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by Eric Umansky and Vernal Coleman

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What Happened

Senators this week called for a federal investigation into the Trump administration’s killing of hundreds of contracts for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Angus King, a Maine independent, wrote to the agency’s inspector general on Monday asking for an investigation into the administration’s cancellation of the contracts and the consequences for veterans.

The senators highlighted “damning reporting from ProPublica” on the cancellations, including how the Department of Government Efficiency used an artificial intelligence tool that marked contracts as “MUNCHABLE.”

The senators wrote that DOGE’s use of AI to scrutinize contracts “adds an entire new level of unease connected to the decision-making, security, governance, and quality control of the entire process.”

VA officials have said they’ve killed nearly 600 contracts after DOGE’s review but have declined requests by lawmakers and ProPublica for details.

“Despite repeated requests in letters to the Secretary, questions at hearings, and dozens of emails to VA officials,” the senators wrote, “the Department has not provided a single briefing or a complete and accurate list of the contracts it has cancelled.”

Blumenthal and King wrote that the VA shared a list of contracts in May, but it was “riddled with errors and inaccuracies.”

What They Said

Amid the administration’s “stonewalling,” Blumenthal said in a statement, “ProPublica’s reporting revealed these cancelled contracts were delivering essential services to veterans and exposed the cruel and dumb AI formulas DOGE bros used to cancel contracts.”

Blumenthal added, “Veterans and all Americans deserve transparency around decisions being made at VA.”

Background

As ProPublica detailed, a DOGE staffer with no background in government or health care created the AI tool used to mark contracts as “munchable.” Among the contracts that were tagged and later killed was one to maintain a gene sequencing device for improving cancer treatment. Another was for blood sample analysis in support of a VA research project. And a third was to help measure and improve nursing care.

In another story, we reported how VA doctors and other staffers across the country have raised alarms about how the killing of contracts could threaten veterans’ care. In internal emails, hospital staffers warned about canceled contracts to maintain cancer registries, where information on the treatment of patients is collected and analyzed. DOGE had marked one such contract “for immediate termination.”

Why it Matters

The VA is one of the nation’s largest health care providers, charged with the care of more than 9 million veterans. President Donald Trump has long promised to prioritize former service members. “We love our veterans,” he said in February. “We are going to take good care of them.”

The administration has reiterated that stance even as the VA has been shedding employees and contracts. Amid the cutbacks, Trump’s pick to run the agency, Secretary Doug Collins, said earlier this year, “Veterans are going to notice a change for the better.”

Response

The VA has not responded to our request for comment about the senators’ letter. Previously, press secretary Pete Kasperowicz said that decisions to cancel or reduce the size of contracts are made after multiple reviews by VA employees, including agency contracting experts and senior staff.

He also said the VA has not canceled contracts that provide services to veterans or work that the agency cannot do itself without a contingency plan in place.

by Margaret Coker, The Current

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

Congressional Republicans, looking for ways to offset their proposed tax cuts, are seeking to mandate that millions of Americans work in order to receive federally subsidized health insurance. The GOP tax and budget bill passed the House in May, and Senate Republicans are working feverishly to advance their draft of federal spending cuts in the coming days.

Georgia, the only state with a Medicaid work mandate, started experimenting with the requirement on July 1, 2023. As the Medicaid program’s two-year anniversary approaches, Georgia has enrolled just a fraction of those eligible, a result health policy researchers largely attribute to bureaucratic hurdles in the state’s work verification system. As of May 2025, approximately 7,500 of the nearly 250,000 eligible Georgians were enrolled, even though state statistics show 64% of that group is working.

Gov. Brian Kemp has long advocated for Medicaid reform, arguing that the country should move away from government-run health care. His spokesperson also told The Current and ProPublica that the program, known as Georgia Pathways to Coverage, was never designed to maximize enrollment.

Health care analysts and former state Medicaid officials say Georgia’s experience shows that the congressional bill, if it becomes law, would cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in administrative costs as it is implemented while threatening health care for nearly 16 million people.

Here’s how proposed federal work requirements compare to Georgia’s — and how they may impact your state:

How will states determine who is eligible?

What Congress proposes:

The House bill, H.R. 1, and draft Senate proposal require all states to verify that Americans ages 19 through 64 who are receiving Medicaid-funded health coverage are spending 80 hours a month working, training for a job, studying or volunteering. These new verification systems would need to be in place by Dec. 31, 2026, and would have to check on enrolled residents’ work status twice a year. That means people who already receive coverage based on their income level would need to routinely prove their eligibility — or lose their insurance.

The federal work requirements would apply to more than 10 million low-income adults with Medicaid coverage as well as approximately 5 million residents of the 40 states that have accepted federal subsidies for people to purchase private health coverage through what’s commonly known as Obamacare.

The House bill exempts parents with children under 18 from the new requirements, while the Senate version exempts parents with children under 15. Neither bill exempts people who look after elderly relatives.

Georgia’s experience:

Georgia’s mandate applies to fewer categories of people than the proposed federal legislation would. Even so, officials failed to meet the state’s tough monthly verification requirement for Pathways enrollees due to technical glitches and difficulty confirming the employment of those who work in the informal economy such as house cleaners and landscapers because they may not have pay stubs or tax records. The challenges were steep enough that Georgia has decided to loosen its work verification protocols from monthly to once a year.

What this means for your state:

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that H.R. 1 would result in at least 10 million low-income Americans losing health insurance. Health care advocates say that’s not because they aren’t working, but because of the bureaucratic hoops they would need to jump through to prove employment. Research from KFF, a health policy think tank, shows that the vast majority of people who would be subject to the new law already work, are enrolled in school or are unpaid stay-at-home caregivers, duties that restrict their ability to earn a salary elsewhere.

Arkansas is the only state other than Georgia to have implemented work requirements. Republican state lawmakers later changed their minds after data showed that red tape associated with verifying eligibility resulted in more than 18,000 people losing coverage within the first few months of the policy. A federal judge halted the program in 2019, ruling that it increased the state’s uninsured rate without any evidence of increased employment.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP)

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, says Medicaid work requirements in H.R. 1 are “common sense.” He says the policy won’t result in health coverage losses for the Americans whom Medicaid was originally designed to help because the work requirements won’t apply to these groups: children, pregnant women and elderly people living in poverty. He points to the $344 billion in a decade’s worth of projected cost savings resulting from Medicaid work requirements as beneficial to the nation’s fiscal health. “You find dignity in work, and the people that are not doing that, we’re going to try to get their attention,” he said earlier this year.

Who will pay for the work verification system in each state?

What Congress proposes:

The House bill allocates $100 million to help states pay for verification systems that determine someone’s eligibility. The grants would be distributed in proportion to each state’s share of Medicaid enrollees subject to the new requirements — an amount health policy experts say will not be nearly enough. States, they say, will be on the hook for the difference.

Georgia’s experience:

In the two years since launching its experiment with work requirements, Georgia has spent nearly $100 million in mostly federal funds to implement Pathways. Of that, $55 million went toward building a digital system to verify participants’ eligibility — more than half the amount House Republicans allocated for the entire country to do the same thing.

Like other states, Georgia already had a work verification system in place for food stamp programs, but it contracted with Deloitte Consulting to handle its new Medicaid requirements. Georgia officials said the state has spent 30% more than they had expected to create its digital platform for Pathways due to rising consultant and IT costs. Deloitte previously declined to answer questions about its Pathways work.

What this means for your state:

All states already verify work requirements for food stamp recipients, but many existing systems would need upgrades to conform to proposed federal legislation, according to three former state Medicaid officials. In 2019, when states last considered work requirements, a survey by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office showed that Kentucky expected administrative costs to top $200 million — double what H.R. 1 has allocated for the country.

Rep. Buddy Carter (Justin Taylor/The Current GA/CatchLight Local)

Rep. Buddy Carter, the Republican who represents coastal Georgia and chairs the health subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which had recommended Medicaid cuts in H.R. 1, said that upfront costs borne by states would be offset by longer-term savings promised in the House bill. Some congressional Republicans concede that the cost savings will come from fewer people enrolling in Medicaid due to the new requirements. Savings from work mandates amount to 43% of the $793 billion in proposed Medicaid cuts, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

How will states staff the program?

What Congress proposes:

Medicaid is a federal social safety net program that is administered differently in each state. Neither H.R. 1 nor the Senate legislative proposal provides a blueprint for how states should verify eligibility or how the costs of overseeing the new requirements will be paid.

Georgia’s experience:

Georgia’s experience shows that state caseworkers are key to managing applications and work requirement verifications for residents eligible for Medicaid. The agency that handles enrollment in federal benefits had a staff vacancy rate of approximately 20% when Georgia launched its work requirement policy in 2023. Georgia at the time had one of the longest wait times for approving federal benefits. As of March, the agency had a backlog of more than 5,000 Pathways applications. The agency has said it will need 300 more caseworkers and IT upgrades to better manage the backlog, according to a report submitted to state lawmakers in June.

What this means for your state:

Former state Medicaid officials and health policy experts say Georgia’s staffing struggles are not unique. In 2023, near the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency, KFF surveyed states about staffing levels for caseworkers who verify eligibility for federal benefits, including Medicaid. Worker vacancy rates exceeded 10% in 16 of the 26 states that responded; rates exceeded 20% in seven of those states.

Adding caseworkers will mean higher costs for states. Currently, 41 states require a balanced budget, meaning that those state legislators would either need to increase taxes and revenues to verify Medicaid enrollees are working or lower enrollment to reduce costs, said Joan Alker, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families.

In about half a dozen large states where county governments administer federal safety net programs, the costs of training caseworkers on the new verification protocols could trickle from states to counties.

“There are provisions in there that are very, very, very challenging, if not impossible, for us to implement,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, told reporters in June of the costs facing her state to meet the House bill requirements.

by Adam Friedman, Tennessee Lookout

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

ProPublica and the Tennessee Lookout are continuing to investigate online sportsbook Action 247 and Harpeth Financial, which owns Flex Loan operator Advance Financial. To tell us about the experience you had with either or both companies, call or text reporter Adam Friedman at 615-249-8509.

Jeanette Thomas had just made her first payment on a loan from payday lender Advance Financial when she said the company emailed her with “good news.” She could borrow $206 more.

The solicitation was a relief to Thomas, a 62-year-old grandmother who had already exhausted the $783 disability check she receives each month since her health conditions render her unable to work.

Over the next few months, Thomas made the required minimum payments on what started in 2019 as a $400 loan to buy Christmas presents. But each time she did so, the company invited her to borrow almost all of the payment back, she said, with emails or letters like “Access Your Cash Today” or “You’re Already Approved.”

“They kept trying to rope me in,” Thomas said.

In the months that followed, the company continued to expand her credit, allowing Thomas to borrow close to $1,600 in total. In the emails and letters that Thomas kept, Advance never stated how much it would cost if she continued to reborrow.

Thomas had read her original loan documents warning that the loan carried a high 279.5% interest rate and would be challenging to pay off. But as the loan balance grew, Thomas came to realize she was trapped. By the spring of 2021, Thomas had paid Advance almost $4,000, yet she still owed more than $1,000 and was paying more than $200 a month to cover the interest, depleting the disability checks that were her only source of income.

Until the Flex Loan, reborrowing or rolling over payday loans was against the law. Tennessee lawmakers first banned reborrowing when they passed the state’s payday lending law in 1997. They reaffirmed that protection in 2011 when they updated that law.

When Tennessee lawmakers passed a 2014 law allowing Flex Loans, they included no such provision.

Instead, the bill’s sponsor, current House Speaker Cameron Sexton, said the loans could be better for borrowers because it required them to make a monthly minimum payment that covered all fees, interest and 3% of the principal. This key provision would ensure that borrowers would always be paying down the principal on the loan.

Thomas and more than a dozen borrowers told the Tennessee Lookout and ProPublica that Advance has encouraged them through emails and notifications to borrow back the value of almost all of the payments they made, tearing a hole in the safety net the law tried to put in place.

All but one of the 14 borrowers who spoke to the newsrooms for this story reported having reborrowed at least once as part of their Advance loan. As with Thomas, Advance made them eligible to borrow more shortly after paying, even though they were often making the minimum payments and almost immediately borrowing the money back to cover the cost of the payment they just made. Advance went on to sue 12 of these borrowers once they stopped being able to afford the loan.

Advance Financial sent ads to several borrowers telling them they were eligible to borrow more. (Obtained by Tennessee Lookout and ProPublica. Highlighted and redacted by ProPublica.)

Andrea Heady, 45, was sued by Advance in Knoxville for over $7,300, despite having paid the company nearly double what she ultimately borrowed. She initially took out $750 through a Flex Loan after the hours at her university job were slashed in June 2020.

“I’ve always sent money home to my mom,” who was taking care of Heady’s sister, she said. “It was COVID. My aunt and uncle were very sick, then they passed away and I just needed money.”

Heady said Advance would send her notifications letting her know she could borrow more. One email appeared as a financial statement, but included in bold and large text was the amount she had available to borrow. The statement did not provide a payment schedule, a new loan amount, the total cost of the loan or how long it would take to pay off making minimum payments, information a lender would have been required to provide if she'd been borrowing on a credit card.

Andrea Heady reborrowed on her Flex Loan over a dozen times after receiving notifications from Advance saying that she could borrow more. (Stacy Kranitz for ProPublica)

Heady reborrowed on her Flex Loan over a dozen times over the next 18 months as Advance increased her credit limit seven times. She stopped paying when her monthly payments of $650 equaled a quarter of her paycheck.

Heady hoped the company would forget about her, but it didn’t. In 2024 Advance sued and won a wage garnishment against her. Ultimately, Heady will end up paying Advance over $14,000 on the $3,850 she borrowed.

David Hill, a 36-year-old from Nashville, started by borrowing $175 from Advance in February 2020. Each month he would repay the full borrowed amount, including interest and fees, and reborrow the principal, often on the same or next day. Over 18 months, he reborrowed almost 80 times.

“COVID happened and I was going through financial trouble,” Hill said. “I would get a check and pay it off. But then I would have to borrow it back to have money.”

David Hill received emails from Advance encouraging him to borrow more money, which he ultimately did almost 80 times. (Stacy Kranitz for ProPublica)

Via email, Advance kept increasing his credit limit and encouraging him to borrow more. “Dear David,” started two of the emails, which contained notes like “good news — you have $645 available.” Hill eventually reached a point where he couldn’t afford the minimum payment, totaling over $400 a month.

He stopped paying and the company sued him in 2023 for over $4,700.

The Lookout and ProPublica sent detailed questions to Cullen Earnest, the senior vice president of public policy at Advance Financial. Earnest repeated what he said in a previous statement, that the company has an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau. He added that the Tennessee Department of Financial Institutions has received just 91 complaints about flexible credit lenders since 2020, representing less than 0.001% of all new flex loan agreements, and that this data reflects the satisfaction of the vast majority of Advance’s customers.

The Tennessee Lookout and ProPublica previously reported that the company has sued over 110,000 Tennesseeans since it began offering the Flex Loan in 2015, making it one of the largest single plaintiffs in the state. One of the subjects in that story reborrowed on her Flex Loan over a dozen times, turning $4,400 in borrowed cash into more than $12,500 in payments to Advance. The company sued her and won a judgment that led to the garnishment of her wages.

Christopher Peterson, a senior official with the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from 2012 to 2016 and a contributor to multiple reports about payday loans, said the agency sought to limit reborrowing on payday and title loans because the desire to borrow again often indicated that borrowers couldn’t afford the loans and would be paying them off forever. That is especially true of the Flex Loan in Tennessee, he said.

“It’s a nasty loan,” he said.

A Better Loan?

The CFPB began targeting high-interest lenders in 2013, releasing a report on the dangers of payday loans and how reborrowing often led to debt traps.

With the threat of federal regulation looming, Advance Financial Chairman Michael Hodges started working with Tennessee lawmakers to create a new type of high-interest loan that would avoid federal oversight, he told the Nashville Business Journal.

In Tennessee’s state House, Advance and other high-interest lenders turned to Sexton to sponsor the legislation.

Sexton was then the majority whip, a position typically reserved for ambitious state House members hoping to travel up the party’s ranks. Sexton also knew banking. He worked at a local bank as a business development executive, a position he still holds today, along with having a seat on its board.

Cameron Sexton, now the speaker of the Tennessee House, sponsored the Flex Loan legislation in 2014. (John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)

Starting in the spring of 2014, Sexton began guiding Flex Loan legislation through Tennessee’s state House committees. On the surface, the bill appeared to be a new type of loan with a 24% interest rate, which would be significantly cheaper than the triple-digit interest on payday and title loans. But the actual cost could be found in the bill’s details, which gave lenders the right to charge a 0.7% daily customary fee, which over a year adds another 255.5%.

Official video recordings from legislative committee hearings show that neither legislators nor Sexton discussed reborrowing or the loan’s interest rate.

When Sexton took to the Tennessee House floor in April 2014, his colleagues showed him deference because of his banking experience, said former Rep. Craig Fitzhugh, a rural West Tennessee Democrat and the minority leader at the time, who sponsored the original payday lending legislation in 1997.

During the hearing, Fitzhugh asked Sexton if he thought the soon-to-be-created Flex Loan was “a step up for consumers” compared to payday and title loans. Sexton said that was a “fair statement.”

When a lawmaker asked about the interest rate, Sexton said it was 190% to 210%, which is lower than the actual rate. But Sexton once again assured lawmakers that the minimum payment would reduce the cost of the loan for consumers.

“When you reduce the principal each and every month, obviously you’re decreasing the amount of interest,” Sexton said from the House floor.

The Flex Loan legislation passed the Tennessee House 83-6, with Fitzhugh abstaining from the vote. Fitzhugh said the high-interest lending landscape in Tennessee has only “gotten worse” over the past decade because of Flex Loans.

Rep. Gloria Johnson, a Knoxville Democrat, said she regrets voting for the Flex Loan legislation and feels like proponents of the legislation misled her.

“I definitely would not vote that way today, and would like to work to fix that massive mistake that’s hurt so many Tennesseans,” Johnson said.

A spokesperson for Sexton did not respond to questions from Tennessee Lookout and ProPublica.

Since passing the Flex Loans bill in 2014, Sexton has received over $105,000 in contributions to his campaign and political action committee from Advance Financial and its affiliated PACs, making them one of his largest contributors.

No Money for Food

Over five years after the law passed, Jeanette Thomas walked into an Advance Financial store three weeks before Christmas 2019 and filled out an application.

Thomas said she listed her income, gave them her debit card number and permission to directly charge her bank account the required monthly minimum payment. A borrower isn’t required to put up any assets, like a car or future paycheck, to get a Flex Loan.

Thomas wound up in a debt trap, borrowing again and again to keep herself afloat. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had tried to restrict reborrowing to protect consumers from falling into this kind of hole. (Stacy Kranitz for ProPublica)

Unlike some other borrowers, Advance allowed Thomas to pay monthly, instead of biweekly, because that’s how she received her federal disability benefits. Thomas said she suffered physical abuse for decades that left her with a traumatic brain injury.

The company deposited $400 into her account the same day she walked into the store.

At the time of the loan, Thomas had been trying to build a better relationship with her two sons and three grandchildren. She used the money to purchase gift cards, art supplies and toys. She was happy to be able to give her family something for the holidays.

Thomas’ first minimum payment to Advance was due Dec. 31 and was a manageable $51.78. That December had been cold, and when Thomas’ heat bill came in $50 higher than normal, she started to worry.

Then, just two days after her loan payment, Thomas said an unsolicited email arrived from Advance telling her she was eligible to borrow $206 more. Thomas thought she could afford it. Why would Advance loan her money she couldn’t pay back, she said she thought.

What Thomas did not realize was her first bill had only been for a 13-day payment period, meaning she’d been charged less than two weeks of interest. By taking the additional loan for an entire month, her monthly payment would almost triple to $130 per month.

Over the next two months, the company offered her a lifeline, extending her credit limit enough that she could make her payments with the money she’d just borrowed.

Eventually, Advance stopped increasing her credit limit and her monthly payment had increased to $230 a month, almost a third of her disability check.

Thomas cut her spending to the bone, hoping that a few months of payments would get her out of debt. She turned to friends to help pay for food, and to a local church to cover her utility bill.

Thomas said Advance sent her mailers and emails multiple times a month, offering to let her borrow any of the principal she had paid off. She tried to resist, but inevitably, she would have an unexpected expense, like medical bills from a series of mini strokes.

Thomas found herself in the position the CFPB had warned about when it sought to restrict reborrowing. Former CFPB official Peterson, who’s now a law professor at the University of Utah, helped work on the agency’s 2017 payday regulations. At the time, the agency wrote that consumers who reborrowed would inevitably be forced to choose between making an unaffordable payment on the loan or paying for necessities like food or rent.

By May 2021, Thomas could no longer afford to pay. The company kept her loan open and unpaid for 90 days, allowing the interest and fees to accumulate, nearly doubling the amount due to $1,700. Advance then charged Thomas two times in one week, withdrawing $430, or half of her monthly budget.

“I can remember just lying in my bed, stomach hurting and doubled over in pain because I couldn’t get something to eat,” Thomas said.

Not knowing where to turn for help, Thomas filed a complaint with the Tennessee attorney general’s Division of Consumer Affairs. In her complaint, she wrote that Advance “needs to stop abusing their power.”

“Now I cannot pay my rent,” she said.

The state investigated the case and took no action. By October 2022, Advance noted on one of Thomas’s monthly bills that it had “written off” her loan and closed her account. Unlike the other 110,000 Tennesseans who fell behind in their payments, Advance hasn’t sued Thomas, whose federal benefits are protected from garnishment.

The company also agreed in a letter to the state to “cease all communications” with Thomas, but Advance continues to send bills requesting a minimum payment of $226.49.

Thomas continues to receive bills requesting a minimum payment of $226.49 years after closing her account with Advance Financial. (Obtained by Tennessee Lookout and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Mollie Simon contributed research.

Correction

June 27, 2025: A call for tips at the top of this story originally misstated the extent of the connection between two companies. It is not clear if Harpeth Financial owns Action 247. The nature of the ownership of Action 247, which shares executives and addresses with Advance Financial, is not made public in Tennessee public documents, and leadership in all three entities refused to answer questions about who in fact owns the sportsbook.

by Tim Golden

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

The Trump administration has launched a major reorganization of the U.S. fight against drug traffickers and other transnational criminal groups, setting out a strategy that would give new authority to the Department of Homeland Security and deepen the influence of the White House.

The administration’s plans, described in internal documents and by government officials, would reduce federal prosecutors’ control over investigations, shifting key decisions to a network of task forces jointly led by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, the primary investigative arm of DHS.

Officials said the plan to bring law enforcement agencies together in the new Homeland Security Task Forces has been driven primarily by President Donald Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, who is closely overseeing the project’s implementation.

Current and former officials said the proposed reorganization would make it easier for senior officials like Miller to disregard norms that have long walled off the White House from active criminal investigations.

“To the administration’s credit, they are trying to break down barriers that are hard to break down,” said Adam W. Cohen, a career Justice Department attorney who was fired in March as head of the office that coordinates organized crime investigations involving often-competing federal agencies. “But you won’t have neutral prosecutors weighing the facts and making decisions about who to investigate,” he added of the task force plan. “The White House will be able to decide.”

The proposed reorganization would elevate the stature and influence of Homeland Security Investigations and Immigration and Customs Enforcement among law enforcement agencies, while continuing to push other agencies to pursue immigration-related crimes.

The task forces would at least formally subordinate the Drug Enforcement Administration to HSI and the FBI after half a century in which the DEA has been the government’s lead agency for narcotics enforcement.

Trump’s directive to establish the new task forces was included in an Inauguration Day executive order, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” which focused on immigration.

The new task forces will seek “to end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States,” the order states. They will also aim to “end the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking, with a particular focus on such offenses involving children.”

Since that order was issued, the administration has proceeded with considerable secrecy. Some Justice Department officials who work on organized crime have been excluded from planning meetings, as have leaders of the DEA, people familiar with the process said.

A White House spokesperson, Abigail Jackson, did not comment on Miller’s role in directing the task force project or the secrecy of the process. “While the Biden Administration opened the border and looked the other way while Americans were put at risk,” she said, “the Trump Administration is taking action to dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking and ensure the use of all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute immigration laws and to Make America Safe Again.”

The task force project was described in interviews with current and former officials who have been briefed on it. ProPublica also reviewed documents about the implementation of the task forces, including a briefing paper prepared for Cabinet-level officials on the president’s Homeland Security Council.

The Homeland Security Task Forces will take a “coordinated, whole-of-government approach” to combatting transnational criminal groups, the paper states. They will also draw support from state and local police forces and U.S. intelligence agencies.

Until now, the government has coordinated that same work through a Justice Department program established by President Ronald Reagan, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces — which the Trump administration is shutting down.

Known by the ungainly acronym OCDETF (pronounced “oh-suh-def”), the $550-million program is above all an incentive system: To receive funding, different agencies (including the DEA, the FBI and HSI) must come together to propose investigations, which are then vetted and approved by prosecutor-led OCDETF teams.

The agents are required to include a financial investigation of the criminal activity, typically with help from the Treasury Department, and they often recruit support from state and local police. The OCDETF intelligence center, located in the northern Virginia suburbs, manages the only federal database in which different law-enforcement agencies share their raw investigative files.

While officials describe OCDETF as an imperfect structure, they also say it has become a crucial means of law enforcement cooperation. Its mandate was expanded under the Biden and first Trump administrations to encompass all types of organized crime, not just drug trafficking.

As recently as a few months ago, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, declared that OCDETF would play a central role in stopping illegal immigration, drug trafficking and street gangs. He even suggested that it investigate the governments of so-called sanctuary cities for obstructing immigration enforcement.

But just weeks after Blanche’s announcement, the administration informed OCDETF officials their operations would be shut down by the end of the fiscal year in September. In a letter to Democratic senators on June 23, the Justice Department confirmed that the Homeland Security Task Forces would absorb OCDETF’s “mission and resources” but did not explain how the new structure would take charge of the roughly 5,000 investigations OCDETF now oversees.

“These were not broken programs,” said a former Homeland Security official who, like others, would only discuss the administration’s plans on condition of anonymity. “If you wanted to build them out and make sure that the immigration side of things got more importance, you could have done that. You did not have to build a new wheel.”

Officials also cited other concerns about the administration’s plan, including whether the new task force system will incorporate some version of the elaborate safeguards OCDETF has used to persuade law enforcement agencies to share their case files in its intelligence database. Under those rules, OCDETF analysts must obtain permission from the agency that provided the records before sharing them with others.

Many officials said they worried that the new task forces seem to be abandoning OCDETF’s incentive structure. OCDETF funds are conditioned on multiple agencies working together on important cases; officials said the monies will now be distributed to law enforcement agencies directly and without the requirement that they collaborate.

“They are taking away a lot of the organization that the government uses to attack organized crime,” a Justice Department official said. “If you want to improve something, great, but they don’t even seem to have a vision for how this is going to work. There are no specifics.”

The Homeland Security Task Forces will try to enforce interagency cooperation by a “supremacy clause,” that gives task force leaders the right to pursue the cases they want and shut down others that might overlap.

An excerpt from a planning document drafted for the president’s Homeland Security Council describes how the new Homeland Security Task Forces would take charge of major organized crime investigations. (Text reproduced from a document obtained by ProPublica.)

The clause will require “that any new or existing investigative and/or intelligence initiatives” targeting transnational criminal organizations “must be presented to the HSTF with a right of first refusal,” according to the briefing paper reviewed by ProPublica.

“Further,” it adds, “the supremacy clause prohibits parallel or competitive activities by member agencies, effectively eliminating duplicative structures such as stand-alone task forces or specialized units, to include narcotics, financial, or others.”

Several senior law enforcement officials said that approach would curtail the independence that investigators need to follow good leads when they see them; newer and less-visible criminal organizations would be more likely to escape scrutiny.

In recent years, those officials noted, both Democratic and Republican administrations have tried at times to short-circuit competition for big cases among law enforcement agencies and judicial districts. But that has often led to as many problems as it has solved, they said.

One notable example, several officials said, was a move by the Biden administration’s DEA administrator, Anne Milgram, to limit her agency’s cooperation with FBI and HSI investigations into fentanyl smuggling by Los Chapitos, the mafia led by sons of the Mexican drug boss Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as “El Chapo.”

Although the DEA eventually indicted the Chapitos’ leaders in New York, officials from other agencies complained that Milgram’s approach wasted months of work and delayed the indictments of some traffickers. Later, when the FBI secretly arranged the surrender of one of the sons, Joaquín Guzmán López, DEA officials were not told about the operation until it was underway, officials said. (Guzmán López initially pleaded not guilty but is believed to be negotiating with the government. Milgram did not respond to messages asking for comment.)

As to the benefits of competition, prosecutors and agents cite the case of El Chapo himself. Before he was extradited to the United States in January 2017, Guzmán Loera had been indicted by seven U.S. attorneys’ offices, reflecting yearslong investigations by the DEA, the FBI and HSI, among others. In the agreement that the Obama Justice Department brokered, three offices led the prosecution, which used the best evidence gathered by the others.

Under the new structure of the Homeland Security Task Forces, several officials said, federal prosecutors will still generally decide whether to bring charges against criminal groups, but they will have less of a role in determining which criminals to investigate.

Regional and national task forces will be overseen by “executive committees” that are expected to include political appointees, officials said. The committees will guide broader decisions about which criminal groups to target, they said.

“The HSTF model unleashes the full might of our federal law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to deliver justice for the American people, whose plight Biden and Garland ignored for four years,” a Justice Department spokesperson said, referring to former Attorney General Merrick Garland. “Any suggestion that the Department is abandoning its mission of cracking down on violent organized crime is unequivocally false.”

During Trump’s first term, veteran officials of the FBI, DEA and HSI all complained that the administration’s overarching focus on immigration diverted agents from more urgent national security threats, including the fentanyl epidemic. Now, as hundreds more agents have been dispatched to immigration enforcement, those officials worry that the new task forces will focus on rounding up undocumented immigrants who have any sort of criminal record at the cost of more significant organized crime investigations.

The first task forces to begin operating under the new model have not assuaged such concerns. In late May, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced that the Virginia Homeland Security Task Force had arrested more than 1,000 “criminal illegal aliens” in just two months, but the authorities have provided almost no details connecting those suspects to transnational criminal organizations.

Agents of Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI, part of the new Gulf of America Homeland Security Task Force, arrested dozens of undocumented immigrants in connection with a cockfighting ring in northern Alabama in mid-June. (Via HSI Atlanta’s X profile)

On June 16, the Gulf of America Homeland Security Task Force, a new unit based in Alabama and Georgia, announced the arrests of 60 people, nearly all of them undocumented immigrants, at a cockfighting event in northern Alabama. Although cockfighting is typically subject to a maximum fine of $50 in the state, a senior HSI official claimed the suspects were “tied to a broader network of serious crimes, including illegal gambling, drug trafficking and violent offenses.” Once again, however, no details were provided.

It is unclear how widely the new task force rules might be applied. While OCDETF funds the salaries of more than a thousand federal agents and hundreds of prosecutors, thousands more DEA, FBI and HSI agents work on other narcotics and organized crime cases.

In early June, five Democratic senators wrote to Bondi questioning the decision to dismantle OCDETF. That decision was first reported by Bloomberg News.

“As the Department’s website notes, OCDETF ‘is the centerpiece of the Attorney General’s strategy to combat transnational-organized crime and to reduce the availability of illicit narcotics in the nation,’” the senators wrote.

In a June 23 response, a Justice Department official, Daniel Boatright, wrote that OCDETF’s operations would be taken over by the new task forces and managed by the office of the Deputy Attorney General. But Boatright did not clarify what role federal prosecutors would play in the new system.

“A lot of good, smart people are trying to make this work,” said one former senior official. “But without having prosecutors drive the process, it is going to completely fracture how we do things.”

Veteran officials at the DEA — who appear to have had almost no say in the creation of the new task forces— are said to be even more concerned. Already the DEA has been fighting pressure to provide access to investigative files without assurances that the safeguards of the OCDETF intelligence center will remain in place, officials said.

“DEA has not even been invited to any of the task force meetings,” one former senior official said. “It is mind-boggling. They’re just getting orders saying, ‘This is what Stephen Miller wants and you’ve got to give it to us.’”

by Cezary Podkul

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Brian Maloney Jr. was flummoxed when he was served with a lawsuit against his family’s business, Middlesex Truck and Coach, in January. Maloney and his father, also named Brian, run the operation, located in Boston, which boasts that it can repair anything “from two axles to ten.” A burly man in his mid-50s who wears short-sleeved polo shirts emblazoned with the company name, Maloney Jr. has been around his dad’s shop since he was 8. The garage briefly surfaced in the media in 2012 when then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a campaign stop there and the Boston Herald featured Maloney Sr. talking about how he had built the business from nothing in a neighborhood he described as having been a “war zone.”

Now Middlesex was being sued by a New Jersey man who claimed he had been defrauded of $133,565 in a cryptocurrency scheme. The suit claimed Middlesex “controlled and maintained” a bank account at Chase that had been used to collect the fraudulent payment. The purported victim wanted his money back.

None of this made any sense to Maloney Jr. His company did not have an account at Chase, and he barely knew what crypto was. “For God’s sake, we fix trucks and still have AOL,” he would later say.

It was only after Maloney went to Chase to investigate that he was able to piece together at least part of the explanation. It turned out that Chase had allowed an unknown individual, who applied online with no identification, to open an account under Middlesex’s name, according to information Chase provided to Maloney. The account was then used to solicit hundreds of thousands of dollars from fraud victims, including the $133,565 from the man who was now trying to reclaim his funds.

Middlesex’s experience, as bizarre as it seems, is part of a global problem that plagues the banking industry. The account falsely opened in Middlesex’s name, and many others like it, are way stations in a sophisticated multistep money laundering process that transports cash from U.S. scam victims to crime syndicate bosses in Asia.

There’s been an explosion in international online fraud in recent years. Particularly widespread are “pig-butchering” schemes, as ProPublica reported in 2022. The macabre name derives from the process of methodically “fattening” victims by getting them to contribute more and more money to an investment scheme that seems to be succeeding, before eventually “butchering” them by taking all their deposits. Often operated by Chinese gangs out of prison-like compounds in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, pig-butchering in that region has reached a staggering $44 billion per year, according to a report by the United States Institute of Peace, and it likely involves millions of victims worldwide. The report called the Southeast Asian scam syndicates the “most powerful criminal network of the modern era.”

A huge portion of such fraud is transacted in cryptocurrency. But given that the typical consumer doesn’t own crypto, many scams unfold with a victim tapping a traditional bank account to wire dollars to swindlers, who receive the funds in their own accounts, then convert them into crypto to move across borders. Later in the process, the scammers will typically transfer their crypto back into standard currency.

Bank accounts are so crucial to this process that a thriving international black market has developed to rent accounts for fraud. That, it seems, is how a Chase account in the name of Middlesex ended up as a repository for the proceeds of pig-butchering.

The huge demand for accounts used for misbehavior gives banks a crucial, and not always welcome, role as gatekeepers — a responsibility required by U.S. law — to prevent criminals from opening accounts or engaging in money laundering. Yet from the U.S. to Singapore, Australia and Hong Kong, banks have consistently failed at that responsibility, according to experts who have investigated money laundering, as well as reviews of fraudulent account details shared by victims and court cases reviewed by ProPublica. The list of financial institutions whose accounts pig-butchering scammers have made use of includes global behemoths like Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, HSBC and Wells Fargo and many other U.S. and foreign lenders.

The banks said in statements to ProPublica that they make extensive efforts to fight fraud by investing in systems to detect suspicious activity and to report it to authorities (read the banks’ statements here). The American Bankers Association, which represents the industry, acknowledged that “with more than 140 million bank accounts opened every year bad actors can sometimes get through despite determined and ongoing efforts to stop them.” But the group said other industries like telecommunications providers and social media platforms need to do more to fight fraud because there’s only so much that financial institutions can do.

Pig-butchering scams present some unique challenges for banks. Among other things, a customer in thrall to a fraudster will sometimes foil their own bank’s attempts to prevent them from sending money to a criminal. And foreign-based scammers have become adept at finding middlemen in the U.S. to exploit the banking system. “Cyber-enabled fraud operations in Southeast Asia have taken on industrial proportions,” according to an October report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. John Wojcik, one of the authors of the report, told ProPublica, “Banks have never been targeted at this scale, in these ways.”

It doesn’t help that there are “no real standards as to what a bank has to do for detecting fraud or money laundering,” said Lester Joseph, a financial compliance consultant who used to oversee money laundering cases at the Department of Justice and later worked at Wells Fargo. The main law governing U.S. compliance regimes, the Bank Secrecy Act, requires financial institutions to maintain programs to know their customers and to detect and report suspicious activity to the government. That might mean noticing, say, that a newly opened account is suddenly receiving and sending hundreds of thousands of dollars of wire payments each month.

But it is up to banks to design those programs. The regulations don’t even require that the programs be effective. That gives banks wide flexibility on how much due diligence and monitoring to do — or not do. More scrutiny upfront means slowing down business and adding costs. Many banks don’t ask questions until it’s too late.

If you’re a criminal looking to obtain a bank account with no pesky formalities, it’ll take you only minutes to find one on the messaging app Telegram. Chinese forums there feature ads for “cars” or “fleets” — bank accounts or other online payment platforms that can be used to collect stolen funds. (The vehicle metaphor stems from the fact that in Chinese slang, money laundering operations are known as “motorcades.”) One Telegram ad offered accounts at PNC, Chase, Citi and Bank of America and boasted of “firsthand” control of the accounts: “People can go to the bank to transfer money,” the ad said.

An ad on Telegram, since taken down, offered bank accounts for “precision chat” — slang for pig-butchering — at Bank of America, Chase, Citibank and PNC. Under “advantages,” the ad listed “firsthand [control], people can go to the bank to transfer money … not a virtual account.” (Screenshot by Cezary Podkul)

Another Telegram channel listed various flavors of pig-butchering scams for which it provided bank accounts. The group, named KG Pay, boasted of accepting wire transfers, making withdrawals from U.S. banks and converting deposits into crypto to transfer them to scammers. KG offered to handle deposits of up to $1 million in accounts that imitate “normal business transactions.” To avoid suspicion, KG said, it sliced big amounts into smaller batches. If banks grew suspicious and froze one of its accounts, KG said, it had agents ready to call customer service to persuade them to lift the freeze. For smaller transfers, a video tutorial inside the channel showed how easy it was to send cash using the Chase app. (Telegram deleted the KG Pay channel after ProPublica asked about it. In a statement, Telegram said it “expressly forbids money laundering, scams and fraud and such content is immediately removed whenever discovered. Every month, over 10 million accounts, groups and channels are removed for breaching Telegram’s terms of service — including rules that prohibit money laundering and fraud.”)

Demand for money laundering is huge in Sihanoukville, a seedy gambling hub in Cambodia notorious for hosting massive scam operations. In some hotels above casinos there, blocks of guest rooms have been converted into offices where workers help fraudsters find motorcades to move illicit funds, according to a 2024 report by a doctoral anthropology student.

A walled complex in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, known to have housed scamming operations (Cindy Liu for ProPublica)

Inside those offices, the tap of keyboards and buzz of Telegram notifications suggested a trading floor at a stock exchange. But the work of the people interviewed by Yanyu Chen, the doctoral student, was very different. The workers, all Chinese and speaking on the condition of anonymity, were candid. They said they were tasked with matching cyberscam gangs with providers who could supply them with bank accounts to collect and move proceeds from fraud victims. In Telegram chat groups, the workers could see bank account suppliers and swindlers in need of accounts and would match the two and keep track of trades and commissions.

The business has become so mainstream that even one of Cambodia’s most prominent financial services firms, Huione Group, runs an online marketplace that allegedly facilitates such transactions. Its Telegram channels, including the one that included the aforementioned ad offering “firsthand” control of U.S. bank accounts, have helped launder funds for pig-butchering scams as well as heists linked to North Korea, according to the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. (Huione said in a statement that it is working to prevent abuse of its services and is “fully committed to collaborating with the U.S. Treasury Department to address expeditiously any and all concerns.”)

The workers interviewed by Chen were unperturbed about enabling fraud. One described the work as boring, little more than copying and pasting bank account info between scammers and motorcades. Another worker told her that he viewed himself as “solving a very old problem of getting into the banking system people who have long been shut out of it.”

The fraud that ensnared Middlesex Truck and Coach as a tangential victim covered thousands of miles via electronic byways. By all appearances, it emanated from Cambodia, then reached New Jersey, where a mark was persuaded to wire a total of $716,000 to accounts tied to purported businesses in Boston, New York, California, Hong Kong and elsewhere. All but a few appeared to have been incorporated by Chinese individuals, sometimes just days before their accounts started accepting large sums.

The fleecing of Kevin, who ProPublica agreed to identify by first name only, was a textbook example of pig butchering. Kevin had reached the stage in life when he wanted to ease his workload after a varied career as a financial planner, small-business owner and fitness instructor. Just before Christmas 2022, someone purporting to be a San Diego woman named Viktoria Zara friended Kevin on Facebook. She soon introduced him to a sleek crypto trading website called 3A on which she claimed to have made $700,000 on bitcoin futures. (Facebook deactivated Zara’s profile after ProPublica inquired about it, and a spokesperson said the social media company has “detected and disrupted over seven million accounts associated with scam centers” in Asia and the Middle East since the start of 2024.)

Kevin acknowledges he was seduced by the thrall of easy money. “Something came over me,” he said. Kevin accepted Zara’s offer to teach him how to trade and, within a few weeks, he was routinely wiring tens of thousands of dollars to various bank accounts to fund his trading.

The accounts were not registered to 3A. They were listed under a variety of companies he’d never heard of, such as Guangda Logistics and Danco Global.

Kevin found this odd. But Zara, his supposed friend, told him that was just how 3A operated, and Kevin felt safe wiring funds to accounts at Chase because of its size and reputation. Every time he did so, the sum showed up in his online 3A portal, making him think the transactions were real. Better yet, his investments had apparently soared; his account balance now read $1.4 million.

An excerpt from Kevin’s chat log with the purported 3A trading site shows how the scammers, claiming to be customer service reps, directed him to wire funds to companies other than 3A with accounts at Chase. (Courtesy of Kevin. Redacted by ProPublica.)

Like many a pig-butchering victim, Kevin realized something was off only when he went to withdraw his profits and 3A demanded that he first pay a “tax” of almost $134,000. Kevin knew from his financial planning days that wasn’t how things worked. But he set aside his doubts and went to his bank late one afternoon in April 2023 to wire the tax payment. He’d been given a fresh Chase account to send funds to and pressured to wire money within two hours.

This time, his money was addressed to Middlesex Truck and Coach. Kevin was so under the sway of his scammers at that point that he did not question the money’s destination. Nor did the teller at the TD Bank branch he went to. (TD declined to comment on Kevin’s case but said it trains employees to challenge customers when transactions seem suspicious and to warn them never to wire funds to people they do not know.)

As soon as Kevin got home, panic set in: 3A told him the Chase account to which he’d just wired $134,000 was frozen and that his tax payment would not go through. He would need to send another $134,000 to a different account. Confused, Kevin went back to TD first thing the next day and asked the teller to reverse the wire. Over the next two weeks, Kevin said, his bankers at TD called Chase three times but never got a response. (Chase did not answer ProPublica’s questions about Kevin’s efforts to recall his wire but said the wire recall process is challenging and rarely succeeds.)

It is possible to reverse a wire transfer if customers inform their banks quickly, before the transaction has been completed, according to lawyers and experts. But banks have no obligation to reverse a transfer even when a customer reports potential fraud. “It’s really up to the receiving institution if they release the funds and how they go after the customer on their end,” said Saskia Parnell, a banking industry veteran who now volunteers for an anti-scam group called Operation Shamrock.

As Kevin agonized, the 3A customer service reps dangled a solution: Just wire the funds again and unlock your $1.4 million. He feared TD wouldn’t let him send the wire again, so he switched to PNC Bank and sent a fresh $134,000 wire to another recipient at Cathay Bank in California. That yielded yet another tale about a purported government roadblock and the demand for yet another payment.

Kevin wasn’t thinking clearly. His son, who had struggled with substance abuse, had suddenly died of a fentanyl overdose. Kevin was overwhelmed with grief. He agreed to make another payment.

By June 2023, even a call from PNC’s fraud department declining his outgoing wire could not dissuade him. It was the only instance, out of the 11 times he attempted to wire money to scammers, that a bank stopped the transaction, according to Kevin, who did not have a history of making wire payments before. (PNC said in a statement that “we believe we took appropriate action.”)

It made no difference. Kevin’s mind was so clouded that he instead opened a new account at Wells Fargo. The switch illustrated another challenge: Even if one bank succeeds in preventing fraud, criminals can still win if another bank isn’t as diligent. (Wells Fargo said it invests hundreds of millions of dollars a year to fight scams).

After wiring $150,000 from Wells Fargo to two Chinese entities listed at a Singaporean bank, Kevin waited to receive his trading proceeds. But when all that resulted was another request that he wire money — $40,000 this time — Kevin finally grasped reality. He was now without a son, and his finances lay in ruins. “The whole world was coming to an end,” he recalled.

Kevin had preserved enough savings to hire a private investigator, John Powers of Hudson Intelligence, to follow the financial trail. Powers found a litany of red flags among the entities that had gotten bank accounts and received Kevin’s funds. Some of the businesses gave phony addresses, such as a vacant home. Another was registered to a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles that was also listed as the headquarters of a dozen other businesses set up since 2022 by different Chinese individuals. Contact info was scarce; official emails for two companies included the temporary email domain “netsmail.us,” which doesn’t connect to a functioning website. All of these ersatz businesses had accounts at Chase, Cathay or Singapore’s DBS Bank.

Chase said that it has policies to identify and verify the identities of its customers, and that it continually evaluates and enhances them. Cathay said it also reviews its systems and policies to detect and prevent fraudulent activity. DBS did not respond to requests for comment.

Another clue indicated that the banks had been doing business with a larger criminal enterprise. Two of the companies Kevin sent funds to, Guangda Logistics (which lists no contact information) and Danco Global (which did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment), showed up on a list of more than six dozen shell entities that had been used to defraud Americans of nearly $60 million. The information was uncovered in an investigation by the U.S. Secret Service into KG Pay, one of the money laundering groups that was on Telegram.

Kevin acknowledges he was seduced by the thrall of easy money. “Something came over me,” he said. Kevin ultimately wired a total of $716,000 to scammers’ accounts at Chase and other banks. (Christopher López for ProPublica)

The case of the man behind KG Pay sheds further light on how motorcades use U.S. banks. Daren Li, a Chinese national in his early 40s, went by the alias KG Perfect. Based in Cambodia, he directed the movement of large sums of pig-butchering proceeds from the U.S. to overseas. Li, who was arrested in April 2024 at the airport in Atlanta, pleaded guilty in November to conspiracy to commit money laundering. He admitted that at least $73.6 million of victim funds were deposited into bank accounts he and his co-conspirators controlled. Li, who is in federal detention awaiting sentencing, could not be reached for comment through his lawyer. Seven other people have pleaded guilty to conspiring with Li.

KG exploited a weakness in the U.S. banking system: Banks are reluctant to share account information, even after they’ve identified suspicious activity. A law enacted in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks gave banks a reprieve from secrecy rules if they alert one another to potential terrorism or money laundering activities. But the information sharing is voluntary and “banks are not communicating with each other,” according to Matt O’Neill, who led many money laundering investigations for the U.S. Secret Service during his 25 years there. “Fraudsters know it and fraudsters are clearly making hundreds of millions or billions of dollars off of this glaring gap in the system,” said O’Neill, who now runs 5OH Consulting.

One of the most prolific cogs in Li’s motorcade, according to civil and criminal cases, was a Chinese national named Hailong Zhu. He entered the U.S. on a tourist visa around 2019 and then stayed, working odd jobs in construction and at a restaurant. In 2022, Zhu was recruited to help Li’s other operatives set up businesses and bank accounts near Los Angeles in exchange for $70,000.

Zhu turned the assignment into a full-time job, eventually juggling seven accounts at Bank of America, Chase, East West Bank and Wells Fargo tied to two entities set up in his name: Sea Dragon Trading and Sea Dragon Remodel. When Bank of America restricted Zhu’s Sea Dragon Trading account due to suspected fraud on Oct. 19, 2022, Zhu got another account at Bank of America the next day using Sea Dragon Remodel. By Nov. 1, 2022, he had secured four more accounts at Chase, Wells Fargo and East West Bank. Except for varying his address and email, investigators found that Zhu provided largely the same info when opening accounts for the two shell entities.

Zhu’s account opening spree happened just a few months after federal prosecutors blamed “the corruption of BofA bankers” for a scheme in which a handful of employees opened 754 accounts at Bank of America registered to 13 false addresses in the Los Angeles suburbs. In that case, shadowy middlemen dispensed bribes of $200 to $250 per account to Bank of America employees who overrode internal compliance systems to open accounts for overseas Chinese citizens who weren’t physically present at the branch to open the accounts, in violation of the bank’s rules. Even when the bankers registered 176 customers to one small home, the accounts were still opened. (Two of the bankers later pleaded guilty to making false entries in bank records; Bank of America said in a statement that it “uncovered illegal activity using its monitoring systems, terminated the employees, and cooperated with law enforcement, who successfully prosecuted those involved. This is how our anti-money laundering program is designed to work.”)

With banks always one step behind, Zhu’s accounts kept receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from victims across the U.S. Zhu would bundle the proceeds and transfer them abroad. During one week in November 2022, for example, he received six wires totaling almost $52,000 into one of his accounts and wired out one lump sum of $53,000. The destination was a bank account in the Bahamas controlled by Li and others, who converted the funds into cryptocurrency for their journey to scam centers located overseas, including in Sihanoukville. Investigators discovered a crypto wallet address they believed Li controlled. Data from cryptocurrency analytics firm Crystal Intelligence shows the wallet address sent and received about $341 million of crypto across 16,800 transactions between April 2021 and April 2024.

Zhu was arrested in March 2023 and charged with bank fraud. His lawyers acknowledged at trial that their client opened bank accounts and moved funds but said that Zhu did not know his bosses were using them for criminal purposes. Zhu was acquitted after the attorneys persuaded the trial judge that using false information to obtain a bank account does not constitute a scheme to defraud a bank. Only months after the acquittal, Zhu was charged again, this time with money laundering offenses, in an indictment filed in December 2023. Zhu, who couldn’t be reached for comment, did not enter a plea and was listed as a fugitive as of March 2025.

In January 2024, Kevin, desperate to get his money back, sued the 10 companies to which he had wired money at the scammers’ behest, including Middlesex Truck and Coach. None replied to his lawsuit — most were shell entities, after all — until January 2025, when Kevin’s lawyer got an email from Brian Maloney Jr.

Maloney confessed that his staff had ignored the lawsuit when it was initially served because it looked like a scam. He said he’d never banked with Chase and had no idea about any account that had been used to defraud Kevin. Maloney agreed to go to the local Chase branch to investigate and try to help Kevin get his money back.

“I went to the bank and said, ‘What the hell is going on?’” Maloney told ProPublica. After spending nearly two hours with the local Chase branch manager, Maloney realized that he, too, was a victim of the bank’s lax procedures: He said the branch manager told him that Chase had allowed someone to obtain an account online in his company’s name in March 2023 with nothing more than a digital signature and an employer identification number, but no personal identification. That account had then accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of wire transfers. And now Maloney’s family business — not Chase — was the defendant in a lawsuit. “How is this legal?” he wondered. (Colin Schmitt, a retired FBI agent, said Chase could have mitigated the fraud by at least pausing incoming wire transfers to the fake Middlesex account and asking its owner to justify the transactions. “If you’re just using an account just for wires, that’s a big red flag,” Schmitt said.)

Still, there was a silver lining: The funds remained in the account. Not only Kevin’s $134,000, but almost $100,000 more from several other victims sat frozen inside since spring 2023.

Kevin was glad the money was still there, but he wondered why it took a lawsuit to unearth the info. “It does not seem like the system is tailored to give any deference to the victim,” he said. “That’s what frustrates me.” His lawyers advised him to seek an order from a federal judge to get his funds back and filed such a petition in March. After ProPublica asked Chase about Kevin’s funds in April, the bank agreed to return the money to him without a court order.

The $134,000 landed back in Kevin’s bank account in mid-May. Finally, he felt a sense of relief. (He has now dropped the suit against Middlesex.) But Kevin also wondered what would happen to the other people whose money got siphoned up by the fake Middlesex account. Would Chase wait for them to file lawsuits too?

Banks are starting to face lawsuits by pig-butchering victims who allege laxness in opening accounts. In December, a California man who was defrauded of nearly $1 million sued DBS and two other banks for alleged failures to comply with know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering laws. A college professor from Iowa who lost $700,000 filed a lawsuit in January against Hang Seng Bank in Hong Kong for failing to do proper due diligence on the people who opened accounts used to defraud him. Hang Seng reached an agreement with the Iowa professor to dismiss the suit and declined to comment further. DBS did not reply to requests for comment on the California case, but the bank asserted that the lawsuit contains “fatal flaws,” according to a filing in the suit.

Such cases are long shots, according to Carla Sanchez-Adams, senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. The suits typically fail because it’s hard to show that financial institutions knew or should have known about potential fraud.

Still, banks are well aware that fraud is on the rise. Nearly 1 in 3 Americans say they have been the victim of online fraud or cybercrime, according to a 2023 poll commissioned by Wells Fargo. “The scale of fraud taking place every day is a massive burden for our country and for the millions of hard-working women and men whose lives are affected by it,” Rob Nichols, president of the American Bankers Association, said in an October speech.

Nichols contends that “consumers credit the banking industry with doing more than other industries to protect them from fraud and keep their information safe.” He cited an initiative by the ABA to create a database of fraud contacts to help banks figure out who to call when there’s a problem. And he urged the Trump administration to develop a national fraud prevention strategy.

Other countries are taking more aggressive steps. In October, the U.K. began requiring banks to reimburse scam victims up to £85,000, or about $116,000, per claim when they make a fraudulent payment on behalf of their customers, even if the customers authorized the transfer. Australia recently enacted a law that will require banks to share suspect account info with one another. Thailand has gone even further, creating a Central Fraud Register intended to compel banks to identify and close accounts used for money laundering.

The U.S. lacks such rules. O’Neill, the former Secret Service agent, thinks that updating the Patriot Act, the post-9/11 law meant to encourage banks to share intel, would be a good place to start. But Congress has not moved in that direction and the Trump administration has shown no sign that it plans to prioritize this issue. (Asked what steps the administration is taking, a spokesperson told ProPublica to Google the administration’s sanctions related to pig-butchering scams.)

For now, bank accounts remain easy for fraudsters to obtain. A sleek-looking brokerage akin to 3A has been online for months, soliciting deposits for what a researcher at the Global Anti-Scam Organization identified as a pig-butchering scheme. Anyone wishing to “invest,” the brokerage said, can wire money to a shifting array of banks, including Chase.

Update, June 26, 2025: After this article was published, East West Bank replied to ProPublica’s prepublication requests for comment, saying the bank is “committed to maintaining the highest standards of regulatory compliance and customer protection” and that it has been “continuously enhancing our risk management and oversight processes, integrating fraud risk mitigation strategies, updating technologies, engaging external expertise, and improving educational resources on fraud prevention.”

Doris Burke contributed research.

by Spencer Norris, New York Focus

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with New York Focus, an investigative news outlet reporting on New York. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week, and sign up for New York Focus’ newsletter here.

Jasmine Stradford sat on her porch near Binghamton, New York, with toys, furniture, garbage bags full of clothing and other possessions piled up around her. She and her partner were being evicted after falling behind on rent.

So last June, they and their children — then ages 3, 12 and 15 — turned to New York’s emergency shelter system for help. It was built to provide homeless residents not only beds, but also food, help finding permanent housing and sometimes child care so parents can find work, attend school or look for apartments.

Stradford and her family received almost none of that. Instead of placing them in a shelter, the Broome County Department of Social Services cycled them through four roadside hotels over three months, where they mostly had to fend for themselves.

“I remember staring at my kids, thinking that I’d failed them,” Stradford said. “Then I remember going to DSS and being completely dehumanized.”

Stradford’s family was part of a growing trend: In the past few years, hotels have quietly become the state’s predominant response to homelessness outside New York City. New York Focus and ProPublica found that the state’s social services agencies placed just under half the 34,000 individuals and families receiving emergency shelter outside the city in fiscal year 2024 in hotels — up from 29% in 2018. The change was most pronounced in Broome County, where hotel cases more than quintupled.

Statewide spending on hotels more than tripled over that period to $110 million, according to an analysis of state temporary housing data by the news organizations. In total, hotels outside New York City were paid about $420 million to shelter unhoused people from April 2017 to September 2024.

Statewide Spending on Hotels More Than Tripled From 2018 to 2024 Data source: Analysis of Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance data on emergency shelter payments. Years are fiscal years. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

It’s a makeshift arrangement that provides people a roof over their head but little else. State regulations exempt hotels from providing the same services that families are supposed to receive in the shelter system.

The hotels are “less supportive, less conducive for good health outcomes, good education outcomes,” said Adam Bosch, CEO of Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress, a policy research nonprofit. “If our ultimate goal is to get people moving back toward independence, sticking them in a hotel on a hillside away from services, away from schools, away from transportation networks is not a great strategy.”

Homelessness in New York City received intense media coverage as the migrant crisis became fodder in the presidential election. But far less attention has been paid to the homeless population throughout the rest of New York, which far surpasses most other states on its own.

Few of the migrants were relocated to hotels outside the city. Instead, the spike in hotel housing stems from a combination of soaring rent, dozens of shelter closures and what housing advocates and industry representatives said was a botched response to the end of the state’s pandemic-related eviction moratorium in 2022. After the moratorium ended, landlords began evicting tenants at rates exceeding previous years. With fewer shelters and more people in need, the number of individuals and families placed in hotels shot up.

An unhoused family living at the Knights Inn in Endwell, New York. It was one of the hotels where the Broome County Department of Social Services placed the Stradford-Moses family. (Michelle Gabel for ProPublica)

Barbara Guinn, the commissioner of the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, said in an interview that her agency hadn’t studied the growth in hotel use for emergency shelter. The trend has been scarcely mentioned at legislative hearings in Albany.

But OTDA, which supervises the county social services offices, has long known about the problems the hotels present. In early 2020, state auditors warned the agency that it wasn’t adequately overseeing shelters, including hotels used as temporary housing. OTDA acknowledged that hotels present challenges because they don’t have on-site support services or the same level of supervision as shelters.

Samir, Moses and Stradford’s 3-year-old son, tries to pass the time in one of the hotel rooms the family stayed in after its eviction. (Courtesy of Jasmine Stradford)

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Rules clarifying the requirement that temporary housing recipients in hotels receive shelter-like services have been on OTDA’s regulatory agenda for at least four years. But the agency, and lawmakers who oversee it, stood by as hotel housing increased. Guinn said she couldn’t “provide insight” on why the agency never formally proposed the rules, but she committed to advancing them this year. The Broome County Department of Social Services did not make its commissioner, Nancy Williams, available for an interview and did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

Reporting across the state, the news organizations found people living for months and sometimes years in hotels, doing what they can to get by. Families share beds while their belongings fill the corners of their rooms. Without kitchens and barred from using most appliances, they trek down shoulderless highways to grocery stores or scour food pantries for anything they can cook in a microwave. They squish cockroaches skittering in dressers. And hotels often force them to move out every few weeks, keeping stability out of reach.

The four hotels that Stradford’s family was placed in last summer collectively made about $10,000 sheltering it over three months — more than what the family owed in back rent. That works out to more than twice the monthly fair market rent for a four-bedroom apartment in Binghamton at the time.

New York Social Services Agencies Frequently Paid Hotels Over Fair Market Rent for a Two-Bedroom Apartment

Nearly half of all payments to hotels were for more than twice the counties’ FMR.

Data Source: Analysis of Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance data on emergency shelter payments; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development fair market rent data for two-bedroom apartments in each county for federal fiscal year 2024. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

This isn’t unusual. County social services offices regularly pay the hotels rates that are worth many times fair market rent for permanent housing in their areas, according to the analysis of OTDA’s housing payment data. One motel in Rome, outside Utica, that was the scene of a shooting last fall charged the county $250 a night for a room at times, according to invoices submitted to the county’s Department of Social Services.

Over three months, Stradford’s family struggled to maintain some semblance of its old life while bouncing from hotel to hotel. The family would lose countless possessions. The kids’ educations would be disrupted, as the school bus failed to keep up with their moves. Their experiences would show the importance of the services they weren’t receiving and what happens to New York’s homeless families when they can’t access them.

“It’s Like Malpractice”

Stradford and her partner, Tiberious Moses, had been evicted after she missed work at a children’s group home while recovering from surgery and Moses struggled to support the family with temporary jobs. At first, Stradford was relieved when the Department of Social Services informed her that it would place them in a hotel instead of a shelter.

“Going to the hotel, I originally thought, ‘OK, this gives a little bit more leeway, a little bit more comfort, hospitality, all of that,’ only to find out that it’s not that at all,” she said. “If you are a DSS recipient, you’re nothing. You are the bottom of the pit.”

Stradford’s family — two adults, three children and four dogs — was packed into a room with two beds at an Econo Lodge sandwiched between a gas station and another budget hotel. Stradford said she found cockroaches and had trouble getting the hotel to clean their room. She said she often saw drug use at the hotel and felt unsafe. Law enforcement and emergency services were called to the hotel 116 times in the first half of that year, dispatch logs show.

Despite those conditions, the Econo Lodge received more money to house temporary assistance recipients than any other known hotel outside New York City, according to the OTDA payments data for the 2024 fiscal year. The hotel, now called Hillside Inn & Suites, served more than 900 individuals and families placed by the Department of Social Services for at least 30,000 total nights, earning over $2.3 million.

The Hillside Inn & Suites, formerly an Econo Lodge, in Binghamton, New York. The Stradford-Moses family spent 26 nights here. (Michelle Gabel for ProPublica)

“We’re forced to rent hotel rooms across the state, and the operators of these places understand that,” said state Sen. Roxanne Persaud, chair of the chamber’s Social Services Committee. “The municipalities’ backs are against the wall. And so they must place the unhoused person or persons somewhere. And so that’s why you see the cost is skyrocketing, because people understand that it’s an easy way to make money off the government.”

OTDA’s regulations say hotels should be considered shelters and provide services if they are used “primarily” as temporary housing for homeless welfare recipients. At least 16 hotels appear to house mostly welfare recipients, the analysis showed.

OTDA spokesperson Anthony Farmer said the agency interprets “primarily” to mean hotels that “house recipients exclusively, or almost exclusively, throughout the year.” He said that hotels aren’t required to deliver services but that county social services agencies “are responsible for some level of service provision.” The state, however, doesn’t regularly collect information on how counties provide services. Guinn said OTDA plans to create a formal process for counties to submit it under new regulations.

(Illustration by ProPublica)

The Econo Lodge’s contract with Broome County doesn’t call for the services offered by shelters, like food and assistance finding housing. It requires the hotel to provide little more than a room with housekeeping, linens and toiletries. The hotel’s CEO, Paresh Patel, declined to comment.

In contrast, traditional shelters often put a significant amount of their funding toward social services. Shelter budgets obtained from OTDA show that they frequently retain at least part-time employees to prepare food and help people find jobs and housing. Local social services offices try to offset the lack of on-site services by hiring caseworkers but have struggled to retain them.

Instead, hotel residents like Stradford’s family are caught in a web of conflicts between the way those services are provided, the strings attached to benefits and the rules and limitations of living in hotels. Social services departments might provide them food stamps to buy groceries, but hotel residents usually don’t have kitchens and are often not allowed to have appliances like hot plates. To keep their lodging, they’re generally required to seek housing and to work or look for jobs, but they often don’t receive child care. They have to regularly meet with caseworkers at social services offices but must rely on spotty public transportation.

“To me, it’s like malpractice as a homeless services provider to place people without support services” in hotels, said Deborah Padgett, a professor of social work at New York University. “It’s good in the sense that they get more privacy, but for them to get a life and not be dependent on the government, they need to be close to services and not be punished for making mistakes.”

Guinn said that her agency would prefer counties use regulated shelters in housing emergencies but that there aren’t enough beds to accommodate everyone. Social services offices must rely on hotels when shelters don’t have space or don’t exist in a particular county, Farmer said in an email.

After 26 nights, Broome County relocated Stradford’s family to the Quality Inn & Suites in Vestal, a Binghamton suburb down the Susquehanna River that’s home to Binghamton University. Stradford’s car had been repossessed, so they stuffed a suitcase and the kids’ book bags with as many clothes as they could and hopped on the bus.

(Illustration by ProPublica)

At the Quality Inn, the family struggled to eat. They had applied for food stamps, but Stradford said she couldn’t get wage records from her former employer proving she was eligible. Instead, the county provided them a restaurant allowance worth about $15 a day to cover all five of them. To get by, they took the bus to food pantries like Catholic Charities, which had started creating “hotel bags” stuffed with canned food, oatmeal, crackers, macaroni and cheese and snacks for the kids — anything that could be eaten cold or prepared with a microwave.

While many shelters provide food on site, contracts between the hotels and Broome County forbid emergency housing recipients from eating the hotels’ food. Stradford said her family was threatened with removal from the Quality Inn after her 12-year-old daughter, Taylor, tried to eat the continental breakfast.

“When we first started taking families on, we did allow breakfast, and unfortunately there was too much being carried away, so we chose to change that,” the hotel’s general manager, Bernadine Morris, said. The Quality Inn has since closed and could not be reached for follow-up questions.

People can get kicked out of hotels and lose their housing assistance for repeatedly violating hotels’ policies, including by using their own cooking appliances. One woman who previously lived at the Motel 6 in Binghamton said she avoided sanctions by throwing an extension cord from the window of her second-story room to use a pressure cooker on the sidewalk.

Stradford’s nonstop juggling act left her on edge. She was grieving her mother’s death, feeding five people and four dogs, apartment-hunting and hustling to culinary classes and social services appointments. She said her children started feeling the stress too: Her 3-year-old, Samir, was wetting the bed frequently, and the older kids missed classes for their summer courses.

The family began butting heads with Quality Inn managers, who accused them of being disruptive and terminated their stay, according to Stradford’s social services case file.

“I’m not totally surprised that they run into problems with the hotel supervisors and the staff just because they’re trying to find some way to get their needs attended to, and it’s not really fair to expect the hotel to do what those people are not trained to do,” Padgett said.

During the three months her family lived in hotels, Stradford’s nonstop juggling act left her on edge. (Michelle Gabel for ProPublica)

Shelters are required to have enough qualified staff to meet residents’ needs. The staff members generally have at least some training in how to handle populations with complex needs, said Elizabeth Bowen, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo School of Social Work.

After Stradford and her family lost their room at the Quality Inn, the county sanctioned them and declined to find them a new place to stay. Moses, who had just gotten a job at Dave & Buster’s, paid out of his own pocket for a room at the Red Roof Inn in Johnson City. When they arrived, the woman at the front desk saw their belongings and dogs and told them the motel wouldn’t honor the reservation. They had used what little money was left on Ubers and the room deposit. The motel did not return requests for comment.

As it rained, Stradford got ahold of the Department of Social Services and pleaded their case. The county decided to continue housing her family until her sanction could be appealed. It booked them at the Knights Inn, another 10 minutes down the road in a town called Endwell.

“I Got Into Protection Mode”

Stradford’s family became skilled at sleeping on a single bed at the Knights Inn. Stradford, Moses, Samir and 15-year-old De’Vante would sleep side by side while Taylor slept horizontally at their feet.

The rest of the facility was in chaos, Stradford said. She saw hypodermic needles and other drug paraphernalia lying in the grass and underneath the stairwell and people slumped over while standing beside the dumpster. Over about six years that the county used it for temporary housing, law enforcement and emergency services were summoned to the motel for 789 incidents, including assaults, overdoses, robberies, domestic disputes and mental health crises.

Note: Knights Inn charged $109.09 per day for two rooms for at least part of their stay. (Illustration by ProPublica)

The Knights Inn had a litany of issues that prevented it from passing Broome County Social Services’ inspections from 2018 to 2021. According to inspection reports, the rooms were dimly lit due to missing light bulbs and broken lamps. The walls were stained and punched through, and the wallpaper peeled off. Some rooms’ doors didn’t lock. Windows didn’t either or were broken. Carpets were torn, and inspectors found cockroaches in dressers.

Health and safety issues plague hotels used as emergency shelters across the state. A 2020 state comptroller audit found that 60% of the hotels they reviewed outside New York City were in “unsatisfactory” condition — about the same as the percentage of shelters.

One woman, who was living with her children in a motel south of Albany, showed paint flaking off their walls and mattresses covered in black mold. Two other parents placed in the motel said they felt that if the Department of Social Services caught them in private housing that resembled their living conditions, their kid could be taken away by Child Protective Services.

OTDA requires social services agencies to inspect hotels housing families every six months. But an analysis of OTDA compliance data showed that social services districts often fail to keep up with hotel inspections: About 40% of the 351 hotels used to house homeless people outside New York City were out of date on their social services inspections as of mid-October or didn’t have an inspection date listed.

Farmer, the OTDA spokesperson, said that most hotels had been inspected within a year and that some others had stopped housing people.

Even when social services agencies do inspections, records show they sometimes fail to take action. Hotels have to correct problems within 30 days, unless it’s a safety problem. If they don’t, counties are supposed to stop placing people there, according to a directive from OTDA.

Records show that the Knights Inn fixed some of the issues as it went but continued to get written up in every inspection for two and a half years. Despite this, Broome County placed hundreds of social services cases there, earning the motel over $750,000.

A Knights Inn manager, Aizaz Siddiqui, said that the motel moved people out of rooms that needed the most work until they were renovated.

In January 2021, the county said it would stop placing people at the Knights Inn until the violations were corrected. The motel received a clean inspection in July 2022. But Stradford said the Knights Inn wouldn’t give them toilet paper or fresh sheets, which are required in shelters. A bedsheet was used as a curtain for their rear window.

Taylor and Samir watch TV in the Knights Inn room. (Courtesy of Jasmine Stradford)

The family stayed for three weeks, but tensions with management boiled over when the family failed to get rid of their dogs by the deadline set by the motel. Eventually, the Knights Inn told them to leave. After giving them a few extra days to find other accommodations, Siddiqui called the police to remove them.

Siddiqui said the families placed at the inn by the Department of Social Services deserve sympathy, but he still has to maintain order. “It’s a tough situation to be in, and we try to work with them as much as we can,” he said. “But again, we do have to fulfill our policies, and we have to stand by them.” The motel declined to respond to additional questions about the conditions.

Stradford’s family didn’t have anywhere else to go. As the State Police arrived, she planted herself on a red cooler in front of their room and refused to leave until the county found them somewhere to stay.

Some community activists she met through local charity work showed up to support her and livestreamed the incident on Facebook.

Note: Motel 6 charged $190 per day for two rooms. (Illustration by ProPublica)

After a three-hour standoff, management relented and allowed the family to stay two more nights. One of the activists arrived with a U-Haul and drove their stuff to the Motel 6, a 15-minute drive back up the river, past the Econo Lodge on the outskirts of Binghamton.

Things were initially calm at the Motel 6. But about three weeks into their stay, the Motel 6 complained to the county that Stradford had left the children alone, which they were told violated the motel’s guest policy. Stradford said she was doing charity work at the time but complained that she couldn’t attend school or meet the state’s requirements to look for housing if she had to constantly supervise her children.

The motel gave the family the weekend to leave. When they missed their checkout time, the Sheriff’s Office came to remove them.

Moses called Stradford, who was at school, to tell her what was happening. She headed to the Department of Social Services to plead their case.

“I got into protection mode,” Stradford said. “I wasn’t going to leave there and just put myself in a seriously homeless situation. So I told them I wasn’t leaving until I knew that we had a secure spot to go to.”

But her attempts failed. The agency said it would no longer help her family due to the complaints. The clerk used a special tool to unlock the room for the deputies.

Community members once again showed up to livestream the encounter and pressure the county. The Sheriff’s Office helped the family find a motel, where it stayed for two more nights.

In the end, it wasn’t New York’s social services system that found stable housing for Stradford’s family; it was a local landlord who heard about the case and offered an apartment at a rate the family could afford on Moses’ wages and temporary assistance from the county.

Moses holds Samir in the family’s new apartment. (Michelle Gabel for ProPublica)

Stradford’s family was placed in hotels for 89 days, about the average for a social services case. Many stay far longer. More than 1,500 individuals and families spent six months or more in hotels, according to payment data from the 2024 fiscal year.

“Some of us really get into a hard time and we really do need the help. We don’t just rely on the system,” Stradford said. “I pay my hard-earned tax dollars. I worked multiple jobs. I’m the one that tried to keep afloat and stuff like that. But things happen in life.”

Between their six moves, the family lost most of its possessions: furniture, Social Security cards, birth certificates, tax documents, family photos, laptops, coats, a painting from someone Jasmine was taking care of, Samir’s toy box, Taylor’s art projects and a blanket covered in motivational quotes that Stradford’s mom had given her before she passed. They had to give up two of their dogs.

When they arrived at their new home, they had only a couple of suitcases and garbage bags full of clothes.

(Illustration by ProPublica) How We Measured Hotel Stays

To track temporary housing recipients placed in hotels, New York Focus and ProPublica used data obtained from the New York Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance through an open records request. The data contains 1.1 million payments issued from April 2017 to September 2024 for emergency shelter stays outside New York City. OTDA repeatedly delayed releasing the data for 10 months but finally did so after ProPublica’s attorneys got involved in the appeals process.

The data classified payments by type of shelter, including family shelters, transitional housing and hotels. It also included an “emergency shelter” category for temporary housing assistance provided before a case is fully approved, which can flow to both hotels and shelters.

Our analysis includes only payments explicitly classified as hotel payments. We excluded some payments that were classified as hotel payments but where the recipients appeared to be nonprofits that operated homeless shelters.

The data also included unique IDs for each assistance case that received shelter, allowing us to determine how many people stayed in hotels and for about how long. Each case represents either an individual or a family.

To find hotels that housed mostly welfare recipients, New York Focus and ProPublica relied on each hotel’s total number of rooms reported to the New York State Department of Health and checked whether shelter payments covered at least half of the hotel’s total capacity from April 1, 2023, to March 31, 2024.

The data listed the start and end date for each payment, but it was not always clear whether the stay was inclusive or exclusive of the final date. As a result, we chose to exclude the final night whenever counting up dates to create the most conservative estimates possible, unless the payment covered a single night. When comparing the payments against fair market rent, we included the final night, which would decrease the daily rate.

Hotels used to house homeless families outside New York City must be inspected by counties once every six months. After that, the district has 30 days to submit the report to OTDA for review.

OTDA provided a database of inspections for hotels as of Oct. 15, 2024. To determine whether a hotel was past due on inspection, we checked whether the most recent inspection was completed and submitted to OTDA in the seven months leading up to that date. In some cases, the inspection may have been conducted but was not submitted to the state on time.

This story was supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

If you have been placed in a hotel or have information about the use of hotels as emergency housing in New York, contact New York Focus reporter Spencer Norris at 570-690-3469 or spencer@nysfocus.com.

Joel Jacobs contributed data reporting.

by Debbie Cenziper, Megan Rose, Brandon Roberts and Irena Hwang

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

In 2022, three Food and Drug Administration inspectors headed to India to investigate a massive Sun Pharma plant that produces dozens of generic drugs for Americans. Over two weeks, they found dangerous breakdowns in the way critical medications were made, and the FDA ultimately placed the factory on an import ban — prohibiting the company from shipping drugs to the United States.

The agency, however, quietly gave the global manufacturer a special pass to continue sending more than a dozen drugs to Americans even though they were made at the same substandard factory that was officially banned from the U.S. market.

It wasn’t the first time. Here are the key takeaways from ProPublica’s 14-month investigation into the FDA’s oversight of foreign drugmakers:

• Over a dozen years, the agency entrusted to protect America’s drug supply gave similar exemptions to some of the most troubled foreign drugmakers in India, allowing factories banned from the U.S. market to continue shipping medications to an unsuspecting American public.

• A secretive group inside the FDA exempted the medications from import bans, ostensibly to prevent drug shortages. With each pass, the agency dismissed warnings from its own inspectors about dangerous breaches in drug quality on factory floors. All told, the FDA allowed into the United States at least 150 drugs or their ingredients from banned factories found to have mold, foul water, dirty labs or fraudulent testing protocols. Nearly all came from factories in India.

• The FDA did not regularly test the drugs exempted from import bans to see if they were safe or actively monitor reports about potential harm among patients. And as the drugs circulated in the United States, the agency kept the practice largely hidden from the public. The FDA said it put protective measures in place, such as requiring third-party oversight of factories to ensure the exempted drugs were safe.

• Some of the exempted drugs were recalled — just before or just after they were exempted — because of contaminants or other defects that could cause health problems. And a ProPublica analysis identified more than 600 complaints in the FDA’s files about the exempted drugs at three factories alone, each flagging concerns in the months or years after the medications were excluded from import bans. The reports cite about 70 hospitalizations and nine deaths.

• Janet Woodcock, who for more than two decades led the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said she didn’t see a need to inform the public about the drugs from banned factories because the agency believed they were safe and that such information would create “some kind of frenzy” among consumers who might seek to change their prescriptions. “We had to kind of deal with the hand we were dealt,” she said, noting she supported the exemptions to deal with chronic drug shortages.

• Decisions made by the FDA decades ago gave rise to the use of exemptions. In the 2000s, as the cost of brand-name drugs soared, the FDA approved hundreds of generic drug applications for foreign manufacturers that had been in trouble before, companies well-known to the inspectors working to stamp out safety and quality breakdowns.

• The exempted drugs that have come to the United States include antibiotics, chemotherapy treatment, antidepressants, sedatives and epilepsy medication.

Sun Pharma did not respond to multiple requests for comment. When the FDA imposed the ban, the company said it would “undertake all necessary steps to resolve these issues and to ensure that the regulator is completely satisfied with the company’s remedial action. Sun Pharma remains committed to being … compliant and in supplying high-quality products to its customers and patients globally.”

Patricia Callahan and Vidya Krishnan contributed reporting. Alice Crites contributed research.

by Debbie Cenziper and Megan Rose

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

Joe DeMayo always knew his healthy years could end abruptly, bound to the lifespan of a transplanted kidney about the size of a small fist. But as the father of a toddler, he had hoped to have more time.

When he was 33, his wife had donated her kidney to him, a milestone that changed the course of DeMayo’s life. The relentless fatigue, nose bleeds and itchy skin brought on by his own poorly functioning kidneys vanished, and he felt good enough to leave home in Philadelphia for a new beginning in the foothills of northern California.

Over long afternoons, DeMayo would hike in the mountains with his wife and their black-and-white mutt, Fausto. When his son was born, he’d imagined himself coaching baseball games, clad in Phillies gear.

But his donated kidney started to fail in early 2023, much earlier than expected. The decline came as a surprise to DeMayo, who had been faithfully taking his medications, including tacrolimus, an essential immunosuppression drug that helps stave off organ rejection.

Joe DeMayo, his wife and son at Christmas in 2022. About a year later he would have a second kidney transplant. (Courtesy of Joe DeMayo)

DeMayo didn’t know at the time that the capsules he swallowed twice a day precisely 12 hours apart could have left him vulnerable — or that one of the most formidable drug regulators in the world may have failed to protect him.

As he grew weaker, his kidney unable to cleanse his body of excess fluid and waste, investigators from the Food and Drug Administration headed to western India to inspect the factory that manufactured DeMayo’s tacrolimus and other generic drugs for American consumers.

It was at least the eighth time since 2015 that the FDA had been there, and each of those visits had uncovered problems in the way the drugs were made, government records show.

During the inspection in the spring of 2023, investigators discovered the Intas Pharmaceuticals factory had, among other things, manipulated drug-testing records to cover up the presence of particulate matter — which could include glass, fiber or other contaminants — in the company’s drugs.

Unaware of the inspection, DeMayo continued taking his tacrolimus capsules. He fought exhaustion and struggled to hold onto his job behind a deli counter.

“Daddy needs a new kidney,” he recalled telling his 5-year-old son at the time.

DeMayo’s tacrolimus medication (George Etheredge, special to ProPublica)

That November, the FDA barred the Intas factory from exporting drugs to the United States. But under a long-standing practice uncovered by ProPublica, the agency excluded certain medications from the factory-wide ban, including tacrolimus, allowing the drugs to continue flowing to the U.S.

In a statement to ProPublica, Intas, whose U.S. subsidiary is Accord Healthcare, said that the company could not comment on the cases of individual patients but that its tacrolimus is safe and effective. The company said it immediately responded to the FDA’s inspection findings, launching a program focused on quality and investing millions of dollars in upgrades and new hires. Intas also said that some exempted drugs were never shipped to the United States but would not provide details.

“Intas is well on its way towards full remediation of all manufacturing sites,” the company said.

ProPublica’s investigation found the FDA has allowed more than 150 drugs or their ingredients from banned factories into the country over the past dozen years, ostensibly to prevent drug shortages.

The agency did not routinely test the drugs or actively look for signs of sudden or unexplained reactions among patients. And the exemptions were largely kept hidden from Congress and the public, including patients like DeMayo, who counted on his medication to keep him alive.

DeMayo filled another prescription for tacrolimus only days before the FDA exempted it from the Intas import ban and continued taking the capsules until just before his second transplant surgery at Temple University Hospital in January 2024.

“I’m trying to do the right thing, take all my medicine,” said DeMayo, 45, who took Intas tacrolimus for two years. “If I’m doing all that, shouldn’t somebody be doing their due diligence?”

In a statement, the FDA said drugmakers that receive a pass from import bans are required to conduct additional safety and quality testing and hire third-party experts to assess the results before shipping medication to the United States. Current and former FDA officials said those measures are faulty. Many of the companies have been cited before for testing protocols that were ineffective or prone to fraud.

DeMayo, now recovered from his second transplant surgery, gave ProPublica two bottles of his unused Intas tacrolimus capsules. ProPublica had them tested at Valisure, an independent, accredited lab in Connecticut.

The Testing Process

I. Preparation Valisure conducted three separate tests on DeMayo’s medication. For two of the analyses, technicians emptied the material inside the capsules onto a scale so precise that it protects samples from the movement of air. The material was then put into a solution for testing.

II. Assessment for Dosage For the first assessment, technicians used a machine to separate, identify and quantify compounds in the solution.

The liquid was poured into tiny vials and then assessed for physical and chemical properties. The analysis revealed how much of the medication’s key ingredient was present and whether it matched the dosage levels described on the label.

III. Testing for Contaminants Valisure also tested the drug for the presence of toxic elements, including lead, arsenic and mercury. The liquid was put into a machine that breaks down chemicals into atoms using plasma that is 18,000 degrees — hotter than the surface of the sun.

IV. Testing for Dissolution In the third assessment, a technician prepared a liquid that simulates stomach acid.

Then, the technician placed the pills into small metal cages and dropped them into the liquid.

The testing machine measured how fast the drug dissolved and whether the capsules provided the right amount of medication at the right time.

(Photography by George Etheredge, special to ProPublica)

In their first test, the scientists at Valisure found that some of DeMayo’s pills contained an adequate amount of the key ingredient but others contained a lower amount than the minimum level set by U.S. regulation. Pharmacists, doctors and other experts said underdosing can leave patients vulnerable to organ rejection.

Valisure did not find any substantive contamination in DeMayo’s medication.

But the scientists found another potential problem. The capsules dissolved quickly — up to three times faster than the name brand. Rapid dissolution can introduce too much of the drug too quickly, experts said, potentially causing tremors, headaches and kidney failure.

Note: Data was modeled by Valisure using the Weibull model. The chart depicts modeled data for 1 mg capsules. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

ProPublica did not test tacrolimus made by any other manufacturer. In its statement, Intas said that the findings are “unrelated to the [FDA’s] inspections” and that the FDA had determined the drug was equivalent to the brand-name version when it was first approved for the U.S. market.

Valisure previously tested Intas’ tacrolimus for the Department of Defense, which is conducting safety and quality testing on more than three dozen drugs commonly used by U.S. service members and their families. Those tests, too, showed the capsules dissolved too quickly.

“This is an alarming signal of other quality issues that can be affecting patient care,” said retired Army Col. Vic Suarez, who helped launch the Defense Department effort and is assisting on the project.

The FDA conducted its own studies of Intas’ tacrolimus in recent years and reported a similar result on its website. The agency noted there was no apparent risk of organ rejection but said the Intas generic could create toxins in the body, which can cause kidney damage. The FDA said the capsules may not provide the same therapeutic effect as the brand-name version.

The findings were made public in September 2023. Weeks later, the agency went on to excuse the drug from the Intas import ban, allowing the company to continue shipping tacrolimus to the United States.

Janet Woodcock, who for years led the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in an interview that the results of the testing are concerning and that the agency should quickly “try to sort them out.”

“This obviously was a quality problem,” she said.

Woodcock did not say why the FDA exempted the drug from the import ban imposed on the Intas factory. Though Woodcock approved exemptions for years, she had left the center and was serving as the FDA’s principal deputy commissioner when the exemptions for tacrolimus and other Intas drugs were made.

DeMayo said he’ll never know whether the medication contributed to the loss of his donated kidney. Organ rejection, which can happen quickly or over years, is among the most common causes of kidney failure in transplant patients, but kidneys can fail for other reasons, too, said Joseph Vassalotti, chief medical officer at the National Kidney Foundation.

In DeMayo’s case, he was hospitalized with a stomach virus and dehydration the same year his kidney function started to decline. Still, he questions the drug that was supposed to protect him and worries that other transplant patients who have taken Intas tacrolimus could be at risk.

One and a half years after the FDA banned the factory from shipping drugs to the United States, tacrolimus is still excluded. A customer service agent for the company said Intas recently stopped distributing the drug, but the company did not respond to a request for comment.

“The people who oversee the pills are failing and the people who are making the pills are failing,” DeMayo said. “How did it get so bad?”

In January, one year after his second kidney transplant, DeMayo went to Temple University Hospital for a follow-up appointment. (First and third photos: Hannah Yoon for ProPublica. Second photo: George Etheredge, special to ProPublica.)

Lucas Waldron contributed graphics and development.

by Eli Hager

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

The New York State Legislature this week passed a bill banning anonymous complaints to the state child abuse hotline. If Gov. Kathy Hochul signs the legislation, New Yorkers will now have to provide their name and contact information if they want to make an allegation that someone might be neglecting a child.

This dramatic change in the law comes a year and a half after a ProPublica investigation showed how the hotline had been weaponized by jealous exes, spiteful landlords and others who endlessly called in baseless allegations. Even if a caller didn’t leave their name or any details, and even if the same allegation had repeatedly been investigated and found to be unsubstantiated, it automatically triggered an invasive search of the accused’s home and often a strip search of the children.

We detailed the case of one Brooklyn mother whose apartment was searched dozens of times — by police officers and child protective services caseworkers who never had a warrant and often showed up at her door after midnight — all because an angry former acquaintance kept anonymously calling the hotline about her. She was never found to have mistreated her children in any way.

According to federal statistics, 96% of anonymous calls to child abuse hotlines are deemed baseless after an investigation. Among all allegations of child abuse or neglect, including non-anonymous calls, 83% are ultimately deemed unfounded.

In New York, more than 4,000 children every year had experienced child protective services investigations as a result of anonymous calls — until now.

The legislation passing is “a win-win for everybody,” said Democratic state Sen. Jabari Brisport, the bill’s sponsor. Not only will it protect victims of domestic violence who may have an abusive current or former partner who has used the anonymous reporting system to harass them or to influence a custody dispute, it will also help caseworkers themselves, Brisport said. “They are stretched so thin already,” he said. “By reducing the number of these false complaints, we can let them do their jobs better.”

“But the fact that false reports make such an effective method of harassment is a symptom of deeper issues in how CPS operates,” Brisport added, referring to how the home searches and investigations that result from these calls often turn families’ lives upside-down. Black parents especially are affected, he said, and they can feel helplessly unable to comfort their children through a terrifying and opaque process that can lead to their separation from their mom and dad.

A committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights last year published a report that cited ProPublica’s journalism on these issues and called on New York to abolish anonymous reporting. ProPublica’s articles were also circulated among lawmakers and legislative staff in Albany both last year and this spring.

California and Texas, too, have passed legislation to curtail anonymous reporting. Several other states are considering similar bills.

New York’s new law will maintain the confidentiality of callers to the child abuse hotline, just not their anonymity. That means that if someone thinks that a family member, neighbor or colleague is harming a child, and they call it in, they can still be assured that the state will not reveal their identity to the alleged abuser or publicly in any way. The caller will just have to provide their name and contact information so that caseworkers can follow up, in part to make sure that they don’t have an ulterior motive for making a malicious accusation and so that caseworkers can gather more details from the caller to conduct a more informed investigation.

If they refuse to identify themselves, hotline staff will decline to pass along the tip to child protective services. But an amendment was added to the bill stating that if a caller doesn’t want to leave their name, they can still speak to a supervisor, who will then explain to them that if they provide their name it will remain confidential; that intentionally making a false report is illegal; and that issues involving children in need can also be addressed through housing, food and other services. Contact information for such services will be provided.

The new law will not affect mandated reporters of child abuse, such as teachers and police officers, who already were not anonymous.

Chris Gottlieb, director of the NYU School of Law Family Defense Clinic, helped to shepherd the legislation to its passage. She said that when she used to bring up this issue in Albany — and talk about how child protective services agents searching families’ homes without a warrant can be deeply traumatizing for both parents and children — she was often met with blank stares. But then ProPublica’s reporting “helped to change the conversation,” she said, and more importantly, parents themselves, many of them Black and Latino and led by the community organizer Joyce McMillan, started holding regular rallies on the steps of the Legislature and testifying at hearings.

In fact, parents have filed a first-of-its-kind class-action lawsuit challenging warrantless child protective services searches of their homes as unconstitutional. New York City is contesting the suit, but the city’s Administration for Children’s Services has said that it is committed to addressing child safety concerns while also respecting families’ rights.

In past statements to ProPublica, ACS has said that it is required by state law to investigate fully and to seek to conduct a home assessment whenever it receives a report of child maltreatment from the state, no matter the original source of that report. But a spokesperson said that the agency supports anonymous reporting reform with the perspective that protections for children who are in danger should also be preserved.

One of the plaintiffs in the class-action suit, Shavona Warmington, praised New York state lawmakers for abolishing anonymous reporting once and for all.

The Queens mother of six alleges that someone called in complaints about her every several months for a decade, knowing that the mere fact of a call would cause caseworkers to pound on her door; threaten that they would call the police if she didn’t let them in; search her refrigerator, cabinets, closets and bed while her kids watched; and then strip search and interrogate them. She said that the content of the reports to the hotline always sounded familiar, clearly from the same person, but that this never mattered.

In the suit, she contended that the person who made the complaints was likely the man who abused her. He could call every day and they would still send somebody out.

Her children have been traumatized by the sound of a knock on the door, she said.

“I have no contact with him otherwise, just through ACS,” Warmington said, referring to her abuser.

by Katherine Dailey and Jessie Nguyen, Medill Investigative Lab

We are still reporting. If you are a current or former FDA employee or someone in the industry with information about the agency, the safety of generic drugs, or the manufacturers that make them, our team wants to hear from you. Megan Rose can be reached on Signal or WhatsApp at 202-805-4865. Debbie Cenziper can be reached on Signal or WhatsApp at 301-222-3133. You can also email us at FDA@propublica.org.

ProPublica has sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in federal court in New York, accusing the agency of withholding information about the safety and availability of generic drugs critical to millions of Americans.

For years, Congress, watchdog groups, doctors and others have questioned the quality of generic drugs made in factories overseas. To better understand how the FDA regulates the industry and protects consumers, ProPublica submitted four records requests last year under the Freedom of Information Act.

The FDA declined to quickly release the documents, including records that would identify drugs made at some of the most troubled factories in India. Inspection reports that describe unsafe manufacturing conditions are public, but the FDA redacts the names of the medications made in those factories.

“Americans (including pharmacists, doctors, hospital systems, policy makers) cannot see for themselves which drugs may have been made in unsafe facilities,” the lawsuit said.

ProPublica requested the records as part of an ongoing investigation into the safety of America’s generic drug supply. ProPublica has reported that the FDA allowed some manufacturers to continue shipping their drugs to Americans even after the factories that made them were found in violation of quality standards and banned from the U.S. market. More than 150 drugs or their ingredients were given these little-known exemptions over the past dozen years.

In its response to ProPublica’s initial records request, the FDA said the news organization had not demonstrated “a compelling need” to expedite the release of documents. Since the lawsuit was filed in November, the agency has begun to turn over some of the requested records. The case is still active in federal court in New York.

ProPublica has argued the records will help inform American consumers, who increasingly rely on generic drugs made overseas. Quality concerns have dogged the industry for years: In 2023, four people died after using tainted eye drops made in India, and others had to have their eyeballs surgically removed.

“Every single one of us relies on the FDA to ensure that the medicines we take and give our loved ones are safe,” said ProPublica’s outside counsel, Jack Browning, a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine. “With the increasing prevalence of offshore manufacturing, it is imperative for organizations like ProPublica to ensure that safety violations are not being swept under the rug.”

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA, declined to comment on the case, citing the ongoing litigation.

This is the second time ProPublica has sued the FDA in recent years.

In 2023, the news outlet and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette filed a lawsuit against the agency for withholding records related to the massive recall of breathing machines made by Philips Respironics. The agency ultimately provided the documents.

Dailey and Nguyen are with Northwestern University’s Medill Investigative Lab in Washington, D.C.

by Annie Waldman

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

What Happened: A federal judge ruled on Monday that the Trump administration’s termination of hundreds of grants by the National Institutes of Health was “void and illegal,” ordering some of them to be reinstated, including many profiled by ProPublica in recent months.

District Judge William G. Young made the ruling in two lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s directives and cancellations: One case was brought by more than a dozen states’ attorneys general, and the other was led by the American Public Health Association alongside several other organizations and researchers.

In Monday’s ruling, the judge determined that the directives that led to the grant terminations were “arbitrary and capricious” and said they had “no force and effect.” The judge’s ruling ordered the funding of the grants to be restored. It only covers grants that have been identified by the plaintiffs in the cases.

What the Judge Said: After Young ruled that the agency directives and terminations were illegal, he noted that the government’s practices were discriminatory.

“This represents racial discrimination, and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community,” he said. “That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out, and I do so.”

This year, the Trump administration banned the NIH from funding grants that had a connection to “diversity, equity and inclusion,” alleging that such research may be discriminatory. ProPublica previously found that caught up in mass terminations was research focused on why some populations — including women and sexual, racial or ethnic minorities — may be more at risk of certain disorders or diseases.

“I have never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable,” Young said during Monday’s hearing. “I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years, and I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this, and I confine my remarks to this record, to health care.”

He also noted the administration’s targeting of LGBTQ+ research. “It is palpably clear these directives and the set of terminated grants here also are designed to frustrate, to stop research that may bear on the health — we are talking about health here — the health of Americans, of our LGBTQ community,” he said. “That’s appalling.”

Background: In recent months, ProPublica has been covering the toll of the grant cancellations by the NIH. More than 150 researchers, scientists and investigators have reached out to ProPublica and shared their experiences, revealing how the terminations are dramatically reshaping the biomedical and scientific enterprise of the nation at large.

They described how years of federally funded research may never be published, how critical treatments may never be developed and how millions of patients could be harmed.

“Two and a half years into a three-year grant, and to all of a sudden stop and not fully be able to answer the original questions, it’s just a waste,” said Brown University associate professor Ethan Moitra, whose grant studying mental health treatment for LGBTQ+ people was terminated.

Response: White House spokesperson Kush Desai said it was “appalling that a federal judge would use court proceedings to express his political views and preferences,” adding that “justice ceases to be administered when a judge clearly rules on the basis of his political ideologies.”

Desai also defended the administration’s policies targeting “diversity, equity and inclusion,” calling it a “flawed and racist logic.” He also said that the administration was committed to “restoring the Gold Standard of Science,” which he claimed involves a recognition of the “biological reality of the male and female sexes.” The NIH, he said, is shifting “research spending to address our chronic disease crisis instead, not to validate ideological activism.”

Andrew G. Nixon, the director of communications for the Department of Health and Human Services, told ProPublica that the agency “stands by its decision to end funding for research that prioritized ideological agendas over scientific rigor and meaningful outcomes for the American people,” and that it was “exploring all legal options, including filing an appeal and moving to stay the order.”

Why It Matters: The mass cancellation of grants in response to political policy shifts has no historical precedent, experts told ProPublica, and marks an extraordinary departure from the agency’s established practices. ProPublica previously revealed that the Department of Government Efficiency — the administration’s cost-cutting initiative —— gave the agency direction on what to cut and why, raising questions about the provenance of the terminations.

The judge's ruling adds to a growing number of legal decisions halting or scaling back the administration’s actions. As of Monday, according to The New York Times, there have been more than 180 rulings that have “at least temporarily paused” the administration’s practices.

Whether the administration follows Monday’s ruling, however, remains an open question. As ProPublica reported, the NIH has previously terminated research grants even after a federal judge blocked such cuts, and the administration has disregarded several other rulings.

“If the vacation of these particular grant terminations, the vacation of these directives, taken as a whole, does not result in forthwith disbursement of funds,” Young said in Monday’s hearing, “the court has ample jurisdiction.”

Were you involved in a clinical trial, participating in research or receiving services that have ended, been paused or been delayed because of canceled federal funding? Our reporters want to hear from you. To share your experience, contact our reporting team at healthfunding@propublica.org.

Asia Fields contributed reporting.

by Debbie Cenziper, Megan Rose, Brandon Roberts and Irena Hwang

We are still reporting. If you are a current or former FDA employee or someone in the industry with information about the agency, the safety of generic drugs, or the manufacturers that make them, our team wants to hear from you. Megan Rose can be reached on Signal or WhatsApp at 202-805-4865. Debbie Cenziper can be reached on Signal or WhatsApp at 301-222-3133. You can also email us at FDA@propublica.org.

On a sweltering morning in western India in 2022, three U.S. inspectors showed up unannounced at a massive pharmaceutical plant surrounded by barricades and barbed wire and demanded to be let inside.

For two weeks, they scrutinized humming production lines and laboratories spread across the dense industrial campus, peering over the shoulders of workers at the tablet presses, mixers and filling machines that produce dozens of generic drugs for Americans.

Much of the factory was supposed to be as sterile as an operating room. But the inspectors discovered what appeared to be metal shavings on drugmaking equipment, and records showing vials of medication that were “blackish” from contamination had been sent to the United States. Quality testing in some cases had been put off for more than six months, according to their report, and raw materials tainted with unknown “extraneous matter” were used anyway, mixed into batches of drugs.

Sun Pharma’s transgressions were so egregious that the Food and Drug Administration imposed one of the government’s harshest penalties: banning the factory from exporting drugs to the United States.

But the agency, worried about medication shortages, immediately undercut its mission to ensure the safety of America’s drug supply.

A secretive group inside the FDA gave the global manufacturer a special pass to continue shipping more than a dozen drugs to the United States even though they were made at the same substandard factory that the agency had officially sanctioned. Pills and injectable medications that otherwise would have been banned went to unsuspecting patients across the country, including those with cancer and epilepsy.

The FDA didn’t routinely test the medications for quality problems or use its vast repository of drug-related complaints to proactively track whether they were harming the people who relied on them.

And the agency kept the exemptions largely hidden from the public and from Congress. Even others inside the FDA were unaware of the details.

In the hands of consumers, according to the FDA’s longtime head of drug safety, the information would have caused “some kind of frenzy.”

“We felt we didn’t have to make it a public thing,” said Janet Woodcock, who spent nearly four decades at the agency.

The exemptions for Sun weren’t a one-time concession. A ProPublica investigation found that over a dozen years, the same small cadre at the FDA granted similar exemptions to more than 20 other factories that had violated critical standards in drugmaking, nearly all in India. All told, the group allowed into the United States at least 150 medications or their ingredients from factories with mold, foul water, dirty labs or fraudulent testing protocols.

The FDA inspection report of the Sun Pharma factory in India warned of leaks that could allow dirty water into a sterile area where drugs were made. (Obtained by ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Some of the drugs were recalled — just before or just after they were exempted — because of contaminants or other defects that could cause health problems, government records show. And a ProPublica analysis identified more than 600 complaints in the FDA’s files about exempted drugs at three of those factories alone, each flagging concerns in the months or years after they were excluded from import bans in 2022 and 2023.

The “adverse event” reports about drugs from the Sun plant and two others run by Indian drugmaker Intas Pharmaceuticals described medication with an abnormal taste, odor or residue or patients who had experienced sudden or unexplained health problems.

The reports cite about 70 hospitalizations and nine deaths. And those numbers are conservative. ProPublica limited its count to reports that linked problems to a single drug. However, the total number of complaints to the FDA that mention exempted drugs is in the thousands.

“Abdominal pain … stomach was acting very crazy,” one report said about a woman using a seizure drug from Sun Pharma. The FDA received the complaint in 2023, nine months after it excluded the medication from the import ban.

“Feeling really hot, breaking out with hives, hard to breathe, had confusion, glucose level was high, heart rate went up and head, arms and hands got numb,” noted another report about a patient taking a sedative from Intas. The complaint was sent to the FDA in June 2023, the same month the agency exempted the medication.

The outcomes described in the complaints may have no connection to the drug or could be unexpected side effects. In some cases, the FDA received complaints about the same drugs made by other manufacturers.

Still, the seriousness of the reports involving exempted drugs did not galvanize the agency to investigate, leaving the public and the government with no way of knowing whether people were being harmed and, if so, how many.

Those unknowns have done little to slow the exemptions. In 2022, FDA inspectors described a “cascade of failure” at one of the Intas plants, finding workers had destroyed testing records, in one case pouring acid on some that had been stuffed in a trash bag. At the second Intas factory, inspectors said in their report that records were “routinely manipulated” to cover up the presence of particulate matter — which could include glass, fiber or other contaminants — in the company’s drugs.

A 2022 FDA inspection report described “a cascade of failure” at one of the Intas plants, noting that employees were observed destroying records “by tearing it into pieces.” (Obtained by ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

The FDA barred both plants in 2023 from shipping drugs to the U.S. Then the agency simultaneously granted more than 50 exemptions to those banned factories — the broadest use of exclusions in ProPublica’s analysis.

Intas, whose U.S. subsidiary is Accord Healthcare, said in a statement that the company has invested millions of dollars in upgrades and new hires and launched a companywide program focused on quality. Exempted drugs were sent to the United States in a “phased manner,” the company said, with third-party oversight and safety testing. Intas also said that some exempted drugs were never shipped to the United States because the FDA found other suppliers. The company would not provide details.

“Intas is well on its way towards full remediation of all manufacturing sites,” the company said.

Sun did not respond to multiple requests for comment. When the FDA imposed the ban, the company said it would “undertake all necessary steps to resolve these issues and to ensure that the regulator is completely satisfied with the company’s remedial action. Sun Pharma remains committed to being … compliant and in supplying high-quality products to its customers and patients globally.”

Both companies’ factories are still under import bans.

“We’re supposed to have the best medicine in the world,” said Joe DeMayo, a kidney transplant patient in Philadelphia who took an immunosuppression medication made by Intas until December 2023, unaware that a month earlier the FDA had excused the drug from an import ban. “Why are we buying from people who aren’t making it right?”

Joe DeMayo, a father and grocery store worker, had no idea the capsules he took every day to protect his transplanted kidney were coming from a factory in India that the FDA had banned from the U.S. market. (Hannah Yoon for ProPublica) An excerpt from an FDA inspection of an Intas factory about its manufacturing of sterile drugs (Animation by Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica)

Watch video ➜

Game of Chance

How the United States wound up here — playing a game of chance with risky drugs made thousands of miles away — is the story of an agency that has relentlessly pressed to keep the supply of low-cost generics flowing even as its own inspectors warned that some of those drugs posed a potentially lethal threat to the American public.

The vast majority of the prescriptions filled in the country are for generic drugs, from penicillin to blood thinners to emergency contraception, and many of those come from overseas, including India and China. For years, the FDA has vouched for the quality of generics, assuring the public in press releases, speeches and social media campaigns that they are just as safe and effective as brand-name drugs.

That guarantee came under serious question in 2019 when journalist Katherine Eban published a breakthrough book, “Bottle of Lies,” that exposed rampant fraud and manufacturing violations in Indian factories and the FDA’s reluctance to aggressively investigate.

ProPublica identified another alarming level of entrenched failure: Even when the agency did investigate and single out factories that were among the worst in India, it still gave them access to American consumers. All the while, patients took their medicine without question, trusting an agency that has long been considered the gold standard in drug regulation.

While specialized business publications have sometimes reported on exemptions when they happen, they’ve offered little context and few specifics.

The FDA in many ways put itself in this untenable position, forced to decide between not having enough drugs or accepting potentially dangerous ones, interviews and government records show.

For years, the agency gave companies with a history of manufacturing breakdowns approval to produce an increasingly larger share of generic drugs, allowing them to become a dominant force in American medicine with the power to disrupt lives if production lines were shuttered.

“It’s our own fault,” said former FDA inspector Peter Baker, who reported a litany of failures during inspections in India and China from 2012 to 2018. “We allowed all these players into the market who never should have been there in the first place. They grew to be monsters and now we can’t go back.”

The decisions to weaken penalties and allow banned factories to continue sending drugs to the United States were approved by Woodcock, one of the agency’s most powerful administrators. For more than two decades, she led the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, the arm of the FDA that serves as the country’s gatekeeper for new and generic drugs.

In a series of interviews with ProPublica, Woodcock said she supported the use of exemptions “as a practical approach.”

“We had to kind of deal with the hand we were dealt,” she said.

Janet Woodcock, who served for years as the country’s top drug regulator, said she believed the drugs coming into the United States from banned factories were safe. The FDA did not routinely test the drugs for quality problems. (Jason Andrew for ProPublica)

Woodcock said she didn’t see a need to inform the public because the agency believed the drugs were safe. She said she mentioned the practice periodically in closed-door meetings with congressional staffers, but she did not provide specifics about those conversations.

After Woodcock left her post in 2020 to help lead the agency’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the exemptions — including those for Sun and Intas — continued under her successor, Patrizia Cavazzoni. Cavazzoni, who left the agency earlier this year and rejoined Pfizer, declined to comment.

Former FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, who led the agency when Sun and Intas received exemptions, told ProPublica that tough calls had to be made and the practice did not worry him.

The FDA did not respond to questions about who made those decisions or how the drugs were evaluated, and it declined requests for interviews with officials who currently oversee drug regulation. In an email, the agency said the exemptions are “thoroughly evaluated through a multi-disciplinary approach.”

Years after the FDA started granting exemptions, some current and former officials say they wrestle with a lingering fear that bad drugs are circulating in the United States.

“It’s not even a hypothetical,” said one senior FDA employee familiar with the exemptions, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “It’s not a question of if — it’s a question of how much.”

“It Was Rotten Eggs”

Although the FDA has been giving companies a way around import bans since at least 2013, the internal process was so secretive that many current and former FDA officials said they have no idea how many exemptions have been granted or for what drugs. In an email, the agency said it did not maintain a comprehensive list.

Even two high-level FDA staff members who worked on drug shortage challenges for the agency said in interviews they had never heard of the exemptions.

Congress required the FDA in 2012 to provide specific information every year about how and when the agency relaxed its rules for errant drugmakers to prevent shortages. But the FDA did not mention exemptions to import bans until 2024 — and only then in a single footnote of its 25-page report to Congress.

ProPublica uncovered the frequent use of exemptions by searching for the “import alert” list published on the FDA’s website that names factories banned from the U.S. marketplace. Because the agency publishes only a current list and doesn’t make the old ones public, the news organization used internet archives and FDA documents maintained by the data analytics company Redica Systems, ultimately compiling import alerts dating back more than a decade. The lists identify the drugs exempted from bans but provide few other details.

ProPublica reviewed scores of inspection reports and corporate documents for overseas factories and interviewed more than 200 people, including current and former officials of the FDA, to understand the little-known practice and the ongoing threat posed by the agency’s decisions.

The investigation revealed not only how many drugs received exemptions from import bans, but also how long the FDA allowed those exemptions to stay in place — in some cases for years.

The agency has removed exemptions when there is no longer a shortage concern. In those cases, the drugs are then banned along with the others at the factory. Both Sun and Intas have had drugs that lost their exemptions.

Two and a half years after the Sun factory was banned, five drugs are still exempted. Intas, whose factories were banned in 2023, currently has 24 drugs on the list. The bans themselves are removed only after companies fix the problems.

Earlier this month, the FDA went back to the Sun Pharma factory for a surprise inspection and found ongoing problems, according to a Sun filing with the Indian stock exchange and Indian media reports. The concerns focused on the way sterile drugs were made, including some of the exempted drugs still being sent to the United States, according to a person familiar with the situation who did not want to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The FDA said it put protections in place for exempted drugs: Manufacturers are required to conduct additional quality checks before they are sent to the United States. That has included extra drug-safety testing, in some cases at an independent lab, and bringing on third-party consultants to verify the results.

The agency did not provide ProPublica with the names of the third-party consultants hired by Sun and Intas. Intas declined to name its consultants.

“The odds of these drugs actually not being safe or effective is tiny because of the safeguards,” said one former FDA official involved in the exemptions who declined to be named because he still works in the industry and fears professional retribution. “Even though the facility sucks, it’s getting tested more often and it’s having independent eyes on it.”

But current and former FDA inspectors said those safety measures require trusting the vigilance of companies that were banned, at least in part, for providing unreliable or deceptive test results to the government or failing to investigate reports about drugs with contaminants or other quality concerns.

The FDA has granted exemptions from import bans to more than 20 foreign factories despite serious quality issues. In this 2019 inspection of a factory in south-central India, inspectors found cross-contamination on drugmaking equipment. (Obtained by ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

The FDA could have done its own routine testing of the exempted drugs but chose not to. The agency said in an email that it tests the drugs using a “risk-based approach” but would not provide ProPublica with any information about which drugs have been tested and what the results were.

Woodcock said testing was expensive and budgets were tight. She acknowledged that regularly assessing the exempted drugs for quality or safety concerns “would have enhanced our confidence … and made everyone more comfortable.”

The European Union, by contrast, requires drugs made in India and China to be checked for quality on EU soil. And the U.S. Department of Defense is conducting its own testing of more than three dozen generic medications and has already identified potency and other quality issues.

“If you don’t know about the quality of the product, why are you letting it in?” said Murray Lumpkin, the FDA’s former deputy commissioner for international programs, who left the agency in 2014 before most of the exemptions were granted.

Beyond the lack of testing, the FDA didn’t actively look for patterns of harm among the exempted drugs in its adverse event database, Woodcock and others said.

ProPublica’s analysis of that data found thousands of reports both before and after the factories were given a pass to sidestep import bans. The reports described unexpected cases of cardiac arrest, blurred vision, choking, vertigo and kidney injuries, among other issues — and in some instances identified specific concerns about how the drugs were made.

Photos from an FDA inspection show discarded and shredded records. Drugmakers are supposed to retain records like these for inspectors to review to prove that drugs going to American consumers are safe and effective. (Obtained by ProPublica)

One person who took Intas’ clonazepam, a sedative and epilepsy drug, reported getting “brain zaps” and bright blue teeth from the coating of dye on the drug. The FDA received the complaint the same month the agency exempted the drug from the import ban.

Even before the FDA exempted Intas’ antidepressant bupropion, consumers reported that it made them sick, wasn’t always effective and had an abnormal odor, which pharmacists and others say can happen when an inactive ingredient breaks down.

“It was rotten eggs,” Nari Miller, a geologist in California who took the pills in 2022 and had severe stomach pain, told ProPublica. “I opened it and smelled it when I got home and it was awful.”

Intas said it could not respond to specific complaints and that all drugs have side effects. “Intas and Accord pay attention to each and every adverse event report,” the company said, adding, “Accord and Intas are committed to continuing to bring safe and effective medicines to patients.”

In its statement, the FDA said the database is monitored weekly for new reports in general. Woodcock, however, acknowledged the reports about exempted drugs, ideally, “would be under much more scrutiny.”

Excerpt from an FDA inspection of the Sun Pharma factory that led to an import ban (Animation by Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica)

Watch video ➜

Too Big to Fail

Decisions made by the FDA decades ago gave rise to the use of exemptions and the risks that now confront the American public.

When new brand-name drugs come to market, they are protected by patents and exclusive sales rights that make them generally expensive. When patents expire, generic drug companies rush in to make their own versions, which are supposed to be equivalent to the brand. Generics are often far cheaper, and insurance companies typically insist that patients use them.

In the 2000s, as the cost of brand-name drugs soared, the FDA began to approve large numbers of generics. The agency, however, gave hundreds of those approvals to foreign manufacturers that had been in trouble before, companies well known to the inspectors working to stamp out safety and quality breakdowns at overseas factories, ProPublica found.

The FDA granted Sun Pharma alone more than 250 approvals for generic drugs since the late 2000s, when the company started amassing violations, records show. The agency’s decisions helped to transform the company from a local provider in India to one of the leading exporters of medications to the United States, with nearly $2 billion in annual U.S. sales.

The approvals kept coming as inspectors continued to raise concerns about manufacturing practices at the company’s factories in India, government records show.

More problems were found at a factory that Sun had acquired in Detroit, where the diabetes drug metformin was contaminated with metal scrapings. The violations were so significant that federal marshals in 2009 raided the plant and seized drugs. The company eventually shuttered the factory.

The rapid expansion of Sun and other foreign drugmakers set off new alarms among inspectors, their supervisors and advisers to Woodcock.

“In a rational system, you would have said, ‘This company is not producing properly, so let’s not approve any more of their drugs,” said William Hubbard, former FDA deputy commissioner for policy, planning and legislation. “The agency in a sense kind of let this happen.”

Ajaz Hussain, the former deputy director of an FDA office that oversaw pharmaceutical science, said that after leaving the agency and becoming a consultant, he made his concerns known in meetings with Woodcock and others.

“They can’t manufacture it. Why do you keep approving it?” Hussain recalled in an interview with ProPublica. “I said, ‘Wake up.’ … But they didn’t listen.”

Hussain in 2012 went to work for Wockhardt, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in India, but quit eight months later after he said he told his superiors about manufacturing failures in the company’s factories.

Although FDA inspectors had reported lapses after multiple visits to Wockhardt plants between 2004 and 2012, the agency cleared the way for the company to export sedatives, antibiotics, beta blockers, painkillers and other generics to the United States, records show. Wockhardt received exemptions from import bans in 2013. The company did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but at the time, the company said it was going to quickly address the FDA’s concerns.

The FDA could have denied generic drug applications — nothing in the law prohibits the agency from saying no to companies with spotty track records. In an email, the FDA said it considers a company’s history and conducts inspections in some cases before issuing approvals.

Woodcock said the agency knew which factories were poor performers but feared being sued by companies blocked from introducing new drugs based on past behavior. Instead, she said that she tried to convince drugmakers to invest in equipment and practices that would turn out higher-quality drugs.

“We had many meetings about this, and we agonized about all these problems,” she said.

But little changed.

Shortages vs. Quality

In 2008, dozens of Americans were killed by contaminated blood thinner from China. So when Margaret Hamburg was appointed commissioner of the FDA in the aftermath of the crisis, she pressed the agency to crack down on overseas drugmakers.

Her efforts ran headlong into what would become the worst drug shortage in modern history. By 2010, cancer drugs were scarce. So were the drugs on hospital crash carts. In all, more than 200 critical medications were in short supply.

Razor-thin profit margins had limited the number of companies that were willing to make generic drugs. And the FDA’s enforcement overseas had forced some manufacturing lines to temporarily shut down, which exacerbated the problem.

LeRoy Hubley, whose wife and son died after taking a tainted generic blood thinner from China, testified before Congress in 2008. The crisis helped prompt the FDA, under Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, to ramp up inspections of overseas drugmakers. (Brendan Smialowski/Bloomberg News)

Congress lambasted the FDA for the shortages and started requiring the agency to prove every year how it was combatting the problem.

At the time, the FDA had a small team focused on shortages that operated on the edges of Woodcock’s 4,000-person Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. With the pressure on, Woodcock elevated the team in 2010 to report directly to her deputy, a move that gave those staff members a commanding voice at the highest levels of the agency, several former staffers told ProPublica.

After 16 years in top leadership roles, Woodcock was formidable enough to force a culture change. Standing 5’2” in FDA conference rooms where she had often been disregarded as the lone woman, Woodcock had fought for her status — sometimes, she said, pushed nearly to tears with frustration. The board-certified internist asserted her authority by wielding data, what she called “brute force” and the soft persuasion of an occasional gift of an orchid, picked from her garden in suburban Maryland.

Woodcock, an avid gardener, retired from the FDA last year. (Jason Andrew for ProPublica)

By 2010, Woodcock had marshalled the center into a powerhouse with great independence — in many ways, outside the reach of the political whims of the commissioners who came and went. Those who worked with her over the years said despite her approachable manner, she fiercely guarded her territory.

In the conference room next to Woodcock’s office, the drug shortage staff began to weigh in whenever the FDA’s compliance team moved to penalize wayward drugmakers because of bad inspections, according to several former FDA officials involved in the deliberations.

Sometimes the small group would decide that a factory could no longer ship drugs to the United States and would try to get other manufacturers to make more. And other times, the group determined that exemptions from import bans were the only course.

Discussions could be tense and often lasted for weeks. A former employee on the compliance team told ProPublica that they repeatedly argued to impose a total import ban on a foreign factory because they feared the drugs couldn’t be trusted. They were left feeling uncomfortable about an exemption granted anyway — for a product that they would not use themselves.

Without exemptions, Woodcock told ProPublica, the FDA might have been forced to source the drugs from a “totally unknown manufacturer, say, from China or somewhere.”

Current and former FDA officials said the concessions became a yearslong practice rather than a stopgap measure and that the protections put in place by the agency were not sufficient. They question why Woodcock and her successor didn’t do more to raise alarms with Congress or the public about the decision to rely on inadequate factories for critical drugs.

Woodcock said she thought the exemptions were a symptom of larger issues involving the drug supply that the FDA had no control over — the agency, for example, can’t force companies concerned about slim profit margins to produce generic drugs.

Two former FDA commissioners told ProPublica they knew about the practice but were not included in the decision-making.

Hamburg, who spent six years at the agency under the Obama administration, said the extent of the practice surprised her. “Had I known that it was sort of an open-ended policy, I would have been disturbed,” she said.

One of her successors, Stephen Hahn, appointed during President Donald Trump’s first term, said more people should have been involved in the decisions.

“You’re talking about a drug of questionable quality being brought into the country,” he said.

Woodcock said she did not believe she needed their input. “I didn’t think in the individual circumstances it was necessary to elevate,” she said, “because what could they do?”

Excerpt from an FDA inspection of the Sun Pharma factory that led to an import ban (Animation by Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica)

Watch video ➜

“We Know What Was Found”

In 2020, the billionaire founder of Sun Pharma joined a pivotal conference call with FDA compliance and investigative staff.

Dilip Shanghvi, whose father had run a wholesale drug business in Kolkata, India, started the company in the 1980s and ultimately turned Sun Pharma into one of the largest suppliers of generic drugs in the United States. On the call, Shanghvi spoke about improvements at Sun’s enormous plant in the Indian city of Halol, according to an FDA official who attended the meeting.

Among other drugs, the plant produced at least 16 sterile injectables for the U.S. market, according to a Sun email to the FDA obtained by ProPublica. Injectables are particularly dangerous if contaminated because the medication is injected directly into the body, unlike a pill that goes through the filtering of the digestive tract.

In 2018 and 2019, inspectors had reported a series of violations at the factory, and Sun had received more than 700 complaints about what appeared to be crystals or spider webs forming in one of its injectable medications, records show.

The company also had to recall more than 135,000 vials of vecuronium bromide, a muscle relaxer used during surgery, after reports that the medication contained glass particles. Sun said the defect could cause life-threatening blood clots.

On the call with the FDA, according to the agency official, Shanghvi assured the government that the Halol plant was turning out high-quality products.

Yet, when the three investigators went back to the factory that scorching morning in 2022 for the surprise inspection, it was clear within days that the FDA would have to take swift action.

Splitting up to check different parts of the plant, the inspectors quizzed workers about cleaning procedures and looked at disassembled equipment to see if it was contaminated with residue from old drugs. At one point, they spotted water leaking near areas where sterile drugs were made, an alarming observation because water can introduce contaminants capable of causing infections or even death.

Digging through company records and test results, they found more evidence of quality problems, including how managers hadn’t properly investigated a series of complaints about foreign material, specks, spots and stains in tablets.

The 2022 FDA inspection report of Sun’s Halol plant described metal particles in vials of injectable medication. (Obtained by ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Several FDA employees familiar with the inspection report — 23 pages of detailed violations — said they had no idea why the agency went on to exclude so many of Sun’s drugs from the subsequent import ban.

“We know what was found,” said the FDA official who attended the meeting with Shanghvi. “How could you trust [those] drugs?”

Sun did not respond to questions about the recalls or its regulatory history with the FDA. In its 2023-24 annual report, the company said, “We have a relentless focus on 24x7 compliance to ensure continuity of supplies to our customers and patients worldwide.”

The specific findings of the FDA’s latest inspection of the Sun plant conducted this month have not yet been made public, and the company did not respond to a request for comment.

To some current and former FDA officials and other experts, plugging a supply shortage with drugs that may be contaminated or ineffective is no solution at all.

“That might be helping a shortage but might be creating a new problem,” said Lumpkin, the former deputy commissioner.

Last summer, a pair of FDA investigators arrived at another manufacturing plant in India that had a bustling production line. After more than a week at the Viatris factory, they left with a familiar list of safety and quality violations.

The inspectors found that equipment wasn’t clean and managers failed to thoroughly investigate unexplained discrepancies in test results.

In a statement to ProPublica, Viatris said it immediately worked to resolve the FDA’s concerns. “Patient safety remains our primary and unwavering focus,” the company said.

Just before Christmas, the FDA banned the facility from exporting drugs.

Then the agency gave the factory a pass, and four of its drugs are still bound for the United States.

Patricia Callahan and Vidya Krishnan contributed reporting, and Alice Crites contributed research.

Medill Investigative Lab students Haajrah Gilani, Emma McNamee, Julian Andreone, Isabela Lisco, Aidan Johnstone, Megija Medne, Yiqing Wang, Phillip Powell, Gideon Pardo, Casey He, Lindsey Byman, Josh Sukoff, Kunjal Bastola, Shae Lake, Alyce Brown, Zhiyu Solstice Luo, Jessie Nguyen, Sinyi Au, Kate McQuarrie and Katherine Dailey contributed reporting.

by Brandon Roberts, Debbie Cenziper, Megan Rose and Irena Hwang

We are still reporting. If you are a current or former FDA employee or someone in the industry with information about the agency, the safety of generic drugs, or the manufacturers that make them, our team wants to hear from you. Megan Rose can be reached on Signal or WhatsApp at 202-805-4865. Debbie Cenziper can be reached on Signal or WhatsApp at 301-222-3133. You can also email us at FDA@propublica.org.

It’s been 17 years since tainted blood thinner from China injured or killed hundreds of people in the United States, and since then, contaminants and other defects have appeared in a cross section of America’s generic drugs.

To understand how risky drugs could end up in our medicine cabinets, ProPublica spent more than a year investigating the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s oversight of foreign factories accused of violating critical quality standards. Reporters focused largely on factories in India, a key supplier of the world’s generic drugs.

The investigation exposed how the FDA, without warning the public, allowed more than 150 drugs or their ingredients into the United States over the past dozen years even though they were made at factories banned from shipping products here. The agency did not routinely test the drugs as they were circulating in the United States or actively track whether consumers had been harmed.

The FDA and several former agency officials told ProPublica they believed the medications that were exempted from import bans were safe. They said the agency required generic drugmakers to conduct additional quality checks before the drugs were sent to the United States, including extra drug-safety testing and bringing on third-party consultants to verify the results.

To conduct its analysis, Propublica used Redica Systems, a quality and regulatory intelligence company with a vast collection of agency documents, as well as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, to find hundreds of “import alert” lists published by the FDA over more than 15 years. The lists identified factories barred from shipping drugs to the United States because the FDA found manufacturing violations.

In examining those lists, reporters discovered references to drugs or raw ingredients that the FDA had excluded from the bans. The exemptions were mentioned with almost no explanation, scattered throughout the often lengthy alerts.

Because the FDA does not keep a comprehensive list of drugs that have been exempted from bans over the years, ProPublica had to build one. Reporters employed two distinct methods to do this. First, ProPublica wrote code that used keyword search and pattern matching to pull drug names and manufacturing locations from the FDA alerts. Second, ProPublica used artificial intelligence to extract the same information. Results from each analysis were cross-checked, and reporters verified each of the results.

In finalizing its analysis, ProPublica counted all drugs that were exempted from each banned factory. Sometimes, the same drug was exempted from multiple factories and was added to each factory’s total. In a handful of cases, the FDA exempted different formulations of the same drug, such as a tablet, capsule or injectable. ProPublica counted those different forms as distinct drugs.

ProPublica’s list of drugs exempted from import bans could be an undercount; there is no way to know for sure without a full accounting from the FDA.

The reporting team interviewed more than 200 people, including former FDA inspectors who repeatedly reported breakdowns in drugmaking overseas and top administrators directly involved in drug safety. ProPublica also obtained troves of government and corporate documents in the United States and India and filed suit against the FDA in November after the agency said it would take as long as two years to turn over public records related to drug safety. The FDA has since begun to provide some of the requested records; the case is active in federal court in New York.

ProPublica paid Redica for access to FDA inspection records and ultimately reviewed reports spanning more than two decades.

To gauge what the FDA knew about the drugs before and after they were exempted from import bans, ProPublica drew on reports from the agency’s Adverse Event Reporting System. The reports are submitted to the FDA by consumers, health care professionals, drug companies and others and used by the agency to detect safety concerns and potential patterns of harm. Each contains information about conditions or reactions linked to drugs and, in some cases, complaints about product quality.

ProPublica identified more than 8,000 reports about the drugs excused from factorywide import bans both before and after the bans were put in place. ProPublica’s analysis included reports from 2010 to early 2025.

The FDA has cautioned that information in the reports is not verified and there may be no “causal relationship” between the drug and the adverse event. Multiple drugs are sometimes listed in a single adverse event report. ProPublica limited its analysis to cases that listed only one primary suspect drug.

Some reports don’t list specific concerns but instead reference academic studies; ProPublica excluded those reports.

To examine the FDA’s role in the growth of foreign drugmakers, ProPublica used the agency’s Orange Book, a register of drugs considered safe and effective by the FDA. The list includes approvals for both brand name and generic drugs, the dates the drugs were approved and the names of the companies that submitted the applications. ProPublica’s analysis showed that companies with troubled regulatory histories received scores of approvals to introduce generic drugs in the United States — and some went on to receive exemptions from import bans.

Journalists have been uncovering problems with generic drugs for years. Katherine Eban’s bestselling 2019 book, “Bottle of Lies,” exposed how Indian drugmakers failed to follow basic quality and safety standards and often knowingly sent shoddy drugs abroad. In 2023, a Bloomberg investigation revealed, among other things, how poisoned cough syrup made in India spread around the world. And the independent watchdog The People’s Pharmacy has raised repeated concerns about the quality of some generic drugs.

ProPublica collaborated with journalism students from Northwestern University’s Medill Investigative Lab in Washington, D.C. Haajrah Gilani, Emma McNamee, Julian Andreone, Isabela Lisco, Aidan Johnstone, Megija Medne, Yiqing Wang, Phillip Powell, Gideon Pardo, Casey He, Lindsey Byman, Josh Sukoff, Kunjal Bastola, Shae Lake, Alyce Brown, Zhiyu Solstice Luo, Jessie Nguyen, Sinyi Au, Kate McQuarrie and Katherine Dailey contributed to this report.

by Eric Umansky

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

What Happened: A monitor appointed by a federal court has found that a New York City Police Department unit has been unjustly stopping and searching New Yorkers, almost all of them Black and Hispanic men. The report on the NYPD’s Community Response Team echoes a recent ProPublica investigation that found the unit, championed by Mayor Eric Adams, has been ridden with abuses.

The federal monitor found that while the CRT was initially created in the early days of the Adams’ administration to focus on so-called quality-of-life issues such as illegal motorbikes, its officers have more recently been “stopping, frisking, and searching unconstitutionally.”

What They Said: In a sample of body-worn camera footage, the monitor found that 41% of stops, searches, and frisks by CRT officers were unlawful, a far higher percentage than with other NYPD units. What’s more, while officers are required to document such stops, which the department then releases as public data, the report found that officers often failed to do so, and even when they did there was a “lack of meaningful review” by supervisors.

As ProPublica previously reported, that behavior goes back to at least 2023, when an NYPD audit found officers were wrongfully stopping New Yorkers and failing to log the incidents. Soon after the audit, the mayor took to Instagram. “Turning out with the team,” he wrote, showing a photo of him wearing the CRT’s signature khaki pants.

The federal monitor had other striking findings. For instance, it found that “97% of the individuals stopped, frisked, and searched were Black or Hispanic men.”

It also found, as ProPublica previously reported, that the NYPD had not been straightforward about the CRT with the monitor itself. Department officials had initially told the monitor that the CRT was just a “pilot program” that already ended, only for the monitor to later learn the team was here to stay and actually expanding.

Background: Our March investigation detailed a wide range of troubling behavior by CRT officers that alarmed NYPD leaders. In the fall of 2022, department lawyers and others warned that highlight videos of the CRT that the team posted on social media showed problematic conduct. Other incidents included a CRT commander who punched a driver, another commander who shoved a pedestrian into a car window and a third officer who drove into a motorbiker, ultimately killing him.

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

Adams’ connection to CRT has been so close, former officials said, that the mayor was given private access to a live feed of the unit’s body-worn cameras. This year, he chose one of the team’s leaders, Kaz Daughtry, to be deputy mayor of public safety.

Why It Matters: The federal monitor for the NYPD was created a dozen years ago after a court found that the department had been engaging in widespread unconstitutional stop-and-frisks, a practice overwhelmingly focused on Black and Hispanic men. The seminal ruling imposed court oversight — the creation of the monitor’s office — of the country’s largest police department. The monitor in turn files regular progress reports.

The monitor’s latest report was filed with Judge Analisa Torres, who oversees the case and has the power to impose fixes. But whatever Torres does, the monitor’s findings make clear that the problems identified by the court all those years ago still persist.

Former NYPD Chief Matthew Pontillo, who wrote the 2023 audit of the CRT, said that the conduct of the team may actually be worse than what’s described in the monitor’s report, noting that the recent investigation relied on body-worn camera footage to examine officers’ conduct. In his own review, Pontillo had found that CRT officers were often not turning on their cameras to fully capture incidents.

Lawmakers and civil rights advocates have called for the CRT to be disbanded.

Response: The mayor’s office declined to answer ProPublica’s questions and instead suggested contacting the NYPD. The department has not replied to our questions.

Adams has previously defended the CRT. Asked about the unit at a mayoral press conference this spring, Adams said: “CRT is here. I support all my units. And if they don’t all stand up and do the job the way they’re supposed to do, those who don’t will be held accountable.”

The NYPD has also defended the CRT’s work and touted the unit’s confiscation of illegal motorbikes and ATVs.

by Tony Schick, Oregon Public Broadcasting

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

Less than two years ago, the administration of President Joe Biden announced what tribal leaders hailed as an unprecedented commitment to the Native tribes whose ways of life had been devastated by federal dam-building along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.

The deal, which took two years to negotiate, halted decades of lawsuits over the harm federal dams had caused to the salmon that had sustained those tribes culturally and economically for thousands of years. To enable the removal of four hydroelectric dams considered especially harmful to salmon, the government promised to invest billions of dollars in alternative energy sources to be created by the tribes.

It was a remarkable step following repeated failures by the government to uphold the tribal fishing rights it swore in treaties to preserve.

The agreement is now just another of those broken promises.

President Donald Trump signed a memorandum on Thursday pulling the federal government out of the deal. Trump’s decision halted a government-wide initiative to restore abundant salmon runs in the Columbia and Snake rivers and signaled an end to the government’s willingness to consider removing dams that blocked their free flow.

Thursday’s move drew immediate condemnation from tribes and from environmental groups that have fought to protect salmon.

“The Administration’s decision to terminate these commitments echoes the federal government’s historic pattern of broken promises to tribes,” Yakama Nation Tribal Council Chair Gerald Lewis said in a statement. “This termination will severely disrupt vital fisheries restoration efforts, eliminate certainty for hydro operations, and likely result in increased energy costs and regional instability.”

The government’s commitment to tribes, however, had been unraveling since almost when the deal was inked.

Key provisions were already languishing under Biden. After Trump won the presidency, his administration spiked most of the studies called for in the agreement, held up millions of dollars in funding and cut most of the staff working to implement salmon recovery. Biden’s promise to seriously consider the removal of dams gained little traction before it was replaced by what Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, called “passionate support” for keeping them in place.

The chair of the White House task force to implement the agreement quit in April because of what he saw as Trump’s efforts to eliminate nearly everything he was working on.

“Federal agencies who were on the hook to do the work were being destroyed through untargeted, inefficient and costly purges of federal employees,” Nik Blosser, the former Columbia River Task Force chair, told ProPublica and OPB. “When I left, most things were on hold or paused — even signed contracts were on hold, which is a disgrace.”

Trump’s White House announcement called the Biden administration’s commitments “onerous” and said the president “continues to deliver on his promise to end the previous administration’s misplaced priorities and protect the livelihoods of the American people.”

“President Trump is committed to unleashing American energy dominance, reversing all executive actions that impose undue burdens on energy production and use,” the announcement read.

But the decision could also have some unintended consequences, experts say.

Trump signed an executive order in April to “restore American seafood competitiveness” but in revoking the Columbia River agreement has canceled millions of dollars to support the programs that seed the ocean with fish to catch. He signed a separate executive order on his first day in office to “unleash American energy dominance” but has now reversed a commitment, made under the Biden salmon deal, to build new sources of domestic energy. This week’s action has sent federal agencies back to court, where judges have repeatedly shackled power production at hydroelectric dams because of its impact on the endangered fish.

“It’s tempting to comment at length on the absurdity of the President’s order, including the fact that what he says he wants — stability for power generation — is in fact put more at risk by this action,” Blosser wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “Instead, I’ll look for inspiration to the mighty salmon, who don’t stop swimming upstream when they get to a waterfall.”

Back to Court

Before they began negotiating the Columbia River Basin agreement in 2021, federal agencies had been losing in court over the hydropower system for more than 20 years. Judge after judge ordered the federal government to use less water for making electricity and instead let more of the river spill through the dams’ floodgates so that fish could more safely ride the current past them.

The accord with states and tribes guaranteed up to a decade without those lawsuits. Trump canceled that.

The Bonneville Power Administration, which sells the hydroelectricity from federal dams, had more at stake than the rest of the agencies in the deal. When the government signed it, Bonneville Administrator John Hairston said it provided “operational certainty and reliability while avoiding costly, unpredictable litigation in support of our mission to provide a reliable, affordable power supply to the Pacific Northwest.”

In its most recent annual report, Bonneville credited the agreement for giving it the flexibility to increase hydropower production during times of high electricity demand, which helped stem the losses in an otherwise difficult financial year.

A major component of the agreement was the acknowledgment of the region’s dependence on hydropower and the need to build new sources of energy before removing the dams. It offered no guarantee of dam removal.

The Biden White House had pledged to help tribes develop enough renewable energy sources to replace the output of four dams on the Snake River, which salmon advocates have long wanted to remove. The administration also planned an analysis of how to meet the region’s energy needs without sacrificing salmon.

The Biden administration never followed through. Even tribally backed energy projects that were already in progress ran into bureaucratic quagmires. When Trump took office and slashed thousands of jobs from the Department of Energy, the commitment for new energy sources died too.

Proponents of Columbia River dams, including the publicly owned utilities that buy federal hydroelectricity, criticized the Biden administration for leaving them out of the negotiations that led to the agreement.

“I want to thank the President (Trump) for his decisive action to protect our dams,” Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Republican from Central Washington, said in a statement on Thursday. He said the Biden administration and “extreme environmental activists” would have threatened the reliability of the power grid and raised energy prices with dam removal.

Even critics of the Biden deal, however, acknowledge they do not want the issue to return to court, where judges’ orders have driven up electricity rates. When Bonneville can’t generate as much hydropower to sell, but still has to pay for hatcheries and habitat fixes for salmon, it has to charge utilities more for its electricity.

“I’m hoping that we avoid dam operations by injunction, because that doesn’t help anybody in the region,” said Scott Simms, executive director of the Public Power Council, a nonprofit representing utilities that purchase federal hydropower.

Earthjustice attorney Amanda Goodin, who represents the environmental advocates who signed the agreement, said the Trump administration’s actions would force a return to courts.

“The agreement formed the basis for the stay of litigation,” Goodin said, “so without the agreement there is no longer any basis for a stay.”

More Fish Will Die

The White House said that Trump’s revoking of the Columbia River deal shows that he “continues to prioritize our Nation’s energy infrastructure and use of natural resources to lower the cost of living for all Americans over speculative climate change concerns.”

Shannon Wheeler, chair of the Nez Perce Tribe, said the damage on the Columbia River is anything but speculative.

“This action tries to hide from the truth,” Wheeler said in a statement. “The Nez Perce Tribe holds a duty to speak the truth for the salmon, and the truth is that extinction of salmon populations is happening now.”

Wild salmon populations on the Columbia and its largest tributary, the Snake River, have been so sparse for decades that commercial, recreational and tribal subsistence fishing are only possible because of fish hatcheries, which raise millions of baby salmon in pens and release them into the wild when they’re old enough to swim to the ocean.

In some years, an estimated half of all the Chinook salmon commercial fishermen catch in Southeast Alaska are from Columbia River hatcheries, making them critical for “restoring American seafood competitiveness” as Trump aimed to do.

But some Columbia River hatcheries are nearly a century old. Others have been so badly underfunded that equipment failures have killed thousands of baby fish.

As ProPublica and OPB previously reported, the number of hatchery salmon surviving to adulthood is now so low that hatcheries have struggled to collect enough fish for breeding, putting future fishing seasons in jeopardy.

The Biden administration promised roughly $500 million to improve hatcheries across the Northwest. His administration never delivered it, and Trump halted all the funds before eventually canceling them with this week’s order.

Mary Lou Soscia, former Columbia River coordinator at the Environmental Protection Agency, said the administration’s dismantling of salmon recovery programs amounts to “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

“We’re losing decades of accomplishments,” said Soscia, who spent more than 30 years at the agency.

“When the fish managers aren’t there to make real time river decisions, more fish will die,” she said. “Or the watershed restoration work will take a lot longer to happen because you won’t have funding and more fish will die.”

by Mila Koumpilova, Chalkbeat, and Jennifer Smith Richards, 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. To keep up with the latest education news, sign up for Chalkbeat Chicago’s free daily newsletter.

More than 4,000 students once crowded DuSable High School, then an all-Black academic powerhouse on Chicago’s South Side. Its three-story Art Deco building drew students with a full lineup of honors classes, a nationally known music program and standout sports teams.

Nat King Cole played the piano in his classroom as a DuSable student. Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor, studied there. On Friday nights, teenagers zipped through its hallways on roller skates and danced in the gymnasium.

But at the turn of the millennium, enrollment plunged as Chicago closed a massive public housing complex nearby and a growing number of Black families left the city. Amid a national infatuation with smaller high schools 20 years ago, Chicago Public Schools conducted a grant-funded experiment to chop DuSable into three separate schools sharing a campus. What remains today, after that grant money ran out, is an enormous building and, inside, two tiny schools clinging to life.

One has about 115 students and claims the north corridors. The other, with only 70 students, takes the south wings. The inoperable pool is off-limits.

Hundreds of unneeded hallway lockers hide behind decorative paper and student posters of Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and former first lady Michelle Obama, whose father attended in the 1950s.

The two little high schools in Bronzeville share the same entrance and sports teams, but other things are doubled: two main offices, two principals, two assistant principals, two school counselors. Even though there’s a teacher for roughly every five students, the course offerings are limited.

Chicago Public Schools operates more than 500 schools and spends about $18,700 per student to run buildings that it considers well-utilized. At the DuSable schools, the cost is closer to $50,000 a student.

The DuSable schools are emblematic of an unyielding predicament facing the district. Enrollment has shrunk. Three of every 10 of its schools sit at least half-empty, and they are costly to run.

More critically, there are 47 schools, including those inside DuSable, operating at less than one-third capacity, by the district’s measure. That’s almost twice as many severely underenrolled buildings as Chicago had in 2013, when it carried out the largest mass school closings in the country’s history, Chalkbeat and ProPublica found. The most extreme example is Frederick Douglass Academy High School, which has 28 students this year and a per-student cost of $93,000.

Many of those schools are in historic buildings that need millions of dollars in repairs.

The costs are not only financial. Students in the city’s smallest schools have fewer courses to choose from and often miss out on clubs, extracurricular activities and sports. Chicago’s underenrolled high schools are more likely to have lower graduation and college enrollment rates. They tend to struggle with chronic truancy and higher dropout rates, a ProPublica and Chalkbeat analysis found.

But officials in Chicago have chosen not to confront the problem of the city’s tiny schools. The teachers union and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who used to be an organizer and legislative liaison for the union, are quick to shut down discussion of downsizing. Widespread anger over the 2013 closures helped fuel the union’s rise to political power over the past decade; the union has also wielded the radioactive closure issue to undermine opponents, notably outgoing district CEO Pedro Martinez.

Union leaders, many community activists and some researchers say closures disrupt displaced students’ learning and harm the city’s predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods, which were disproportionately affected by that earlier wave of closures. They argue the district needs to do much more to try revitalizing these campuses before it considers shuttering or merging them.

Helping to delay a reckoning: Since 2013, the district has operated under a series of moratoriums on closing schools, including one state lawmakers enacted with strong support from the teachers union. And a statewide school finance overhaul under former Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner increases or at least holds funding steady for districts even if enrollment declines.

Chicago has too many schools for the number of students it serves today, Martinez said in an interview with ProPublica and Chalkbeat. The district is spending too much on aging buildings, and it’s not providing a rich experience for students in many of its tiny schools, he said, adding: “They’re not having joy in that environment.”

But he said he inherited a closure moratorium and worked with school boards that had no appetite for closing or merging schools. “Our footprint is too large,” said Martinez, who leaves the district this month. “Every time somebody wants to address this issue, you see at all levels of politics, nobody wants to do it.”

He said he hopes a fully elected school board that will take over in 2027 will tackle the issue head-on, working closely with the communities it serves.

In a statement, the district noted its building utilization formula is “just one measure,” and it could overestimate available space.

The mayor’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

With public school enrollment declining across the country, a growing number of cities — Milwaukee; Denver; Flint, Michigan; Boston; San Francisco; Philadelphia — are grappling with the issue of underenrollment. Some plan to close schools.

But Chicago, the country’s fourth-largest district, operates on a larger scale: It has more students and more buildings than most other cities. The city’s school-age population, meanwhile, is on a downward trajectory, federal COVID-19 aid ran out this year and the district faces a budget deficit of more than $500 million.

And yet, Chicago “doesn’t seem to be having an honest conversation about the challenges it’s facing,” said Carrie Hahnel, a school finance researcher with the nonprofit Bellwether.

The DuSable High School building houses two smaller schools, the Bronzeville Scholastic Institute and Daniel Hale Williams Preparatory School of Medicine. Unused lockers are covered with posters and decorative crafts. (Akilah Townsend for ProPublica) “A Lack of Political Courage”

The 2013 closings of 49 Chicago elementary schools and one small high school were more than controversial. Families there felt that their communities were being torn apart as the city moved to shutter schools with long and rich histories. After protests and angry meetings, students were displaced to schools that were farther away from home. Neighborhood hubs were mothballed.

Deep distrust of Chicago Public Schools after the mass closures lingers, especially in Black neighborhoods like DuSable’s Bronzeville. University of Chicago research showed those closures set students back academically, though a small number who moved to high-performing campuses fared better. Some community groups and the teachers union in Chicago see schools as a public good; shuttering them is another mark of disinvestment.

That was the backdrop when a group of DuSable High School alumni grew concerned about dwindling enrollment at their beloved school and worried the district might target the building for closure. They approached CPS just before the pandemic with an alternative idea: Consolidate the two tiny schools at DuSable and focus classes on STEM careers.

The Bronzeville Scholastic Institute and the Daniel Hale Williams Preparatory School of Medicine would unite and revert to the name DuSable.

The alumni had no illusions that they could fully restore DuSable to what it once was. Compared to the school’s heyday, a much smaller number of school-age children live in Bronzeville today. But the alumni wanted more for the school.

The group met repeatedly with school and district leaders in DuSable’s wood-paneled social room, where trophies mark decades of athletic and musical excellence.

Officials told the group to get more input from current families at both schools — a daunting task given that the district would not provide their names or contact information. The plan fizzled out.

Hal Woods, now a policy director with the parent advocacy nonprofit Kids First Chicago, worked as the district’s school development director at the time and sat in on those meetings. He said the bottom line was that the plan smacked too much of a closure.

“We didn’t want to be seen with our fingerprints on this,” he said.

The Robert Taylor Homes — at one time the largest public housing project in the United States — once loomed over DuSable High School, as seen in these images from 1966. The complex was demolished by 2007, and DuSable High School never recovered from the loss of that student population. (Chicago Sun-Times Collection/Chicago History Museum)

Former school board President Jianan Shi, a Johnson appointee who served from 2023 to 2024, said rebuilding trust and planning for schools’ future with local communities at the helm takes time; it must begin now.

But, he said, “There’s a lack of political courage to have this conversation, and yet it’s often weaponized.”

Amid the uproar over the 2013 closings, Chicago’s then-mayor, Rahm Emanuel, vowed that his appointed school board would not close schools for five years. The state legislature then imposed a 2021 moratorium on closing Chicago schools until January of this year, part of a bill that changed the Chicago Board of Education to an elected, rather than mayor-appointed, body.

Today, Chicago has 634 schools, including 119 charter and contract schools run by outside entities, and a teachers union ally holds the mayor’s office. Last September, amid a power struggle between Johnson and Martinez, the Chicago Teachers Union publicized a facilities analysis that the district had done in late 2023, which included hypothetical scenarios for consolidating 75 schools, including Williams and Bronzeville. The union argued that even entertaining that idea was cause to fire Martinez immediately.

As the CTU pounced, Martinez pushed back, saying the district had concluded that no school would be closed while he was in charge — which he now says was really the school board’s decision. At the next school board meeting, he presented a new resolution that got unanimous support: CPS would not close any schools until 2027.

But the city’s demographic realities are not on hold. About 325,000 students enrolled this year, a drop of more than 70,000 from a decade ago. District officials project that three school years from now, there could be as few as 300,000 or, in a best-case scenario, as many as 334,000 students. Those estimates are based in part on the city’s sharply falling birth rates. Citywide, from 2011 to 2021, the number of births dropped by more than 43%.

Still, CTU leaders insist that the city is actually poised for a population turnaround. During President Donald Trump’s second administration, Chicago under Johnson can bill itself as a progressive refuge — a place that protects immigrants, abortion care, LGBTQ+ rights and access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth and adults, said Jackson Potter, vice president of the CTU.

“We are going to need to be a citadel of protection,” he said, adding that the last thing the city wants is to shutter some of its schools, then see families arriving in these neighborhoods en masse only to find limited classroom seats.

The union’s real issue with school closures, Potter said, is that Chicago has done them without enough educator and community input and has rushed them, destabilizing other nearby schools.

An influx of immigrant families allowed CPS to stabilize its enrollment and the city to notch modest population increases in the past two years after a lengthy decline. But some demographers think the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown might mean these gains are short-lived.

Jim Lewis, a senior researcher at the Great Cities Institute, a research hub at the University of Illinois Chicago, is skeptical about the possibility of an influx of school-age children in areas with shrinking schools. Some gentrifying Chicago neighborhoods have drawn new residents, but they tend to be higher earners who generally have fewer kids.

Lewis cautions that people tend to overestimate the power of schools to attract residents. Studies have shown that crumbling schools can deter families, he said. But research also suggests new programs and attractive campuses can only do so much to draw them — unless those schools come with a complete package of job opportunities, safe neighborhoods, affordable housing and more.

“I’m all for beautiful new schools,” Lewis said. “Do I think by itself it changes the demography of a place? I don’t think so.”

What to do about underenrolled schools and Chicago’s diminished school-age population is a decision for Chicago’s school board. Currently, 10 members are elected and 11 are appointed by the mayor. Next year, all will be up for election.

Some members, who said they could only speak candidly if they aren’t named, said the board must discuss solutions for tiny schools, including consolidation. But being branded “school closers” is a concern ahead of elections. Others said they’re open to discussing alternatives to school closings, including bringing health clinics or other family services into vacant parts of underenrolled schools.

“I think we have to talk about small schools as a result of historic racism, underfunding, neglect and inequity,” said member Debby Pope, a former CTU employee. A conversation is going to be essential, she said, but with a moratorium on closings in place and the possibility that the board could extend it, “I don’t think this is the moment for that conversation.”

Dozens of Chicago schools are operating at less than one-third capacity. (Taylor Glascock for ProPublica) Small Enrollment, Limited Opportunities

About 5 miles southeast of DuSable is Hirsch High School, which was one of the district’s largest school building projects when it opened in the 1920s and once dealt with severe overcrowding. It’s gotten so small now that M’Kya Craig had taken all the electives the school offered by her junior year.

She was one of roughly 100 students at Hirsch, which could enroll 1,000. She browsed the school’s limited courses and decided to take yearbook for a second time. She was bracing to take the course a third time her senior year, but Hirsch added an African American literature class.

Craig appreciated that staff at the small school got to know her well, including a counselor who helped her get into Chicago State University. But she often felt frustrated by the school’s slim course offerings and scarce extracurriculars over the years.

“We lost a lot over the years due to being a small school,” she said.

Most of the district’s underenrolled schools serve students who do not participate in Chicago’s expansive system of school choice, where high-performing students test into selective schools ranked the best in the state, and other students find their way to magnets, charters or strong neighborhood schools, often in wealthier parts of Chicago.

Many of the district’s small schools serve Chicago’s highest-needs students.

Hirsch High School on Chicago’s South Side opened in 1926 and has the capacity for 1,000 students. It currently has around 100. (Taylor Glascock for ProPublica)

At the Daniel Hale Williams Preparatory School of Medicine, one of the schools inside DuSable, junior Georgia Deaye was drawn to the school’s medical career program and loves the close-knit feel.

“The connection with teachers is way deeper than if I was at another school,” she said.

She participated in a summer internship program that Williams accesses through one of the larger district high schools and recently got her CPR certification. The most recent graduation rate at Williams was 93%, among the highest in the district. The graduating class was 14 students. There are a total of 70 students enrolled there, at a cost of $54,000 per student.

“Small schools are not always painted in a positive light,” said Williams Principal Leonetta Sanders, but the smaller environment is ideal for some students. In part because of its size, the campus hasn’t had to deal with gang problems or violence, she said.

“Safety,” she said, “is always money well spent.”

Some research has suggested that students tend to do better in smaller schools, notes Bruce Fuller, an expert at the University of California, Berkeley. But those findings apply to small-by-design campuses with healthy enrollments, not schools that have shrunk dramatically as families have moved away.

Fuller doesn’t think that student outcomes at those underenrolled schools have been studied rigorously because it would be too hard to control for factors such as the high needs of the students they tend to serve. “There’s consistent evidence that smaller can be better,” Fuller said. “But small in this lifecycle of decline is a totally different story.”

In Chicago’s tiny schools, the limitations, even at a high per-student cost, are substantial. Bronzeville Scholastic Institute, the other school inside DuSable, used to be able to teach Spanish and French but now offers Spanish only. The school once offered Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses but realized it could not continue to offer both; it kept the IB program.

The schools have tried to make up for the limited course offerings by encouraging students to take online courses and dual-enrollment classes that local community colleges offer to high school students.

“You’ve got 12 kids in a class. The board is not going to pay for a calculus teacher,” Grace Dawson, who leads DuSable’s robust alumni group, said of the school district. Students are being “robbed” of opportunity, said Dawson, a former Chicago school principal.

Flush with federal COVID aid, the district added more than 7,500 new positions over the past four years even as enrollment kept declining. It also recently started guaranteeing a certain number of staff, including 10 teachers, at each school regardless of enrollment. Williams and Bronzeville, which used to share an assistant principal and a gym teacher, each hired their own. Douglass High School on the city’s West Side now has 27 employees for 28 students.

That includes six regular education teachers, six special education teachers, a school counselor, a college and career coach, a conflict resolution specialist, a restorative justice coordinator, and an assistant principal and principal. The cost to run the school is $93,000 per student.

“Is a Douglass student getting a $93,000-a-year experience? No,” said Woods of Kids First Chicago. “We can confidently say that. CPS pumps extra dollars into these schools so they can offer the bare minimum."

The district, which handles requests for comment about individual schools, did not dispute the high per-pupil price tag at Douglass. It has said its new budgeting approach gives all schools a fiscal boost regardless of size.

David Narain, who was principal at Hirsch until 2023, said the school’s smaller size allowed his staff to focus intensely on a highly mobile student body, where many students came in reading at the third or fourth grade level. But it was challenging to build a school culture on a campus with so few students.

“You try to have a homecoming, but there’s no football team,” he said. “There’s nothing to come home to.”

And Narain understands the financial tension the district faces. “The writing is on the wall,” he said. “You can’t continue to run these schools and give them all of these resources.”

Williams Preparatory School, one of the schools inside DuSable, offers students a medical career program. (Akilah Townsend for ProPublica) Old Buildings, Big Expenses

In a district with a $10 billion budget, the overall spending on staff and programs at small schools can seem negligible. But keeping aging campuses running is costly no matter how many students are there. The average Chicago school building is 85 years old; dozens of them were built before 1900.

Analysis of capital spending data by ProPublica and Chalkbeat found that since 2017, the district’s 47 severely underenrolled schools — ones that sit more than two-thirds empty — have cost more than $213 million to maintain and renovate.

The emptiest buildings account for $400 million of the district’s estimated $3.1 billion in needed critical repairs. The DuSable building alone needs $21 million in urgent repairs.

Adding to the financial uncertainty at CPS is the Trump administration’s threat to withhold federal funding from districts such as Chicago that have maintained their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

Education policy researcher Chad Aldeman, the former policy director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, said some closures or consolidations seem inevitable on the heels of Chicago’s massive enrollment losses. If the district doesn’t make a plan now — with community input and help to ease the transition for students — it could find itself scrambling later to reorganize in crisis mode.

“A lot of places that are closing schools are in financial distress,” Aldeman said. “They are trying to save money rather than thinking holistically.”

Closing schools can also carry steep costs. In 2013, the district spent big to add staff at schools that took in students, spruce up those schools and move furniture out of the closed buildings.

Then there’s what to do with vacant buildings. The district is still trying to sell 20 vacant schools from the 2013 closures, which it pays to maintain.

CTU leaders, who pushed to add thousands of new school staff positions in recent contract talks, have long advocated spending more to breathe new life into underenrolled schools — an invest-and-they’ll-come theory.

Potter, the CTU vice president, holds up Dyett High School — which the district closed but later reopened after a CTU-supported hunger strike in protest — as an example of a “phoenix rising from the ashes.” Its basketball team won a state title this year. Though the school is still at 58% capacity, enrollment has stabilized at roughly 500 students, a benchmark CPS has used to weigh whether a high school is big enough.

“Why would you start with a question about consolidations when you can start with a question about support?” he said.

But recent years have tested the power of added investments to boost enrollment.

In 2018, the district and teachers union jointly launched an initiative to target 20 high-poverty campuses, including Dyett, with an additional $500,000 a year. They’ve used the money to partner with a local nonprofit to offer more services for students and families.

Some of these schools have since reported parent and student engagement gains. But with a few exceptions, they have steadily lost enrollment since then, in some cases dramatically.

by ProPublica

ProPublica announced on Thursday that Adriana Pera has been hired as an engagement and tips coordinator, where she’ll work to ensure that the tips that flow into our newsroom remain secure and are routed to the appropriate reporters.

Pera was most recently an engagement producer at KPCC/LAist, where she worked on projects related to civics, democracy and education.

“Reader tips are the lifeblood of our newsroom, and we’re fortunate to have a journalist as seasoned and thoughtful as Adriana at the helm,” said Tyson Evans, chief product and brand officer.

“I’m a firm believer that journalism is better when we hear from sources and community members with direct knowledge of what’s happening,” Pera said. “I am beyond ecstatic to join ProPublica’s impressive engagement team and to uphold the accessibility, security and impact of their tips line.”

by Annie Waldman, Asia Fields and Ashley Clarke, design by Zisiga Mukulu, and photography by Bethany Mollenkof for ProPublica

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The National Institutes of Health is responsible for more than 80% of the world’s grant investment in biomedical research. Its funding has sparked countless medical breakthroughs — on cancer, diabetes, strokes — and plays a fundamental role in the development of pharmaceutical drugs.

Scientists compete vigorously for a slice of the more than $30 billion that the agency doles out annually; they can spend years assembling grant applications that stretch thousands of pages in hopes of convincing peer reviewers of the promise of their projects. Only 1 in 5 gets chosen.

The NIH has rarely revoked funding once it has been awarded. Out of the tens of thousands of grants overseen by the institution since 2012, it terminated fewer than five for violations of the agency’s terms and conditions.

Then Donald Trump was reelected.

Since his January inauguration, his administration has terminated more than 1,450 grants, withholding more than $750 million in funds; officials have said they are curbing wasteful spending and “unscientific” research. The Department of Government Efficiency gave the agency direction on what to cut and why, ProPublica has previously found, bypassing the NIH’s established review process.

“The decision to terminate certain grants is part of a deliberate effort to ensure taxpayer dollars prioritize high-impact, urgent science,” said Andrew G. Nixon, the director of communications for the Department of Health and Human Services. He did not respond to questions about the terminated grants or how patients may be impacted, but he said, “Many discontinued projects were duplicative or misaligned with NIH’s core mission. NIH remains focused on supporting rigorous biomedical research that delivers real results — not radical ideology.”

Targeted projects, however, were seeking cures for future pandemics, examining the causes of dementia and trying to prevent HIV transmission.

The mass cancellation of grants in response to political policy shifts has no precedent, former and current NIH officials told ProPublica. It threatens the stability of the institution and the scientific enterprise of the nation at large. Hundreds of current and former NIH staffers published a declaration this week — cosigned by thousands of scientists across the world, including more than 20 Nobel laureates — decrying the politicization of science at the agency and urging its director to reinstate the canceled grants. Many researchers have appealed the terminations, and several lawsuits are underway challenging the cuts.

It has been difficult for scientists and journalists to convey the enormity of what has happened these past few months and what it portends for the years and decades to come. News organizations have chronicled cuts to individual projects and sought to quantify the effects of lost spending on broad fields of study. To gain a deeper understanding of the toll, ProPublica reached out to more than 500 researchers, scientists and investigators whose grants were terminated.

More than 150 responded to share their experiences, which reveal consequences that experts say run counter to scientific logic and even common sense.

They spoke of the tremendous waste generated by an effort intended to save money — years of government-funded research that may never be published, blood samples in danger of spoiling before they can be analyzed.

Work to address disparities in health, once considered so critical to medical advancement that it was mandated by Congress, is now being cut if the administration determines it has any connection to “diversity,” “equity” or “gender ideology.” Caught in this culling were projects to curb stillbirths, child suicides and infant brain damage.

Researchers catalogued many fears — about the questions they won’t get to answer, the cures they will fail to find and the colleagues they will lose to more supportive countries. But most of all, they said they worried about the people who, because of these cuts, will die.

Research Frozen

The NIH often awards funding in multiyear grants, giving scientists the time and intellectual freedom to pursue their work uninterrupted. They plan experiments, hire staff and make equipment purchases on long timelines.

Now, studies can’t be completed. Papers can’t be published. Years of research may be lost and millions of dollars wasted.

Grants Terminated:

A project to improve recruitment of participants in Alzheimer’s clinical trials.

A study to increase vaccine uptake in underserved populations.

A study investigating in-utero exposure to contaminants in public drinking water.

An examination of the consequences of abortion restrictions.

Diana Greene Foster, a reproductive health researcher and professor at the University of California, San Francisco

After the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, demographer Diana Greene Foster set out to study the outcomes of pregnant patients who showed up in emergency departments. She wanted to know whether state restrictions were causing delays in care.

“This needs to be answered for courts to consider the evidence,” said Foster, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. “Every day that goes by, people are potentially at risk.”

Less than one year into a five-year NIH grant, she had arrived at some early findings: “Abortion bans don’t stop very many people from getting abortions,” she said. “Bans actually cause people to have their abortions later in pregnancy.” For those who live in states with bans, she found, second-trimester abortions increased from 8% of procedures to 17%, requiring more complex interventions to end their pregnancies and increasing their risk of complications.

But before the data could be published, the NIH informed her on March 21 that the grant was terminated. It was no longer in line with agency priorities, a letter stated, specifying that studies on “gender identity” “ignore, rather than seriously examine, biological realities.”

The termination left Foster confused. “They are wrong that studying gender minority populations is not important,” she said. “But my study is not about gender identity. It is relevant to anyone who is pregnant, regardless of how they identify.”

Foster had to pause her research while she searched for other funding. “This was clearly a politically motivated cut,” she said.

ProPublica heard from more than 70 researchers who said that they were unable to continue their projects due to the terminations.

“Two and a half years into a three-year grant, and to all of a sudden stop and not fully be able to answer the original questions, it’s just a waste.” —Ethan Moitra, associate professor at Brown University, who was researching whether brief therapy can improve mental health for LGBTQ+ people

“We are now scrambling to figure out if there are parts we can continue or salvage.” —Julia Marcus, associate professor at Harvard Medical School, who was researching whether HIV prevention medicine can be made available over the counter

“To build trust between health care providers, health researchers in communities takes decades of work, and scientists have already done the work. Now this is going to be depleted.” —Jesus Ramirez-Valles, professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who was examining how HIV impacts the physical and mental health of gay men as they age

Patient Studies Interrupted

Thousands of studies supported by the NIH involve human subjects. Some include clinical trials, in which researchers recruit participants, often with grave conditions from cancer to HIV, to test the value of novel treatments and protocols.

In addition to jeopardizing data, terminating a grant in the middle of an active study may worsen participants’ conditions and put them at higher risk of death.

Grants Terminated:

A study to prevent sexually transmitted infections with common antibiotics.

A study to increase access to kidney transplant evaluations.

A clinical trial to understand the effectiveness of flu and COVID-19 vaccine text message reminders.

A study to test a protocol to prevent HIV transmission.

Amy Nunn and Dr. Philip Chan, behavioral and social science professors at Brown University

A single daily pill can nearly eliminate the risk of contracting HIV — but only when taken as prescribed. Black and Latino men who have sex with men have more than a 1-in-4 chance of contracting HIV but sometimes struggle to get or stay in care.

Working with community clinics across Mississippi, Washington, D.C., and Rhode Island, Brown University professors Amy Nunn and Dr. Philip Chan set out to examine what happens when people are provided wraparound clinical services before they contract the disease. “This is about preventing people from getting HIV,” Nunn said.

The study provides aggressive case management to help patients navigate the health care system and stay on the treatment, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP, which is available in both oral and injectable forms. Workers provide patients with reminders, help them get coverage and even pick up their medicine.

In 2023, the researchers received about $3.7 million in NIH funding for five years of work. Their team was just starting to gather data that showed the program’s efficacy when the grant was terminated. “This is science that had really great chances of having a huge impact, and all of a sudden, it’s cut off at the knee,” Nunn said.

Chan told ProPublica that he worries that the patients in their study could be harmed by the cut. “There’s no doubt that some of them are going to not stay on PrEP,” said Chan, “and that some of them are going to get HIV.”

At least 30 researchers told ProPublica that the termination of their grant forced them to end clinical research or a trial abruptly, leaving participants in limbo.

“We cannot assay the blood samples that we have collected and paid participants for. A total waste of the money and resources that went into collecting the data.” —Sarah Whitton, professor at the University of Cincinnati, who was identifying risk factors for mental illness and suicidality for young LGBTQ+ women

“We have also had to quickly scramble to keep the study going unfunded to avoid having to stop the treatment and clinical trial for those already enrolled.” —Tiffany Brown, assistant professor at Auburn University, who was developing an eating disorder treatment for LGBTQ+ patients

“With a clinical trial, if you can’t follow participants to the end, you have no information, because the whole point is to see whether there’s change from beginning to end.” —Katie Biello, professor and chair of epidemiology at Brown University’s School of Public Health, who was trying to improve adherence to medication protocols for adolescents with HIV in Brazil

Disparities Disregarded

(Edwin Tan/Getty Images)

The Trump administration has banned the NIH from funding grants with a perceived connection to “diversity, equity and inclusion,” alleging that such projects may be discriminatory.

Caught up in the wave of terminations is work seeking to understand why some populations — including women and sexual, racial or ethnic minorities — may be more at risk of certain disorders or diseases.

Grants Terminated:

A study investigating how discrimination affects the mental health of Latino youth.

Research examining maternal behavioral health conditions of Black women.

An examination of the effects of structural racism on people at risk of kidney disease.

A study investigating why women of color disproportionately die from cervical cancer.

Adana Llanos, an epidemiologist and health equity scholar at Columbia University

Despite preventative vaccines and improved screening, more than 4,000 women die every year from cervical cancer. Black and Hispanic women are more likely than their white peers to be diagnosed, and often at later stages.

After more than a decade of studying cancer care disparities, epidemiologist Adana Llanos found that the ZIP code in which a woman received care often plays a pivotal role in how she fares. And in 2023, Llanos and her colleagues were awarded a multiyear NIH grant to further examine inequities, specifically in cervical cancer care and who survives it.

Even though their work targets the women most at risk, Llanos said their research, like most health equity research, will increase our understanding of cervical cancer more broadly. “This work has the potential to improve cancer outcomes for everyone, no matter what you identify as, no matter what your characteristics are,” she said.

Last year, her team began to recruit a cohort of 960 women who had been diagnosed with cervical cancer to track their patterns of care and outcomes. But in March, after the researchers had enrolled about 200 participants, the NIH terminated the funding. Llanos paused enrollment.

The cancellation felt like a betrayal of her study’s participants, she said. Llanos had spent years developing relationships with community groups and cancer patients, gaining their trust so they would feel comfortable sharing their treatment experiences.

“We’ve made commitments to them,” she said.

More than 550 of the terminated grants were focused on health disparities or inequities, attempting to understand why some groups have different health outcomes.

“If you cannot identify groups that are higher risk, it seems like just really bad science. That’s sort of the basics of how you try to conquer a disease.” —Carl Latkin, professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, who was analyzing the comorbidities of people who have HIV and those at risk for getting it

“Health disparities are just going to get larger, and real folks are going to die.” —Marguerita Lightfoot, professor at the Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University School of Public Health, who was studying the value of guaranteed income and financial mentoring to Black youth

“It’s a major principle of epidemiology to target work towards the people who are being disproportionately affected. Now we’re being told that we cannot mention them in our research.” —Dr. Matthew Spinelli, assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who was working to prevent sexually transmitted infections with common antibiotics

LGBTQ+ People Targeted

(Jason Koxvold for ProPublica)

One of Trump’s first executive orders was a directive banning federal funds from being used to support or promote so-called “gender ideology.” Hundreds of grants focused on the health of LGBTQ+ populations have been terminated, including many studies focused on young people and those at risk of contracting HIV.

In response to a lawsuit, a federal judge issued an injunction barring the administration from fully enforcing the orders. It canceled the grants anyway, citing agency policy and scientific priorities.

Grants Terminated:

A study to improve the delivery of behavioral health care to LGBTQ+ youth.

Research to address substance use in young men who are at risk for or living with HIV.

An evaluation of disparities in mpox vaccination rates among men who have sex with men.

An investigation of why LGBTQ+ adults are dying by suicide.

Lauren Forrest, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon (Jason Koxvold for ProPublica)

Gay, lesbian and bisexual adults are over three times more likely to consider suicide than their heterosexual peers. Few studies have aimed to figure out how to prevent this.

Last year, Lauren Forrest, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, received a multiyear grant to do so, focusing on LGBTQ+ people who live in rural areas where access to specialized care may be more limited.

She was planning to recruit dozens of participants. But on March 21, she received a notification from the NIH that her grant was terminated because it did not “effectuate” the agency’s priorities, citing its connection to “gender identity.”

“The way they’re going about deciding which grants will or won’t be terminated, it’s not about scientific rigor,” she said. “It’s about literally actively discriminating against health-disparity populations.”

Forrest has been forced to reduce the hours of her research staff, and she now risks losing key lab personnel who may have to seek other employment due to the cuts. “There is no way to recover the lost time, research continuity or training value once disrupted,” she said.

She worries most about the deaths that could have been prevented. “People are going to be harmed because of this,” she said.

More than 300 of the grants terminated by the NIH were focused on LGBTQ+ health care. About 40 of those grants were researching ways to prevent suicide in adults and youth.

“We have a paper that’s ready to go out that shows lesbian women are almost 3 times as likely to have a stillbirth compared to their heterosexual peers. That’s such an avoidable, horrible outcome to happen, and that paper may never be published.” —Brittany Charlton, associate professor at Harvard Medical School, who was quantifying obstetrical outcomes for lesbian, gay and bisexual women

“It is devastating to have state-sanctioned dehumanization and exclusion. I am afraid for what these messages will do to the mental health of youth who are told they don’t matter or, for some, that they don’t even exist by parts of society.” —Dr. Sarah Goff, professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was studying how to improve the delivery of mental health care to LGBTQ+ youth

“I honestly burst into tears. The evidence we would have gained from this work will not exist.” —Kirsty Clark, assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, who was finding best practices for preventing suicide in LGBTQ+ preteens

Losing a Generation

The grant terminations and subsequent instability have created a lost generation of scientists, dozens of researchers told ProPublica — cutting off an established pipeline at all stages of researchers’ careers.

Universities are trimming the number of openings in postdoctoral and graduate programs.

Young researchers are struggling to find funding to initiate studies or open new laboratories.

And some scientists are opting to pursue opportunities abroad.

Grants Terminated:

A grant to train researchers and public health professionals on HIV science.

A program to support the development of early-career scientists and researchers.

A grant to support Ph.D. students from historically underrepresented groups.

A program to train the next generation of pediatric research scientists.

Dr. Lauren Harasymiw, a scholar in the NIH’s Pediatric Scientist Development Program

Dr. Lauren Harasymiw was a medical resident in a neonatal intensive care unit when an infant took a turn for the worse. Born at only 23 weeks gestation — the edge of viability — the baby girl experienced a hemorrhage within the ventricles of her brain.

“What does this mean for her?” Harasymiw recalls asking her attending physician. The supervisor didn’t know. “The field of neonatology has made incredible strides over the last decades in helping our babies survive,” Harasymiw said. “But we’ve made less progress in protecting their neurodevelopmental outcomes.”

If doctors could better assess infants’ outcomes after a brain injury, they could target interventions sooner and provide families with better resources. To advance this area of medicine, Harasymiw pursued NIH-funded training to become a pediatric scientist.

But in March, the NIH terminated funding for the Pediatric Scientist Development Program, which funded Harasymiw’s salary and research, claiming that the program was connected to “DEI.”

“This is just ripping out the foundation of my career,” Harasymiw said.

In a statement about the grant terminations, Nixon, the HHS spokesperson, said that the NIH “continues to invest robustly in training and career development opportunities that produce measurable contributions to biomedical science and patient care.” However, he added that “while fostering the next generation of scientists is essential, effective leadership requires clear focus: prioritizing research that is impactful and results-driven over duplicative or low-yield programs.”

Dr. Sallie Permar, who runs the program and is chair of pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, was perplexed by the cut; the program seemed to be in line with the administration’s focus on combating chronic disease in children.

“That’s exactly what we’re training these scholars to do,” she said.

More than 50 researchers told ProPublica that the funding cuts would harm the next generation of scholars, discouraging them from practicing in the United States.

“We have a generation of researchers that were planning to focus on these questions that are now either scared or don’t have funding to continue their training, or both.” —Mandi Pratt-Chapman, associate center director for community outreach, engagement and equity at the George Washington Cancer Center, who was identifying best practices for collecting data about LGBTQ+ people at small and rural cancer centers

“Admissions for graduate school have been downsized to a point where prospective students are giving up on pursuing a Ph.D.” —Tigist Tamir, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who received a career development grant and was studying how oxidative stress is regulated in breast cancer and obesity

“I already know several researchers on the job search who ended up taking faculty positions in Canada instead of the U.S.” —Dr. Benjamin Solomon, instructor of immunology and allergy in the department of pediatrics at Stanford Medical School, who received a career development grant and was examining rare genetic immune diseases in children

How We Reported the Story

Shortly after the public became aware of the termination of hundreds of grants at the National Institutes of Health, ProPublica published a call for tips in March, requesting that researchers with canceled grants share their experiences. ProPublica heard from more than 150 researchers and scientists and interviewed more than 70 about how the grant terminations were affecting their projects, their careers and the field of biomedical science at large. The story relies on the personal opinions of the researchers and does not reflect the views of their institutions. To understand the universe of NIH grant terminations, ProPublica relied on two main data sources: spreadsheets of terminated health grants released by the federal government to comply with Trump’s “Radical Transparency About Wasteful Spending” order, and data from Grant Watch, a private initiative tracking the terminations, led by researchers Noam Ross, Scott Delaney, Anthony Barente and Emma Mairson. They have used crowdsourcing and federal sources to create their dataset.

Were you involved in a clinical trial, participating in research or receiving services that have ended, been paused or been delayed because of canceled federal funding? Our reporters want to hear from you.

To share your experience, contact our reporting team at healthfunding@propublica.org.

Melody Kramer and Agnel Philip contributed research.

by T. Christian Miller and Sebastian Rotella

Leer en español.

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In mid-April, President Donald Trump sat down in the Oval Office with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador to celebrate a new partnership. They had recently negotiated an extraordinary deal in which El Salvador agreed to incarcerate in a maximum security prison hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants that the Trump administration had labeled as violent criminals, though few had been convicted of such crimes. The U.S. also sent back accused members of the notorious Salvadoran gang MS-13 — which both the U.S. and El Salvador have designated as a terrorist organization.

Bukele’s presidency has been defined by his successful crackdown against MS-13. He has jailed tens of thousands of alleged gang members, transforming one of the hemisphere’s most dangerous nations into one of its safest. Although human rights groups have criticized his tactics, Bukele remains extremely popular in El Salvador.

During their meeting at the White House, Trump praised his guest as “one hell of a president.” He shook Bukele’s hand, saying, “We appreciate working with you because you want to stop crime and so do we.”

A long-running U.S. investigation of MS-13 has uncovered evidence at odds with Bukele’s reputation as a crime fighter. The inquiry, which began as an effort to dismantle the gang’s leadership, expanded to focus on whether the Bukele government cut a secret deal with MS-13 in the early years of his presidency.

New reporting on that investigation by ProPublica shows that senior officials in Bukele’s government repeatedly impeded the work of a U.S. task force as it pursued evidence of possible wrongdoing by the Salvadoran president and his inner circle.

Bukele’s allies secretly blocked extraditions of gang leaders whom U.S. agents viewed as potential witnesses to the negotiations and persecuted Salvadoran law enforcement officials who helped the task force, according to exclusive interviews with current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials, newly obtained internal documents and court records from both countries.

In a previously unreported development, federal agents came to suspect that Bukele and members of his inner circle had diverted U.S. aid funds to the gang as part of the alleged deal to provide it with money and power in exchange for votes and reduced homicide rates. In 2021, agents drew up a request to review U.S. bank accounts held by Salvadoran political figures to look for evidence of money laundering related to the suspected diversion of U.S. funds. The list of names assembled by the agents included Bukele, senior officials and their relatives, according to documents viewed by ProPublica.

“Information obtained through investigation has revealed that the individuals contained within this submission are heavily engaged with MS-13 and are laundering funds from illicit business where MS-13 are involved,” the agents wrote. The people on the list “are also believed to have been funding MS-13 to support political campaigns and MS-13 have received political funds.”

The outcome of the request is not known, but its existence shows that the U.S. investigation had widened to examine suspected corruption at high levels of the Bukele government.

The investigation was led by Joint Task Force Vulcan, a multiagency law enforcement team created at Trump’s request in 2019. Agents found evidence that the Bukele government tried to cover up the pact by preventing the extraditions of gang leaders who faced U.S. charges that include ordering the murders of U.S. citizens and plotting to assassinate an FBI agent.

In addition, U.S. officials helped at least eight of their counterparts in Salvadoran law enforcement flee the country and resettle in the United States or elsewhere because they feared retaliation by their own government, current and former U.S. officials said.

It has been clear from the beginning what Trump wants from El Salvador: an ally who would accept, and even imprison, deportees. Less clear has been what Bukele might want from the United States. In striking the deal with the Salvadoran president, Trump has effectively undercut the Vulcan investigation and shielded Bukele from further scrutiny, current and former U.S. officials said.

Veterans of the Vulcan team are “concerned that all their work, the millions of dollars that were spent, going all over the United States, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, that it will be weakened for political reasons,” said a U.S. official familiar with the investigation.

The task force worked closely with the Salvadoran attorney general’s office, whose prosecutors shared evidence from their own investigation of the gang negotiations and suspected graft in the Bukele government, according to current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials.

“There was good information on corruption between the gang and the Bukele administration,” Christopher Musto, a former senior official at Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, who worked on Vulcan, said about the Salvadoran investigation. “It was a great case.”

In May 2021, Bukele’s legislative majority in Congress ousted the attorney general and justices of the Supreme Court, which oversees extradition requests. Within seven months, newly installed justices reversed or halted six requests for senior gang leaders wanted in the U.S., according to interviews and documents.

“Bukele’s people were coming to the Supreme Court and saying under no circumstances are we extraditing the MS-13 leaders,” said the U.S. official familiar with the investigation. “‘Delay, interfere, undermine, do what you have to do.’”

Senior Bukele officials helped an MS-13 leader with a pending extradition order escape from prison, according to court records, U.S. officials and Salvadoran news reports. At least three other top gang leaders were released from Salvadoran custody after the U.S. filed extradition requests for them, according to Justice Department documents.

Published accounts in the United States and El Salvador have reported allegations that Bukele also pushed for the return of MS-13 leaders to prevent them from testifying in U.S. courts about the pact. Despite his government’s refusal to extradite gang bosses to the United States, the Trump administration in March deported one MS-13 leader accused of terrorism. The Justice Department is now seeking to dismiss charges against a second leader, which would allow him to be sent back to El Salvador, according to recent court filings.

The Justice Department declined to comment in response to questions sent by ProPublica. The State Department referred questions to the Justice Department.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to detailed questions.

“President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people and removing dangerous criminals and terrorist illegals who pose a threat to the American public,” said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson. “We are grateful for President Bukele’s partnership.”

Bukele, the Salvadoran Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Salvadoran Supreme Court did not respond to lists of questions. Bukele has repeatedly denied making any agreement with MS-13. The Trump administration’s deportation of MS-13 members to El Salvador, he said in a post on X, will enable security forces to dismantle the gang.

“This will help us finalize intelligence gathering and go after the last remnants of MS-13, including its former and new members, money, weapons, drugs, hideouts, collaborators, and sponsors,” the post said.

President Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, during a meeting in the Oval Office in April 2025. Trump has praised Bukele as “one hell of a president.” (Al Drago/The Washington Post/Getty Images) “Just Fear”

Bukele was elected president of El Salvador in February 2019, promising to fight the country’s ingrained political corruption and pervasive gang violence, which he called “one of the greatest challenges” facing the nation.

During his first term, Trump also made MS-13 a high-profile foe, calling it “probably the meanest, worst gang in the world.” In August 2019, Attorney General William P. Barr created the Vulcan task force, teaming federal prosecutors with agents of the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies. The goal: Eradicate MS-13.

For decades, MS-13 has bedeviled law enforcement in the Americas with its vast reach, extreme violence and complex culture. The initials stand for “Mara Salvatrucha.” “Mara” means a swarm, while “salvatrucha” has been said to refer to a clever Salvadoran, according to interviews and an academic study. The number represents the 13th letter of the alphabet, M, in homage to the Mexican Mafia, the powerful Southern California prison gang.

MS-13 emerged in the 1980s in Los Angeles among Salvadoran youths whose families had fled a bloody civil war. The gang expanded throughout the diaspora and, as the U.S. deported planeloads of ex-convicts starting in the 1990s, took root in El Salvador. Although most of the leaders were serving sentences in El Salvador, a jailhouse council of 14 bosses, known as the “Ranfla,” used cellphones to micromanage criminal activities in U.S. cities thousands of miles away.

The gang developed a reputation for torturing, brutalizing and dismembering its victims. Barr has called it “a death cult” in which violence is more important than riches.

“It was like a very violent mom-and-pop operation where the cousins and second cousins all want to be a part of it,” said Carlos Ortiz, who served as the HSI attaché in El Salvador from 2018 to 2024. “Minimal money, compared to others. Even though it’s an organization, a lot of it is just fear. Fear of the high-ranking bosses among the rest of the gang, that’s what drives it.”

Trained with military weapons, MS-13 warred with security forces in El Salvador, took over neighborhoods and generated one of the world’s worst homicide rates, driving an exodus of immigrants reminiscent of the 1980s. The Salvadoran Supreme Court designated the gang as a terrorist organization in 2015.

The Vulcan task force had about 30 members, including prosecutors, agents and analysts. Its director, John J. Durham, was a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York who had spent a decade pursuing MS-13 cliques on Long Island. Members of the task force worked from bases around the country and traveled to Mexico and Central America.

One of the founding investigators, Newark FBI agent Daniel Brunner, spoke fluent Spanish and had worked gangs for seven years. He became a roving specialist providing expertise, communications intelligence and court transcripts, sometimes in person and sometimes from a distance.

“Our idea was that Vulcan was like a SEAL Team 6, going in to help the different districts build cases,” Brunner, who is now retired, said in an interview.

Vulcan built on the longtime U.S. presence and extensive influence in El Salvador, where the embassy has long funded and trained law enforcement agencies. FBI agents and others were embedded as advisers in police anti-gang and homicide units and worked with prosecution teams led by Attorney General Raúl Melara.

The U.S. task force modeled its strategy on the ones used against Mexican cartels and Colombian narcoguerrillas: Break the power of the MS-13 bosses by extraditing them to face trial and prison in the United States.

On Jan. 14, 2021, six days before the end of the Trump administration, Durham and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray joined acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen when he announced “the highest-reaching and most sweeping indictment targeting MS-13 and its command and control structure in U.S. history.”

Prosecutors charged the 14 members of the leadership council with major crimes including conspiracy to support and finance narcoterrorism. For more than two decades, the Ranfla ran a criminal network in the United States, Mexico and Central America that sanctioned the murders of Americans and trafficked drugs and arms, the indictment alleged.

The indictment contained a stunning charge: MS-13 bosses had taken the extraordinary step of giving an order, or “green light,” to assassinate an FBI agent working with local investigators in El Salvador. Embassy officials learned of the threat and evacuated the agent, according to interviews.

It is highly unusual for Latin American criminal groups to target a U.S. agent — they have learned that it invites an overwhelming law enforcement response. The assassination plot was a sign that the U.S. crackdown had rattled the gang chiefs, current and former officials said.

Family and friends attend the burial of Justin Llivicura in 2017 on Long Island, New York. Justin, a 16-year-old high school student, was one of four teenagers murdered in a park by members of MS-13. (Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images) Vulcan on the Hunt

In conversations with American officials as president-elect, Bukele promised cooperation and welcomed their support against gangs and graft, even in his own Nuevas Ideas party, according to current and former U.S. officials.

At a press event about the Vulcan task force in 2020, Trump asserted that in the past El Salvador “did not cooperate with the United States at all,” but now it had become a strong law enforcement partner.

Already, though, there had been news accounts alleging that Bukele had cut deals with gangs when he was mayor of San Salvador. Vulcan investigators quickly found evidence that top aides to the new president were negotiating a new pact with gang chiefs, according to interviews.

For more than a decade, MS-13’s control of the streets had made it a political force. It could deliver votes, ignite mayhem or impose order. A series of politicians had held talks with gang leaders to seek electoral support and reductions in violence in return for improved prison conditions and perks such as prostitutes and big-screen televisions.

The Bukele government adopted a more sophisticated bargaining strategy, according to current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials. During secret meetings in prisons and other sites, the president’s emissaries offered MS-13 leaders political power and financial incentives if they lowered the homicide rate and marshaled support for the Nuevas Ideas party, according to current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials and court documents.

The chief negotiator was Carlos Marroquín, a former rap artist and confidant of the president. Bukele had appointed him the director of a new Justice Ministry program known as “Reconstruction of the Social Fabric” that operated in impoverished communities.

Marroquín promised the Ranfla a central role in developing the program, control of neighborhood youth centers, power over urban turf and other financial and political benefits, according to current and former U.S. officials, court documents and Treasury Department sanctions. Informants and communications intercepts indicated that some of the resources going to MS-13 came from U.S. government aid, a violation of U.S. law, according to interviews and documents.

“Money was going from us, from USAID, through to this social fabric group,” a former federal law enforcement official said. “They’re supposed to be building things and getting skills and learning. It was funding the gangs.”

Vulcan also gained information from two highly placed Salvadoran officials involved in the talks with MS-13. The officials provided inside information to U.S. agents about the negotiations, which they said Bukele directed, according to interviews.

The accumulating evidence about the gang pact and the suspected misuse of U.S. funds spurred the task force to broaden its initial focus and target alleged corruption in the Bukele government, current and former U.S. officials said.

In April 2021, federal agents prepared a list of powerful Salvadorans for a financial review by the U.S. Treasury Department. Bukele was one of the 15 names. So were Marroquín; Osiris Luna, the director of the national prison system and another alleged organizer of the gang talks; Martha Carolina Recinos, the president’s chief of staff; and other political figures and their relatives. The request asked the Treasury Department to search for possible illicit transactions in any bank accounts held in the United States by those on the list, according to documents seen by ProPublica.

The Vulcan task force was seeking evidence in U.S. banks of money laundering tied to the diversion of USAID funding through the gang pact, the documents showed. Agents explained that the task force had “uncovered information that MS-13 members are in close contact with politically exposed persons in El Salvador,” referring to prominent government figures.

“The USAID funding is believed to have been laundered by the individuals submitted in this request,” who were suspected of “facilitating, supporting and promoting MS-13 through their official positions,” said the request, which was viewed by ProPublica.

Made under section 314A of the USA Patriot Act, the request for a canvass of U.S. banks requires that investigators show reasonable suspicion rather than probable cause, which is a higher standard. The outcome of the request is unknown. The Treasury Department declined to comment. U.S. prosecutors have not publicly accused Bukele and the others of crimes related to USAID funds.

As U.S. investigators advanced in this political direction, they gained valuable information from the Salvadoran prosecutors who were pressing their own investigation of the gangs and the Bukele administration.

Known in English as Operation Cathedral, their probe was as ambitious and sensitive as the U.S. one. Investigators had documented the secret jailhouse deals with MS-13 and the official attempts to cover them up. They also pursued leads that revealed alleged widespread corruption involving the country’s COVID-19 relief programs, according to current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials and documents. Political tensions increased as the Salvadoran prosecutors targeted the president’s inner circle and raided government offices, clashing with police who tried to stop them from searching the Health Ministry in one incident.

April 2021 was also when a delegation led by Attorney General Melara came to Washington to meet with leaders of Vulcan and other senior U.S. officials. The prosecutors laid out their case against prominent figures in the Bukele government. The “impressive” presentation, a former U.S. federal law enforcement official said, cited videos, phone intercepts and other evidence showing that Marroquín, prisons director Luna and others had clandestinely arranged for government negotiators and gang leaders to enter and leave prisons, smuggled in phones and destroyed logs of prison visits.

“Melara was very nervous because of the very high level of the people he was investigating,” a former U.S. federal law enforcement official said.

Melara declined to comment, saying he does not discuss his work as attorney general.

The Salvadoran director of prisons, Osiris Luna, right, speaks at a police facility in San Salvador, El Salvador, in November 2021. (Rodrigo Sura/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) Interference

On May 1, 2021 — soon after Melara and his team met with U.S. investigators — the Salvadoran Legislature, controlled by Bukele, voted to expel the attorney general and five justices on the Supreme Court.

The purge was a decisive step by Bukele to centralize power. It drew international condemnation. In El Salvador, critics denounced the president’s actions as a “self-coup.” On his Twitter page, Bukele began calling himself “the world’s coolest dictator.”

For Vulcan, the expulsions marked a dramatic shift in its investigation. The Supreme Court justices had signaled their willingness to sign off on some extraditions. Melara had been a helpful ally who reportedly pledged to do “everything necessary” to extradite the Ranfla members, many of whom were in custody in El Salvador. But it soon became clear that the government was no longer interested in handing over senior gang leaders.

“The next prosecutors were not willing to work with us,” said Musto, the former HSI official. “We were not closed out, but all these things that we had in place that we were moving to getting people back here slowed down to a snail’s pace.”

The first clash came over Armando Melgar Diaz, an alleged MS-13 leader who acted as a middleman between gangs in the United States and senior leaders in El Salvador. Melgar, known as “Blue,” had ordered the kidnapping of a family in Oklahoma that owed the gangs $145,000, collected money from a drug ring operating out of restaurants in Maryland and Virginia and was involved with killings in the U.S., according to an indictment and interviews with U.S. officials. He was the first MS-13 member to be accused under terrorism laws.

The newly constituted Supreme Court voted to approve Melgar’s extradition but then reversed its decision, announcing that the matter needed further study. Later, Bukele’s new attorney general asked for a halt to the extradition. The reason: The United States had failed to guarantee that it would not seek the death penalty or life in prison, sentences not allowed under Salvadoran law.

The rationale made no sense to Vulcan prosecutors. The Justice Department had already promised that it would not pursue such punishments against Melgar, according to records and interviews. U.S. and Salvadoran officials attributed the sudden reversal to fear that Melgar could link Bukele and his government to the pact with MS-13.

“Melgar Diaz was going to be the test case,” Musto said. “It was going to be an easy win for Vulcan.”

Information obtained by U.S. agents included allegations that Bukele’s judicial adviser, Conan Castro-Ramírez, had called one of the new Supreme Court justices and told him to find ways to stop the extradition of Melgar, according to interviews. When the justice objected, saying that the extradition had already been approved, Castro allegedly ordered him to reverse it. “That’s why we put you there,” he said, according to the interviews.

The State Department sanctioned Castro for his role in assisting in the “inappropriate removal” of the Supreme Court justices and the attorney general. Castro did not respond to attempts to contact him.

A Salvadoran court sentenced Melgar to 39 years in prison for conspiracy to commit homicide, among other crimes. He was the first MS-13 leader whose extradition was blocked. Soon after, the U.S. extradition requests for other gang chiefs ran into opposition.

“Bukele and his government are using the entire state apparatus to prevent these people from being extradited,” a person with knowledge of the Salvadoran judicial system said in a recent interview.

Miguel Ángel Flores Durel, a newly appointed Supreme Court justice who reportedly had served as a lawyer for a top MS-13 leader, made sure that the requests were never granted, according to the person with knowledge of El Salvador’s judicial system. Flores instructed colleagues “do not work on extraditions at all,” the person said.

In July 2022, El Salvador agreed to extradite two lower-ranking MS-13 members charged with the murders of Salvadoran immigrants in Long Island in 2016 and 2017 in which victims were butchered with axes and machetes. The Supreme Court also approved the return of Salvadorans not affiliated with the gang who were accused in the U.S. of crimes such as murder.

This was a deliberate strategy, the person said. Flores said that El Salvador needed to continue some extraditions in order to “calm” U.S. officials, who were complaining about the lack of cooperation with Vulcan, the person said. (Flores died in 2023.)

It didn’t work. The extradition of other criminals by the Bukele-aligned Supreme Court only emphasized the lack of cooperation on requests for the senior MS-13 leaders.

“We were never told officially that it wouldn’t happen, but it became impossible,” said Brunner, the former FBI agent.

In October 2022, Bukele’s new attorney general announced that criminals would first have to serve their sentence in El Salvador before being sent to the U.S. — an interpretation of the country’s extradition treaty that differed from the previous Supreme Court.

“We aren’t going to be sending Salvadorans without them first paying for the crimes they have committed” in El Salvador, Rodolfo Delgado said.

Threats and Roadblocks

The Bukele government’s interference with the U.S. investigation went beyond blocking extraditions, U.S. officials said.

Senior Bukele allies also waged a campaign of harassment and intimidation against the Salvadoran officials who had investigated corruption and assisted the Vulcan task force, according to interviews with current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials.

The government threatened officials with arrest and sent police patrols to their homes, according to current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials. At least eight senior Salvadoran law enforcement and judicial officials fled El Salvador for the United States and elsewhere. Vulcan provided them with travel money, language classes, housing and help gaining legal immigration status and finding jobs. In one instance, a U.S. Embassy official escorted a Salvadoran prosecutor out of the country because American officials believed his life was in danger, according to an official familiar with the incident.

The Salvadoran government also weakened special “vetted units” of the police that had worked with the FBI and other U.S. agencies, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Bukele’s allies didn’t stop there. They allegedly helped the escape or release from prison of at least four members of the MS-13 leadership council sought by Vulcan for alleged crimes in the U.S., according to interviews, court documents and press reports.

Elmer Canales-Rivera, alias “Crook de Hollywood,” was one of the most wanted of the Ranfla members. He had been imprisoned for several murders in El Salvador, including a case in which he reportedly helped suffocate and drown in insecticide a gang member who violated orders. In the United States, prosecutors had accused him of orchestrating murders and kidnapping across the nation for more than 20 years.

In November 2021, Canales escaped from prison. El Faro, a prominent investigative news outlet, and other Salvadoran media published stories that detailed how Marroquín had escorted Canales from the prison. The articles featured taped calls between gang members and a person identified as Marroquín discussing his role in the escape, along with photos of officials apparently attempting to remove jail logs to conceal their presence at the prison.

Canales was caught in Mexico and turned over to U.S. authorities. Currently in prison awaiting trial, he has pleaded not guilty.

Leaders of the MS-13 street gang read the newspaper after a press conference at La Esperanza jail in San Salvador in 2013. Elmer Canales-Rivera, known as “Crook de Hollywood,” right, allegedly escaped from prison with the help of senior Salvadoran officials in 2021. (Jose Cabezas/AFP via Getty Images)

Over the next several months, three other MS-13 leaders disappeared from Salvadoran prisons, causing Durham, the head of the task force, to express his concern in a letter to the judge in New York overseeing the cases. At the time the Bukele administration had received extradition requests and Interpol notices, he wrote, the leaders had been in custody. Salvadoran media later reported that the country’s Supreme Court had formally denied the extradition requests for the three men.

The purge of the Supreme Court and prosecutors, the blocked extraditions and the disappearance of the MS-13 gang members marked a significant deterioration in relations between Bukele and the administration of President Joe Biden. Agencies across the government began looking for ways to push El Salvador to cooperate.

Acting U.S. Ambassador Jean Manes announced a “pause” in relations with El Salvador and left the country. A veteran diplomat who had previously served in El Salvador, Manes had pressured Bukele in public and private, criticizing the extradition delays and his increasingly authoritarian rule, according to State Department officials.

“What are we seeing now? It is a decline in democracy,” Manes said shortly before her departure.

In December 2021, the Treasury Department issued sanctions against Bukele aides Luna, Marroquín and Recinos, blocking them from conducting financial transactions in the United States because of alleged corruption. None of them responded to questions sent to a Bukele spokesperson.

Nonetheless, former members of the task force said they felt that the Biden administration treated Vulcan as a lower priority and cut its resources. They said Biden officials saw the task force as a Trump initiative and wanted to focus on other law enforcement targets, such as human trafficking.

“As soon as the Biden administration came in, we were slowed down,” Brunner said. “There was a lot more red tape we had to go through.” Former Biden officials denied this was the case.

Whatever truce had existed between the Salvadoran government and MS-13 collapsed in March 2022. The country descended into chaos. Over one three-day period, some 80 people were killed in gang-related violence.

Bukele reacted forcefully. He declared a nationwide “state of exception” that suspended constitutional protections. Police began rounding up thousands of accused gang members and others. He announced the construction of the megaprison known as CECOT.

The policies proved tremendously popular. Murder rates dropped dramatically, though human rights advocates criticized the loss of civil liberties. Bukele dismissed their complaints.

“Some say we have put thousands in prison, but the reality is that we have set millions free,” he has said, an assertion he repeated to Trump in the Oval Office.

The Turnaround

Despite the harsh treatment of gang members — an estimated 14,500 people are now held in CECOT — one thing did not change: The Bukele government continued to refuse to extradite senior MS-13 leaders to the United States.

The reasons for Bukele’s alleged protection of the gang leadership versus his relentless pursuit of the rank and file are the subject of speculation in both the United States and El Salvador. One possible explanation, according to current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials: Bukele is aware that Vulcan was gathering evidence that could lead to criminal charges and political damage. The imprisoned leaders are potential witnesses to his alleged deal with MS-13, while El Salvador’s street-level gangsters are not.

Police escort accused Venezuelans and Salvadorans after their deportation from the United States to be held in the CECOT megaprison in El Salvador. (El Salvador Press Presidency Office/Anadolu via Getty Images)

In February 2023, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment for another group of leaders, most of whom operated a tier below the Ranfla, relaying its directives to gangsters on the streets. The 13 defendants were accused of terrorism and drug smuggling, among other charges.

The U.S. announced it would “explore options for their extradition with the government of El Salvador.” The Justice Department declined to say whether any such requests had been made.

In filing the charges, prosecutors made their strongest public accusations yet about deals between the Bukele government and the gangs. Without naming the president or his allies, prosecutors alleged that MS-13 leaders agreed to use their vast political influence to turn out votes for candidates belonging to Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party in legislative elections in 2021.

The gang bosses also “agreed to reduce the number of public murders in El Salvador, which politically benefited the government of El Salvador, by creating the perception that the government was reducing the murder rate,” the indictment said.

As part of the arrangement, the senior MS-13 leaders demanded that the Bukele government refuse to extradite them, the indictment said. The alleged condition appears to be in effect. To date, none of the extradition requests for more than a dozen high-ranking gang members has been approved.

In the face of obstacles, Vulcan relied increasingly on the Mexican government for help. During the past four years, Mexican authorities have captured nine of the 27 MS-13 leaders named in the indictments and deported them to the United States, where they were arrested. This year, prosecutors obtained guilty pleas to terrorism charges from two lower-ranking bosses, including one who prosecutors said had helped implement the deal between the Bukele administration and the gang. Sentencing for the men is pending.

Since Trump took office this year, his administration has redirected Vulcan’s mission to also target Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the president has put in the spotlight.

There has been a remarkable recent development related to MS-13, however. After more than five years leading the Vulcan task force, Durham wrote letters asking the judge overseeing the cases to dismiss charges against two gang leaders in U.S. custody, allowing them to be deported to El Salvador. The letters were dated March 11 and April 1, weeks after the Trump administration began negotiating the mass deportation deal with Bukele’s government.

César Humberto López Larios, a member of the Ranfla known as “Greñas,” had his charges dismissed and was returned to El Salvador with more than 250 Venezuelans and Salvadorans sent to CECOT as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation of migrants on March 15. López, identified in media reports, is featured in a slickly produced video posted by Bukele on X, kneeling in the prison, his head shaved. He had pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.

Then, in April, Durham asked for the dismissal of terrorism charges against a lower-ranking MS-13 prisoner, Vladimir Antonio Arevalo-Chavez, alias “Vampiro,” according to recently unsealed court records. His defense lawyers are seeking to stall the request to give them time to fight his deportation to El Salvador. He has pleaded not guilty.

Durham acknowledged in his letters to the judge that the evidence against the two men is “strong.” After millions spent on an operation involving investigators and prosecutors from the U.S., El Salvador and other countries, Vulcan had amassed a trove of evidence aimed at incarcerating the MS-13 leaders who had overseen the killings, rapes and beatings of Americans. Prosecutors told defense attorneys they had more than 92,903 pages of discovery, including 600 pages of transcribed phone intercepts, 21 boxes of documents from prosecutors in El Salvador and 11 gigabytes of audio files.

Durham said prosecutors were dropping their pursuit of the cases “due to geopolitical and national security concerns.”

It was like a reverse extradition. Trump was giving Bukele the kind of high-level criminals that the United States had never received from El Salvador.

During the negotiations over the use of El Salvador’s prison, Trump officials agreed to pay some $6 million to house the deported men and acceded to an additional demand.

Bukele had one specific request, according to Milena Mayorga, his ambassador to the United States.

“I want you to send me the gang leaders who are in the United States,” she quoted Bukele as telling U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

For Bukele, she said in a broadcast interview, it was “a matter of honor.”

Mica Rosenberg contributed reporting, and Doris Burke contributed research.

by ProPublica

ProPublica announced on Wednesday a new call for proposals to select the next five partners in its Local Reporting Network. These newsrooms will be chosen to be part of the organization’s 50 State Initiative, a commitment to partnering with one newsroom from each state by 2029. The deadline for applications is July 21 at 5 p.m. Eastern. Reporters selected for the one-year program will begin work on Oct. 1, 2025.

Through this partnership, ProPublica will reimburse news organizations for the salary of the selected reporter (up to $75,000 plus a benefits stipend) so they can spend a year working full time on an accountability journalism project of importance to their communities. Additionally, ProPublica provides editing support, along with our data, research, visual storytelling, graphics, design, audience and engagement expertise.

More information about how to apply and the application for prospective newsrooms have just been posted. Newsrooms from 35 states are eligible to apply for this round. Please see our eligibility map for details.

As part of the 50 State Initiative, ProPublica is currently working with newsrooms from the first 10 states; another five newsrooms will start in July. Reporting with The Connecticut Mirror on car towing in the state sparked legislative reforms to overhaul century-old towing laws that favored tow companies at the expense of drivers. In Georgia, we have documented how the state’s Medicaid work requirement, which is being heralded as a model for the rest of the country, has fallen short and cost millions. And in Tennessee, we’ve shown how one company has vastly expanded the use of a unique high-interest loan — and then gone on to sue more than 100,000 borrowers.

“It’s thrilling to see ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network reach newsrooms in all regions of the country,” said Sarah Blustain, an assistant managing editor at ProPublica. “With each additional state, we are able to bring urgent local issues to readers nationwide.”

The 50 State Initiative expands the scope of ProPublica’s work at the local and regional level, which includes a growing team of journalists reporting from communities across the country and groundbreaking partnerships with local news organizations through the LRN program.

The initiative broadens our support for local journalism, which now includes the LRN alongside dedicated reporting hubs in the Midwest, South, Southwest and Northwest, as well as an investigative unit in Texas in partnership with The Texas Tribune. ProPublica has more than 25 staff reporters and more than 20 reporting partnerships around the country contributing to regional and local accountability reporting, ensuring people can benefit from world-class journalism that can drive measurable change in their communities.

The LRN began in January 2018 in an effort to help remedy the lack of investigative reporting at the local level. It has since led to partnerships with some 80 news organizations across the country.