing.

Richardson put handcuffs on the 11-year-old and locked him in the back of the patrol car. In a police report written later that day, Richardson cited a new state law as the basis for the arrest. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment or to a detailed list of questions.

After a shooter killed six people at Nashville’s Covenant School in 2023, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature ignored calls to pass gun control measures. Instead, they passed a series of increasingly punitive laws aimed not only at preventing future violence but dissuading kids from making threats that disrupt school and terrify other students.

Two contradictory laws went into effect before this school year began. One requires school officials to expel a student only if their investigation finds the threat is “valid,” a term that the law does not define. The other mandates that police charge people, including kids, with felonies for making threats of any kind, credible or not. As a result, students across the state can be arrested for statements that wouldn’t even get them expelled.

Police in Tennessee say that even when kids make threats that are not credible, they need to be held accountable for their actions — including with arrests and felony charges. The Tennessee Sheriffs’ Association announced in September that law enforcement would “not tolerate anyone making threats and inciting fear within our schools and our community. Those responsible will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Rep. Cameron Sexton, Tennessee House speaker and the Republican sponsor of the felony law, said his legislation is working as intended and will lead to safer schools. “Unfortunately sometimes you have to make examples of the first few who are doing it so that others know that it’s going to be taken seriously,” he said.

Tennessee has not yet released statewide data on how many arrests for threats of mass violence have been made since school started in August. But Hamilton County arrested 18 students in the first six weeks of the school year, more than twice as many as Nashville’s Davidson County — despite Hamilton having far fewer students. Data that ProPublica and WPLN obtained through a records request shows that at least 519 students were charged with threats of mass violence last school year, when it was a misdemeanor, an increase from 442 the prior year. Many of them were middle schoolers and most were boys. The youngest child charged last school year was 7 years old.

Juvenile defense lawyers, judges, school officials and parents criticized the felony law for casting too wide a net — unnecessarily traumatizing kids by arresting and handcuffing them over jokes, rumors and misunderstandings. Ben Connor, a school board member in Junior’s district, said the new law has muddied the waters, making it more difficult to spot real threats when so much time is spent punishing kids who don’t have the intent or the means to carry out violence.

“We may not even be keeping the kids safer by choosing to just send everyone to jail,” Connor said. “At some point you’re going to get desensitized to so many children going to jail for silly things that a credible threat could easily pass through the cracks of that system.”

Junior at home in Chattanooga (Andrea Morales for ProPublica) “We Don’t Pick and Choose”

The incident that got Junior in trouble happened in science class, during the last hour of the school day. As he would later describe it to his parents, he overheard two other students talking. One was asking if the other was going to shoot up the school tomorrow. Junior looked at the other student, who seemed like he was going to say yes. So Junior answered for him. “Yes,” Junior recalls saying.

According to the police report, other students went to the teacher and told her that Junior said he was going to shoot up the school. Junior denies ever having said that. He lives with his mom, who doesn’t own guns.

It was the type of misunderstanding that, in past years, might have been sorted out by the teacher or a school counselor. But Tennessee law now requires school staff to report threats, credible or not, to law enforcement. If they don’t, they could be charged with a misdemeanor.

Junior was called to the principal’s office to give his version of events. Since it was the end of the day, Torri joined him there when she came to pick him up. The principal, the dean and Richardson questioned Junior about what happened.

After he retold the story, Torri asked what to expect the next day. Torri said the principal responded: “‘Oh, he can attend school,’ as if he was not a threat. No hesitation.”

Relieved by what the principal said, Torri took Junior home to get ready for the birthday party.

Hamilton County Schools did not respond to questions from ProPublica and WPLN about their general approach to threats of mass violence or Junior’s case, even though Torri signed a form giving school officials permission to speak about what happened to her son. Instead, Superintendent Justin Robertson emailed his communications team asking them to send the news organizations a “generic quote” on the district’s position.

“We recognize the critical importance of identifying and assessing any threat of mass violence made within our schools and advocating for a system of assessment that prioritizes our value of care,” a spokesperson wrote in a subsequent email. “It is critical that we work in partnership with our local law enforcement agencies to conduct threat assessments to determine their severity level and hold individuals accountable for valid threats.”

Junior’s parents felt it was overzealous of Richardson to track down Junior and arrest him at the party, especially since the officer knew he would be at school the next day. They later filed a citizen’s complaint against Richardson, stating that he “arrested their son on hearsay” and “wanted glory for making that arrest.” The complaint is still under investigation by the sheriff’s department.

Under the law, Richardson did not need to consider the context or intent before making an arrest.

“We don’t pick and choose,” Hamilton County Sheriff Austin Garrett told a panel of county commissioners at a public hearing in mid-September. His officers “know to make an arrest and charge the person making that threat, child or adult.” When Garrett was elected in 2022, one of his biggest priorities was installing more police in public schools, in part through state grants. Within a year, he succeeded. Garrett turned down requests to be interviewed for this story.

Boyer, Junior’s stepfather, spoke on the phone twice in late October with Richardson’s boss, Hamilton County Sheriff’s Lt. Jeremy Durham. During the calls, which Boyer recorded, Durham said he had reviewed camera footage of the arrest and thought Richardson “did not violate policy.”

“He was not out to get anybody,” Durham said. “None of us like doing this. There’s no high-five or big honor in putting a child in jail.”

Durham said that ultimately internal affairs would review whether the case was handled properly. “We do have discretion, but it puts a little bit more burden on the deputy when it is a felony, especially one like threats of mass violence on school,” Durham said on one of the calls. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

ProPublica and WPLN requested data from Hamilton County Schools on their response to threats in the first six weeks of school. The district investigated 38 threats from students in nearly all grade levels, including finger guns pointed at other classmates and remarks about burning down the classroom. One fourth grader was hit with a soccer ball at recess and angrily told students he would blow up the school.

Police arrested 18 students, even though school officials labeled most of the threats as “low level” with “no evidence of motive.” Of the students arrested, 39% were Black, compared to 30% of students in the district overall. And 33% had disabilities, more than double the share of disabled students in the district’s population.

Junior is Black. But his stepdad thought they had more time before they’d have to have the talk about how the police are not always looking out for his best interests. It was a lesson Boyer learned himself when he was a few years older than Junior. At age 13, Boyer was walking his dog when police officers stopped him and slammed him against a fence, saying he “fit the description” of a boy who had escaped from the nearby juvenile detention center.

When he stumbled home, nose bleeding, he sought reassurance from his dad, who greeted him from the porch. His dad’s response has echoed in his head for years: “Yeah, boy, you’re going to deal with that your whole life.” Boyer is determined to avoid making the same mistake with his son. “I’m going to go to the end of the earth for my kids,” he said.

Hundreds of children across the country are facing charges this year similar to Junior’s, especially after a deadly school shooting in Georgia this September fueled a frenzied response. School officials and law enforcement reported immediate increases in the number of school threats on social media and vowed to crack down on anyone making them.

A Judicial Safety Net

As soon as Boyer got to Hamilton County’s juvenile detention center the night of the arrest, he started making his case. Junior has autism, he told the man at the front desk. He’s probably scared out of his mind right now. He’s only 11 years old. Is there any way the man could tell Junior his parents were there, so that he knows he’s not alone?

The man offered to bring Junior into a room with a window that was visible from the waiting room so that he could see Boyer. Hours passed like that, father and son trading half-hearted waves and thumbs ups while they waited.

Boyer started to worry that the detention center might try to keep Junior overnight.

But when he asked an employee, he found out that the detention center wouldn’t hold Junior overnight at all — he was too young. According to state records, the detention center holds children ages 12 through 18. Once Richardson finished writing his report, Junior was free to go.

“So all of this is unnecessary. Putting the handcuffs on the kid, this whole show that you guys are trying to have,” Boyer said. “You’re not even gonna accept the 11-year-old.”

Junior was only detained for a few hours before he got to go home, but other kids have been locked in juvenile detention for days. A recent lawsuit against the school board and district attorney in Williamson County, outside of Nashville, alleges that last September a high school junior was handcuffed, taken to juvenile detention and strip searched before being placed in solitary confinement. His requests to speak with his parents or a lawyer were denied, the lawsuit claims. He was held in juvenile detention for three nights, until he was released on house arrest.

The arrest stemmed from an incident in his chemistry class. The principal asserted the student had raised his hand in a “Hilter salute” and made a threat against the school. According to the lawsuit, this claim was baseless and the teacher present denied that the student had done anything inappropriate.

Williamson County’s school board disputed some of the facts of the lawsuit in a court filing in early October, including that a Hitler salute was the reason for the student’s discipline and that the teacher said he’d done nothing wrong. The school board did not describe what happened but said in the filing that the student’s “comments and actions warranted” discipline. A school district spokesperson declined to answer further questions about pending litigation, and the district attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s unclear what will happen with Junior’s case in juvenile court. He was charged with a felony, which could mean imprisonment in a state facility, though it wouldn’t follow him into adulthood because juvenile records are sealed. His case will be heard in juvenile court in December.

“Because the charge has been enhanced to a felony level, some law enforcement officers started the school year thinking they had no choice but to make an arrest,” said Robert Philyaw, Hamilton County’s juvenile court judge and the president of the Tennessee Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

Many of the threats of mass violence cases he’s seen should never have made it to his court, he said. One child held up a battery and called it a bomb. He was arrested. Another said he was going to nuke the place. That child was arrested too, even though he realistically “didn’t have any plutonium in his backpack,” Philyaw said.

“If some child says, ‘I’m going to run an elephant through here and it’s going to tear the school up,’ are they going to be arrested?” Philyaw asked. “Even though there’s no elephant in sight or within that child’s control? I don’t know.” Most of these cases in his court this school year have been dismissed after a thorough review, he said.

According to a ProPublica and WPLN analysis of state data, juvenile court judges are rarely finding students “delinquent,” a term equivalent to “guilty” in adult court. In fact, about 80% of young people charged with threats in the past three school years have either had their charges completely dismissed or were sent through diversion programs, which could require them to complete community service hours, therapy or other interventions.

Judges are, in effect, acting as safety nets at the end of a harsh process. In some cases, they’ve overruled district attorneys seeking harsher treatment of children. In Knox County, located in East Tennessee, judges largely rejected the local district attorney’s request to detain all children charged with making threats until trial — which could be up to 30 days.

Rep. Bo Mitchell, a Nashville Democrat who co-sponsored the felony law, acknowledged that children who do not pose any danger are being arrested. But he said that district attorneys and judges should use good judgment when determining how to handle the charge.

But Matt Moore, a defense lawyer in West Tennessee, said the stakes for children are too high to rely on the discretion of individual prosecutors and judges as protection from an overly punitive law.

“The whole point is, these are juveniles. They’re supposed to make mistakes. They’re supposed to be young and dumb,” he said. “And if you don’t have a judge or a district attorney who take that into account, these kids’ lives are basically over.”

Junior loves watching and playing football, and when he can’t be on the field, he often plays football video games. (Andrea Morales for ProPublica) “Who Takes Responsibility?”

The only thing Junior loves more than talking about football is playing it. When the weather is too harsh to get outside, he plays his favorite football video game.

His parents sat high up in the bleachers one day in early October as he ran drills alongside his teammates. They picked him out from the other students easily, his height and stocky build adding to his talent as a lineman. He often encourages the younger players on the team, an unofficial mentor.

“This field is his place,” Torri said, smiling. “He’s the gentle giant of the field.”

That night, Hamilton County Schools had been planning to host a town hall about the threats and arrests. Junior’s parents were hoping to attend and share their story as a way to advocate for their son while the charge against him remains pending in court. But the board canceled the meeting at the last minute without giving a clear explanation.

By the time the two parents found out about the regularly scheduled school board meeting later that week, it was too late to sign up to make a public comment. They felt like they were constantly bumping up against roadblocks in a system that wasn’t designed to let them be heard.

The school district has been grappling with the state laws since the start of the school year. Connor, a school board member, is the father of four daughters in the public school system. He drafted a resolution in an attempt to convince legislators to align the way schools and police handle threats of mass violence. Most importantly, he said, police should have to consider whether a threat is valid before making an arrest, just like schools are required to do before expulsions.

“As a result of this unfortunate disparity,” the resolution reads, “students who have not made valid, credible threats against the security of the school or the safety of their classmates are nevertheless being arrested by law enforcement and detained when these same students might not face discipline at school.”

The school board was supposed to vote on the resolution twice in the last two months, but it canceled both votes. Connor said the board will instead try to speak directly with the authors of the law. A group of parents, many organized by a chapter of the far-right group Moms for Liberty, showed up to speak out against the resolution at a board meeting in September. One school employee and parent begged the board not to ask for a change in the law and asked them to treat all threats the same: “How can you be sure it’s a valid threat?”

Junior was suspended for two days, according to his parents, but the consequences of the arrest have lasted much longer. Junior can barely talk about what happened, even with his parents. He gets scared when he spots a police officer on the street. Little by little, Junior said, it’s gotten easier for him to sit in the classroom of the teacher who reported him to the police and to walk past the officer who handcuffed him and put him in the back of a cop car.

In past years, Junior had struggled with reading and math due to his disability and required extra support in school. And it seemed to be working. Before the arrest, Junior was “rocking this school year,” his mom said. “I’m a proud mama.” He would check his own grades daily, excited to see how well he was doing and track his progress. His parents worry his improvements might be derailed.

“So do you fault the officer? Do you fault the new law? Who takes responsibility of this massive problem?” Boyer said. “We’re traumatizing our children.”

by Phoebe Petrovic, Wisconsin Watch, and Doug Bock Clark, ProPublica

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.

Earlier this month, subscribers to the Wisconsin Law Journal received an email with an urgent subject: “Upholding Election Integrity — A Call to Action for Attorneys.”

The letter began by talking about fairness and following the law in elections. But it then suggested that election officials do something that courts have found to be illegal for over a century: treat the certification of election results as an option, not an obligation.

The large logo at the top of the email gave the impression that it was an official correspondence from the respected legal newspaper, though smaller print said it was sent on behalf of a public relations company. The missive was an advertisement from a new group with deep ties to activists who have challenged the legitimacy of recent American elections.

The group, Follow the Law, has placed ads in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin news outlets serving attorneys, judges and election administrators — individuals who could be involved in election disputes. In Georgia, it ran ads supporting the State Election Board as its majority, backed by former President Donald Trump, passed a rule that experts warned could have allowed county board members to exclude enough Democratic votes to impact the presidential election. (A judge later struck down the rule as “illegal, unconstitutional and void.”)

In making its arguments about certification, Follow the Law has mischaracterized election rules and directed readers to a website providing an incomplete and inaccurate description of how certification works and what the laws and rules are in various states, election experts and state officials said.

“Anyone relying on that website is being deceived, and whoever is responsible for its content is being dishonest,” said Mike Hassinger, public information officer for Georgia’s secretary of state.

Certification is the mandatory administrative process that officials undertake after they finish counting and adjudicating ballots. Official results need to be certified by tight deadlines, so they can be aggregated and certified at the state and federal levels. Other procedures like lawsuits and recounts exist to check or challenge election outcomes, but those typically cannot commence until certification occurs. If officials fail to meet those deadlines or exclude a subset of votes, courts could order them to certify, as they have done in the past. But experts have warned that, in a worst-case scenario, the transition of power could be thrown into chaos.

“These ads make it seem as if there's only one way for election officials to show that they're on the ball, and that is to delay or refuse to certify an election. And just simply put, that is not their role,” said Sarah Gonski, an Arizona elections attorney and senior policy adviser for the Institute for Responsive Government, a think tank working on election issues. “What this is, is political propaganda that’s dressed up in a fancy legal costume.”

The activities of Follow the Law, which have not been previously reported, represent a broader push by those aligned with Trump to leverage the mechanics of elections to their advantage. The combination of those strategies, including recruiting poll workers and removing people from voting rolls, could matter in an election that might be determined by a small number of votes.

Since Trump lost the 2020 election, at least 35 election board members in various states, who have been overwhelmingly Republican, have unsuccessfully tried to refuse to certify election results before being compelled to certify by courts or being outvoted by Democratic members. Last week, a county supervisor in Arizona pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for failing to perform election duties when she voted to delay certifying the 2022 election. And last month, the American Civil Liberties Union sued an election board member in Michigan after he said he might not certify the 2024 results. He ultimately signed an affidavit acknowledging his legal obligation to certify, and the ACLU dismissed its case. Experts have warned that more could refuse to certify the 2024 election if Trump loses.

Follow the Law bills itself as a “group of lawyers committed to ensuring elections are free, fair and represent the true votes of all American citizens.” It’s led by Melody Clarke, a longtime conservative activist with stints at Heritage Action, a conservative advocacy organization, and the Election Integrity Network, headed by a lawyer who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

This summer, Clarke left a leadership position at EIN to join the Election Transparency Initiative, a group headed by Ken Cuccinelli, a former Trump administration official. The two groups work together, according to Cuccinelli and EIN’s 2024 handbook.

The banner ads that appeared in Georgia and Wisconsin outlets disclosed they were paid for by the American Principles Project Foundation. ETI is a subsidiary of a related nonprofit, the American Principles Project. Financial reports show that packaging magnate Richard Uihlein has contributed millions of dollars to the American Principles Project this year through a political action committee. Uihlein has funneled his fortune into supporting far-right candidates and election deniers, as ProPublica has reported.

Cuccinelli, Clarke and a spokesperson for Uihlein did not respond to requests for comment or detailed lists of questions. Cuccinelli previously defended to ProPublica the legality of election officials exercising their discretion in certifying results. “The proposed rule will protect the foundational, one person-one vote principle underpinning our democratic elections and guard against certification of inaccurate or erroneous results,” Cuccinelli wrote in a letter to Georgia’s State Election Board.

The most recent ads appear to be an extension of a monthslong effort that started in Georgia to expand the discretion of county election officials ahead of the November contest.

In August and September, Follow the Law bought ads as Georgia’s election board passed controversial rules, including one that empowered county election board members to not certify votes they found suspicious. As ProPublica has reported, the rule was secretly pushed by the EIN, where Clarke worked as deputy director.

Certification “is not a ministerial function,” Cuccinelli said at the election board’s August meeting. The law, he argued, “clearly implies that that board is intended and expected to use its judgment to determine, on very short time frames, what is the most proper outcome of the vote count.”

However, a state judge made clear in an October ruling the dangers of giving county board members the power to conduct investigations and decide which votes are valid. If board members, who are often political appointees, were “free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge” and refuse to certify election results, “Georgia voters would be silenced,” he wrote, finding that this would be unconstitutional. The case is on appeal and will be heard after the election.

Despite that ruling, and another from a different judge also finding both certification rules unconstitutional, Follow the Law’s website section for Georgia still asserts that a State Election Board rule “makes crystal clear” that county board members’ duty is “more than a simple ministerial task” without mentioning either ruling. The state Republican party has appealed the second ruling.

In a Telegram channel created by a Fulton County, Georgia, commissioner, someone shared what they called a “dream checklist” for election officials this week that contains extensive “suggestions” for how they should fulfill their statutory duties. The unsigned 15-page document, which bears the same three icons that appear on Follow the Law’s website, concludes, “Resolve all discrepancies prior to certification.”

On the same day the Georgia judge ruled that county board members can’t refuse to certify votes, Follow the Law began running ads in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin legal publications. The communications argued that certification is a discretionary step officials should take only after performing an investigation to ensure an election’s accuracy, largely continuing the line of argument that Cuccinelli pushed to Georgia’s election board and that the lawyers took before the judge. “Uphold your oath to only certify an accurate election,” said banner ads that ran in WisPolitics, a political news outlet. Another read: “No rubber stamps!” WisPolitics did not respond to requests for comment.

In Pennsylvania, the ad claimed that “simply put, the role of election officials is not ‘ministerial’” and that election officials are by law “required to ensure (and investigate if necessary) that elections are free from ‘fraud, deceit, or abuse’ and that the results are accurate prior to certification.”

Follow the Law has also directly contacted at least one county official in Eureka County, Nevada, pointing him to the group’s website, according to a letter obtained by ProPublica and Wisconsin Watch.

Follow the Law’s ads and website overstate officials’ roles beyond what statutes allow, state officials in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin said.

The group’s Wisconsin page reads: “Canvassers must first ensure that all votes are legally cast and can only certify results after verifying this.” But officials tasked with certifying elections are scorekeepers, not referees, said Edgar Lin, Wisconsin policy strategist and attorney for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works to protect the integrity of American elections. Lin and other experts said officials ensure the accuracy of an election’s basic arithmetic, for example, by checking that the number of ballots matches the number of voters, but they are not empowered to undertake deeper investigations.

Gonski said that in addition to overstating certifiers’ responsibilities, Follow the Law’s messaging underplays the protections that already exist. “Our election system is chock-full of checks and balances,” Gonski said. “Thousands of individuals have roles to play, and all of them seamlessly work together using well-established procedures to ensure a safe, accurate and secure election. No single individual has unchecked power over any piece of the process."

Ads in the Wisconsin Law Journal and the Legal Intelligencer in Pennsylvania also presented the findings of a poll that Follow the Law said was conducted by Rasmussen Reports, a company whose credibility the ad emphasizes. But Rasmussen Reports did not conduct the poll. It was conducted by Scott Rasmussen, who founded the polling company but has not worked there in over a decade.

Both the company and pollster confirmed the misattribution but did not comment further. The Wisconsin Law Journal and ALM, which owns the Legal Intelligencer, declined to comment.

Sam Liebert, a former election clerk and the Wisconsin director for All Voting is Local, said he wants the state’s attorney general to issue an unequivocal directive reminding election officials of their legal duty to certify.

“Certifying elections is a mandatory, democratic duty of our election officials,” he said. “Each refusal to certify threatens to validate the broader election denier movement, while sowing disorder in our election administration processes.”

Do you have any information about Follow the Law or other groups’ efforts to challenge election certification that we should know? Have you seen Follow the Law ads or outreach elsewhere? If so, please make a record of the ad and reach out to us. Phoebe Petrovic can be reached by email at ppetrovic@wisconsinwatch.org and by Signal at 608-571-3748. Doug Bock Clark can be reached at 678-243-0784 and doug.clark@propublica.org.

Correction

Oct. 31, 2024: This story originally misstated the profession of a representative for Richard Uihlein. The representative was a spokesperson, not a lawyer.

by Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana

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Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.

The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.

But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”

For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.

Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.

Barnica is one of at least two Texas women who ProPublica found lost their lives after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, which fall into a gray area under the state’s strict abortion laws that prohibit doctors from ending the heartbeat of a fetus.

Neither had wanted an abortion, but that didn’t matter. Though proponents insist that the laws protect both the life of the fetus and the person carrying it, in practice, doctors have hesitated to provide care under threat of prosecution, prison time and professional ruin.

ProPublica is telling these women’s stories this week, starting with Barnica’s. Her death was “preventable,” according to more than a dozen medical experts who reviewed a summary of her hospital and autopsy records at ProPublica’s request; they called her case “horrific,” “astounding” and “egregious.”

The doctors involved in Barnica’s care at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest did not respond to multiple requests for comment on her case. In a statement, HCA Healthcare said “our responsibility is to be in compliance with applicable state and federal laws and regulations” and said that physicians exercise their independent judgment. The company did not respond to a detailed list of questions about Barnica’s care.

Like all states, Texas has a committee of maternal health experts who review such deaths to recommend ways to prevent them, but the committee’s reports on individual cases are not public and members said they have not finished examining cases from 2021, the year Barnica died.

ProPublica is working to fill gaps in knowledge about the consequences of abortion bans. Reporters scoured death data, flagging Barnica’s case for its concerning cause of death: “sepsis” involving “products of conception.” We tracked down her family, obtained autopsy and hospital records and enlisted a range of experts to review a summary of her care that ProPublica created in consultation with two doctors.

Barnica’s autopsy report lists her cause of death as sepsis with “retained products of conception,” meaning tissue that grew during her pregnancy but remained after her miscarriage. (Highlighted and redacted by ProPublica)

Among those experts were more than a dozen OB-GYNs and maternal-fetal medicine specialists from across the country, including researchers at prestigious institutions, doctors who regularly handle miscarriages and experts who have served on state maternal mortality review committees or held posts at national professional medical organizations.

After reviewing the four-page summary, which included the timeline of care noted in hospital records, all agreed that requiring Barnica to wait to deliver until after there was no detectable fetal heartbeat violated professional medical standards because it could allow time for an aggressive infection to take hold. They said there was a good chance she would have survived if she was offered an intervention earlier.

“If this was Massachusetts or Ohio, she would have had that delivery within a couple hours,” said Dr. Susan Mann, a national patient safety expert in obstetric care who teaches at Harvard University.

Many noted a striking similarity to the case of Savita Halappavanar, a 31-year-old woman who died of septic shock in 2012 after providers in Ireland refused to empty her uterus while she was miscarrying at 17 weeks. When she begged for care, a midwife told her, “This is a Catholic country.” The resulting investigation and public outcry galvanized the country to change its strict ban on abortion.

But in the wake of deaths related to abortion access in the United States, leaders who support restricting the right have not called for any reforms.

Last month, ProPublica told the stories of two Georgia women, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, whose deaths were deemed “preventable” by the state’s maternal mortality review committee after they were unable to access legal abortions and timely medical care amid an abortion ban.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp called the reporting “fear mongering.” Former President Donald Trump has not weighed in — except to joke that his Fox News town hall on women’s issues would get “better ratings” than a press call where Thurman’s family spoke about their pain.

Leaders in Texas, which has the nation’s oldest abortion ban, have witnessed the consequences of such restrictions longer than those in any other state.

In lawsuits, court petitions and news stories, dozens of women have said they faced dangers when they were denied abortions starting in 2021. One suffered sepsis like Barnica, but survived after three days in intensive care. She lost part of her fallopian tube. Lawmakers have made small concessions to clarify two exceptions for medical emergencies, but even in those cases, doctors risk up to 99 years in prison and fines of $100,000; they can argue in court that their actions were not a crime, much like defendants can claim self-defense after being charged with murder.

Amid the deluge of evidence of the harm, including research suggesting Texas’ legislation has increased infant and maternal deaths, some of the ban’s most prominent supporters have muted their public enthusiasm for it. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who once championed the fall of Roe v. Wade and said, “Pregnancy is not a life-threatening illness,” is now avoiding the topic amid a battle to keep his seat. And Gov. Greg Abbott, who said early last year that “we promised we would protect the life of every child with a heartbeat, and we did,” has not made similar statements since.

Both declined to comment to ProPublica, as did state Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose commitment to the ban remains steadfast as he fights for access to the out-of-state medical records of women who travel for abortions. Earlier this month, as the nation grappled with the first reported, preventable deaths related to abortion access, Paxton celebrated a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that allowed Texas to ignore federal guidance requiring doctors to provide abortions that are needed to stabilize emergency patients.

“This is a major victory,” Paxton said.

“They Had to Wait Until There Was No Heartbeat”

To Barnica, an immigrant from Honduras, the American dream seemed within reach in her corner of Houston, a neighborhood filled with restaurants selling El Salvadoran pupusas and bakeries specializing in Mexican conchas. She found work installing drywall, saved money to support her mother back home and met her husband in 2019 at a community soccer game.

A year later, they welcomed a big-eyed baby girl whose every milestone they celebrated. “God bless my family,” Barnica wrote on social media, alongside a photo of the trio in matching red-and-black plaid. “Our first Christmas with our Princess. I love them.”

Barnica and her daughter days after she was born. Barnica loved dressing the family in matching clothing. (Courtesy of the Barnica family)

Barnica longed for a large family and was thrilled when she conceived again in 2021.

Trouble struck in the second trimester.

On Sept. 2, 2021, at 17 weeks and four days pregnant, she went to the hospital with cramps, according to her records. The next day, when the bleeding worsened, she returned. Within two hours of her arrival on Sept. 3, an ultrasound confirmed “bulging membranes in the vagina with the fetal head in the open cervix,” dilated at 8.9 cm, and that she had low amniotic fluid. The miscarriage was “in progress,” the radiologist wrote.

When Barnica’s husband arrived, she told him doctors couldn’t intervene until there was no heartbeat.

The next day, Dr. Shirley Lima, an OB on duty, diagnosed an “inevitable” miscarriage.

In Barnica’s chart, she noted that the fetal heartbeat was detected and wrote that she was providing Barnica with pain medication and “emotional support.”

In a state that hadn’t banned abortion, Barnica could have immediately been offered the options that major medical organizations, including international ones, say is the standard of evidence-based care: speeding up labor with medication or a dilation and evacuation procedure to empty the uterus.

“We know that the sooner you intervene in these situations, the better outcomes are,” said Dr. Steven Porter, an OB-GYN in Cleveland.

But Texas’ new abortion ban had just gone into effect. It required physicians to confirm the absence of a fetal heartbeat before intervening unless there was a “medical emergency,” which the law did not define. It required doctors to make written notes on the patient’s condition and the reason abortion was necessary.

The law did not account for the possibility of a future emergency, one that could develop in hours or days without intervention, doctors told ProPublica.

Barnica was technically still stable. But lying in the hospital with her cervix open wider than a baseball left her uterus exposed to bacteria and placed her at high risk of developing sepsis, experts told ProPublica. Infections can move fast and be hard to control once they take hold.

The scenario felt all too familiar for Dr. Leilah Zahedi-Spung, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist who used to work in Tennessee and reviewed a summary of Barnica’s records at ProPublica’s request.

Abortion bans put doctors in an impossible position, she said, forcing them to decide whether to risk malpractice or a felony charge. After her state enacted one of the strictest bans in the country, she also waited to offer interventions in cases like Barnica’s until the fetal heartbeat stopped or patients showed signs of infection, praying every time that nothing would go wrong. It’s why she ultimately moved to Colorado.

The doctors treating Barnica “absolutely didn’t do the right thing,” she said. But she understood why they would have felt “totally stuck,” especially if they worked at a hospital that hadn’t promised to defend them.

Even three years after Barnica’s death, HCA Healthcare, the hospital chain that treated Barnica, will not disclose whether it has a policy on how to treat miscarriages.

Some HCA shareholders have asked the company to prepare a report on the risks to the company related to the bans in states that restrict abortion, so patients would understand what services they could expect and doctors would know under what circumstances they would be protected. But the board of directors opposed the proposal, partly because it would create an “unnecessary expense and burdens with limited benefits to our stockholders.” The proposal was supported by 8% of shareholders who voted.

The company’s decision to abstain has repercussions far beyond Texas; the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain has said it delivers more babies than any other health care provider in America, and 70% of its hospitals are in states where abortion is restricted.

As the hours passed in the Houston hospital, Barnica couldn’t find relief. On the phone with her aunt Rosa Elda Calix Barnica, she complained that doctors kept performing ultrasounds to check the fetal heartbeat but were not helping her end the miscarriage.

Around 4 a.m. on Sept. 5, 40 hours after Barnica had arrived, doctors could no longer detect any heart activity. Soon after, Lima delivered Barnica’s fetus, giving her medication to help speed up the labor.

Dr. Joel Ross, the OB-GYN who oversaw her care, discharged her after about eight more hours.

The bleeding continued, but when Barnica called the hospital, she was told that was expected. Her aunt grew alarmed two days later when the bleeding grew heavier.

Go back, she told her niece.

On the evening of Sept. 7, Barnica’s husband rushed her to the hospital as soon as he got off from work. But COVID-19 protocols meant only one visitor could be in the room with her, and they didn’t have a babysitter for their 1-year-old daughter.

So he left and tried to get some sleep.

“I fully expected her to come home,” he said.

But she never did. Her family planned two funerals, one in Houston and another in Honduras.

Nine days after her death, Barnica’s husband was processing his shock, learning how to be a single dad and struggling to raise funds to bury his wife and the son he had hoped to raise.

Meanwhile, Lima was pulling up Barnica’s medical chart to make an addition to her records.

The notes she added made one point abundantly clear: “When I was called for delivery,” she wrote, “the fetus no longer had detectable heart tones.”

“They Should Vote With Their Feet”

Texas has been on the forefront of fighting abortion access.

At the time of Barnica’s miscarriage in 2021, the Supreme Court had not yet overturned the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. But Texas lawmakers, intent on being the first to enact a ban with teeth, had already passed a harsh civil law using a novel legal strategy that circumvented Roe v. Wade: It prohibited doctors from performing an abortion after six weeks by giving members of the public incentives to sue doctors for $10,000 judgments. The bounty also applied to anyone who “aided and abetted” an abortion.

A year later, after the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling was handed down, an even stricter criminal law went into effect, threatening doctors with up to 99 years in prison and $100,000 in fines.

Soon after the ruling, the Biden administration issued federal guidance reminding doctors in hospital emergency rooms they have a duty to treat pregnant patients who need to be stabilized, including by providing abortions for miscarriages.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton fought against that, arguing that following the guidance would force doctors to “commit crimes” under state law and make every hospital a “walk-in abortion clinic.” When a Dallas woman asked a court for approval to end her pregnancy because her fetus was not viable and she faced health risks if she carried it to term, Paxton fought to keep her pregnant. He argued her doctor hadn’t proved it was an emergency and threatened to prosecute anyone who helped her. “Nothing can restore the unborn child’s life that will be lost as a result,” he wrote to the court.

No doctor in Texas, or the 20 other states that criminalize abortion, has been prosecuted for violating a state ban. But the possibility looms over their every decision, dozens of doctors in those states told ProPublica, forcing them to consider their own legal risks as they navigate their patient’s health emergencies. The lack of clarity has resulted in many patients being denied care.

In 2023, Texas lawmakers made a small concession to the outcry over the uncertainty the ban was creating in hospitals. They created a new exception for ectopic pregnancies, a potentially fatal condition where the embryo attaches outside the uterine cavity, and for cases where a patient’s membranes rupture prematurely before viability, which introduces a high risk of infection. Doctors can still face prosecution, but are allowed to make the case to a judge or jury that their actions were protected, not unlike self-defense arguments after homicides. Barnica’s condition would not have clearly fit this exception.

This year, after being directed to do so by the state Supreme Court, the Texas Medical Board released new guidance telling doctors that an emergency didn’t need to be “imminent” in order to intervene and advising them to provide extra documentation regarding risks.

But in a recent interview, the board’s president, Dr. Sherif Zaafran, acknowledged that these efforts only go so far and the group has no power over criminal law: “There’s nothing we can do to stop a prosecutor from filing charges against the physicians.”

Asked what he would tell Texas patients who are miscarrying and unable to get treatment, he said they should get a second opinion: “They should vote with their feet and go and seek guidance from somebody else.”

An immigrant from El Salvador who works 12-hour shifts, Barnica’s husband doesn’t follow American politics or the news. He had no inkling of the contentious national debate over how abortion bans are affecting maternal health care when ProPublica contacted him.

Now he is raising a 4-year-old daughter with the help of Barnica’s younger brother; every weekend, they take her to see her grandmother, who knows how to braid her hair in pigtails.

All around their home, he keeps photos of Barnica so that the little girl grows up knowing how much her mother loved her. He sees flashes of his wife when his daughter dances. She radiates the same delight.

When asked about Barnica, he can’t get out many words; his leg is restless, his eyes fixed on the floor. Barnica’s family calls him a model father.

He says he’s just doing his best.

Mariam Elba and Doris Burke contributed research. Lizzie Presser contributed reporting.