ProPublica

by Ginny Monk and Dave Altimari, The Connecticut Mirror

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

The Connecticut Senate on Friday overwhelmingly passed the most significant reform to the state’s towing policies in decades, a measure lawmakers said would help protect drivers from predatory towing.

House Bill 7162 overhauls the state’s century-old towing statutes and comes in response to an investigation by the Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica that showed how state towing laws have come to favor tow companies at the expense of drivers. It takes several steps to make it harder to tow vehicles from private property and easier for drivers to retrieve their vehicles after a tow.

The bill, which passed the House of Representatives last week with wide bipartisan support and little debate, sailed through the Senate on a 33-3 vote.

“It’s reform that ensures transparency, it ensures fairness and accountability, but does all of this without undercutting the essential work that ethical and professional tow operators do each and every day for us, keeping our roads safe and our properties accessible,” said Transportation Committee Co-chair Sen. Christine Cohen, D-Guilford. “We’ve learned over the years, and particularly over the last year due to some investigative reporting, of some particularly egregious circumstances.”

A spokesperson for Gov. Ned Lamont said the governor plans to sign the bill into law.

Republican Sen. Tony Hwang, ranking member of the Transportation Committee, also spoke in favor of the bill. The bill got about a half hour of debate ahead of passage, and there were no comments in opposition.

Hwang, who represents Fairfield, said the bill strikes the right balance between the interests of towers and consumers.

“I want to acknowledge that our press had an important part to bring out transparency and some of the bad actions, and I think in this bill we address some of those issues,” Hwang said. “We took measures to ensure that there is due process, and what has been discovered to have occurred in a criminal action, I believe, should never, ever happen again, to undermine the trust that we have to have in this process.”

Connecticut’s law allows tow companies to begin the process to sell vehicles after just 15 days. CT Mirror and ProPublica found that it is one of the shortest windows in the nation, and that the law has particularly impacted people with low incomes. Reporters spoke with people who said towing companies required them to pay in cash or wouldn’t allow them to get personal belongings out of their vehicles. Many couldn’t afford to get their towed vehicles back and lost transportation or jobs because of it.

After weeks of negotiations, lawmakers said they came to a compromise with the towing industry. Two bills were merged to include massive reforms to towing procedures from private property and rate increases for highway tows that typically follow car accidents.

The bill that passed and would take effect Oct. 1 requires tow companies to accept credit cards and doesn’t allow them to tow vehicles immediately just because of an expired parking permit or registration. Vehicles can’t be towed from private property without notice unless they’re blocking traffic, fire hydrants or parked in an accessible spot.

Under the bill, towing companies can still start the sales process for vehicles worth $1,500 or less after 15 days, but they would now have to take more steps to give the owner a chance to claim the vehicle. The Department of Motor Vehicles would be required to check whether the driver filed any complaints about the tow before approving the sale, and the tower would have to send a notice ahead of the sale to the registered owner and lienholders via certified mail, with receipts of delivery.

The actual sale couldn’t go through until 30 days after the tow.

The bill also requires that towers take at least two photos before they tow a vehicle — one of the violation that resulted in a tow and another of any damage to the vehicle. Cohen said this would help determine if vehicles had any missing parts before the tow, a seeming nod to the news organizations’ story about a DMV employee who the agency’s investigators found schemed with a towing company to undervalue vehicles and sell them for thousands in profit. (The employee denied he did anything wrong, and the agency ultimately took no action in that case.)

The bill also establishes a working group to study how to handle proceeds from the sales of towed vehicles. State law requires that towing companies hold profits in escrow for a year in case the vehicle owner claims them, then remit that money to the state. But CT Mirror and ProPublica found the DMV never set up a system for that process to occur.

Additionally, it calls for the DMV to work with the state’s attorney general to develop a consumer bill of rights on towing.

Tow companies have to be available after hours and on weekends to allow people to get their vehicles or personal property. In a story published this month, CT Mirror and ProPublica reported that tow truck companies sometimes hold onto people’s belongings to pressure them into paying their towing fees.

Under the new law, drivers will be allowed to retrieve their belongings from their vehicles, even if they haven’t paid the towing fees. State regulations currently allow vehicle owners to retrieve only “personal property which is essential to the health or welfare of any person.”

Cohen listed many of the issues outlined in the news outlets’ reporting as “some of the worst abuses of predatory towing practices.”

Timothy Vibert, president of Towing and Recovery Professionals of Connecticut, said the industry initially opposed the bill because towers believed it would impede their ability to tow cars and clear traffic. He also said towers weren’t involved enough in the original draft. But they worked with lawmakers on the bill over several weeks, and he issued a statement in support this week.

“The people of Connecticut deserve safety, accountability and transparency when their cars are towed, and so do the people who work for Connecticut’s towing companies who risk our lives every day to make our roads safe,” Vibert said. “We all need clear, easy-to-follow rules.”

DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera commended the House and Senate.

“The DMV fully supports this initiative, as it not only enhances the framework for fair and equitable enforcement of towing laws but also provides a clear path forward for our agency to advance these efforts,” Guerrera said in a statement.

Cohen said that the bill aims to “fix a broken process,” and that lawmakers had worked on some aspects of it for years before the bill passed.

News of the bill’s passage brought relief to Melissa Anderson, who was featured in a CT Mirror and ProPublica story after her car was towed and sold from her Hamden apartment because of an expired parking permit.

The bill requires a 72-hour grace period before a car can be towed for an expired parking sticker to allow people time to get a new one.

“I’m glad we made a difference,” Anderson said. “This is going to help a lot of people.”

The bill next heads to Lamont’s desk.

“The Governor appreciates all the work that went into this legislation, which provides greater protections for the public and their vehicles,” Lamont’s spokesperson, Rob Blanchard, said in a text message. “He plans on signing the legislation once it reaches his desk.”

by Anjeanette Damon and Mollie Simon

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The former operator of one of the largest HomeVestors of America franchises has agreed to plead guilty to federal wire fraud in connection with a sprawling Ponzi scheme targeting people who believed they were investing in his real estate empire.

Federal prosecutors in Texas identified 80 victims defrauded of nearly $40 million by Charles Carrier since 2018. Though Carrier agreed to plead guilty to only one count of felony wire fraud involving one $200,000 transfer, he admitted to the broader scheme as part of the deal and agreed to pay restitution — the amount of which has yet to be determined.

The charge also carries a maximum 20-year prison sentence and the possibility of millions of dollars in fines. A federal judge will decide the sentence.

Carrier owned Dallas-based C&C Residential Properties, one of the most successful franchises in the HomeVestors chain, which is known for its “We Buy Ugly Houses” slogan. HomeVestors terminated Carrier’s franchise in October 2024, after receiving a tip that he had been defrauding investors. It has since sued him for infringing on the company’s assiduously protected trademark. Carrier has not yet responded to the lawsuit.

In a story published this month, ProPublica detailed how Carrier bilked millions of dollars from scores of investors across Texas, including both wealthy businesspeople and older adults of more modest means who depended on the investment income for daily expenses. According to new court documents, losses to individual investors range from $35,000 to $11.6 million. The plea agreement was filed in court two weeks after the article was published.

Carrier took loans from investors to finance his house-flipping business, initially using the money to buy and renovate older houses to sell for a profit. Carrier promised each loan would be secured by an ownership interest in a house and that he would pay 8%-10% interest in monthly installments over the course of the loan.

For many years, investors received reliable monthly payments. In 2018, however, Carrier started taking out multiple loans on individual properties, sometimes providing investors with deeds he never recorded and racking up debt far beyond the value of the houses, according to court documents. Carrier also admitted to forging signatures and notary stamps so he could sell properties without notifying the investors or paying off their notes, according to court documents. Carrier admitted to using investor money to “pay personal credit card balances, business operating expenses and interest obligations to earlier investors,” according to court documents.

The fact that Carrier’s plea deal contains only a single charge left some victims even more angry.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Ron Carver, who lost $300,000 and whose father lost $200,000 before he died. “They will let him plead out and he might get a slap on the wrist.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office said they can’t comment on a pending case.

Carrier’s lawyer, Tom Pappas, said it wasn’t Carrier’s “intention to defraud anybody of their money.”

“Pretty much all of his money was put into his business to try and make it successful so investors would be successful,” Pappas said, adding that Carrier didn’t fund a lavish lifestyle. Without providing details, Pappas said changes in the real estate market “overtook” Carrier and “the thing just got away from him.”

Although Carrier agreed to plead to only one count, the entirety of the fraud identified by prosecutors will be considered by the judge during sentencing.

Pappas said Carrier is “committed to repaying every investor every dollar he can to make them whole.” Pappas said he expects the restitution will likely be “much lower” than the $40 million in losses identified by prosecutors, as the lawyers are wrangling over the value of the investors’ losses. In February, Carrier signed an asset liquidation agreement allowing prosecutors to oversee the sale of his remaining properties, with the proceeds going toward restitution.

Pappas said he expects Carrier will serve time in prison.

“Depending on the amount of the loss, there’s a strong possibility he may go to jail,” he said. “But again, we are doing everything we can to make everybody as whole as we can.”

by Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica; Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune; Melissa Sanchez and Gabriel Sandoval, ProPublica; Ronna Rísquez, Alianza Rebelde Investiga; and Adrián González, Cazadores de Fake News

Leer en español.

The Trump administration knew that the vast majority of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador in mid-March had not been convicted of crimes in the United States before it labeled them as terrorists and deported them, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security data that has not been previously reported.

President Donald Trump and his aides have branded the Venezuelans as “rapists,” “savages,” “monsters” and “the worst of the worst.” When multiple news organizations disputed those assertions with reporting that showed many of the deportees did not have criminal records, the administration doubled down. It said that its assessment of the deportees was based on a thorough vetting process that included looking at crimes committed both inside and outside the United States. But the government’s own data, which was obtained by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of journalists from Venezuela, showed that officials knew that only 32 of the deportees had been convicted of U.S. crimes and that most were nonviolent offenses, such as retail theft or traffic violations.

The data indicates that the government knew that only six of the immigrants were convicted of violent crimes: four for assault, one for kidnapping and one for a weapons offense. And it shows that officials were aware that more than half, or 130, of the deportees were not labeled as having any criminal convictions or pending charges; they were labeled as only having violated immigration laws.

As for foreign offenses, our own review of court and police records from around the United States and in Latin American countries where the deportees had lived found evidence of arrests or convictions for 20 of the 238 men. Of those, 11 involved violent crimes such as armed robbery, assault or murder, including one man who the Chilean government had asked the U.S. to extradite to face kidnapping and drug charges there. Another four had been accused of illegal gun possession.

We conducted a case-by-case review of all the Venezuelan deportees. It’s possible there are crimes and other information in the deportees’ backgrounds that did not show up in our reporting or the internal government data, which includes only minimal details for nine of the men. There’s no single publicly available database for all crimes committed in the U.S., much less abroad. But everything we did find in public records contradicted the Trump administration’s assertions as well.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues. It’s also co-published with Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates), a coalition of Venezuelan online media outlets, and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters), a Venezuelan investigative online news organization.

ProPublica and the Tribune, along with Venezuelan media outlets Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) and Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates), also obtained lists of alleged gang members that are kept by Venezuelan law enforcement officials and the international law enforcement agency Interpol. Those lists include some 1,400 names. None of the names of the 238 Venezuelan deportees matched those on the lists.

The hasty removal of the Venezuelans and their incarceration in a third country has made this one of the most consequential deportations in recent history. The court battles over whether Trump has the authority to expel immigrants without judicial review have the potential to upend how this country handles all immigrants living in the U.S., whether legally or illegally. Officials have suggested publicly that, to achieve the president’s goals of deporting millions of immigrants, the administration was considering suspending habeas corpus, the longstanding constitutional right allowing people to challenge their detention.

Hours before the immigrants were loaded onto airplanes in Texas for deportation, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, declaring that the Tren de Aragua prison gang had invaded the United States, aided by the Venezuelan government. It branded the gang a foreign terrorist organization and said that declaration gave the president the authority to expel its members and send them indefinitely to a foreign prison, where they have remained for more than two months with no ability to communicate with their families or lawyers.

Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the American Civil Liberties Union’s legal fight against the deportations, said the removals amounted to a “blatant violation of the most fundamental due process principles.” He said that under the law, an immigrant who has committed a crime can be prosecuted and removed, but “it does not mean they can be subjected to a potentially lifetime sentence in a foreign gulag.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in response to our findings that “ProPublica should be embarrassed that they are doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens who are a threat,” adding that “the American people strongly support” the president’s immigration agenda.

When asked about the differences between the administration’s public statements about the deportees and the way they are labeled in government data, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin largely repeated previous public statements. She insisted, without providing evidence, that the deportees were dangerous, saying, “These individuals categorized as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gang members and more — they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”

As for the administration’s allegations that Tren de Aragua has attempted an invasion, an analysis by U.S. intelligence officials concluded that the gang was not acting at the direction of the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro and that reports suggesting otherwise were “not credible.” Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, fired the report’s authors after it became public. Her office, according to news reports, said Gabbard was trying to “end the weaponization and politicization” of the intelligence community.

Our investigation focused on the 238 Venezuelan men who were deported on March 15 to CECOT, the prison in El Salvador, and whose names were on a list first published by CBS News. The government has also sent several dozen other immigrants there, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who the government admitted was sent there in error. Courts have ruled that the administration should facilitate his return to the U.S.

We interviewed about 100 of the deportees’ relatives and their attorneys. Many of them had heard from their loved ones on the morning of March 15, when the men believed they were being sent back to Venezuela. They were happy because they would be back home with their families, who were eager to prepare their favorite meals and plan parties. Some of the relatives shared video messages with us and on social media that were recorded inside U.S. detention facilities. In those videos, the detainees said they were afraid that they might be sent to Guantanamo, a U.S. facility on Cuban soil where Washington has held and tortured detainees, including a number that it suspected of plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Trump administration had sent planes carrying Venezuelan immigrants there earlier this year.

They had no idea they were being sent to El Salvador.

Among them was 31-year-old Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, who left Venezuela and his job as a youth soccer coach last July. His sister, Leidys Trejo Solórzano, said he had a hard time supporting himself and his mother and that Venezuela’s crumbling economy made it hard for him to find a better paying job. Colmenares was detained at an appointment to approach the U.S.-Mexico border in October because of his many tattoos, his sister said. Those tattoos include the names of relatives, a clock, an owl and a crown she said was inspired by the Real Madrid soccer club’s logo.

First image: Colmenares’ mother, Marianela Solórzano, and sister at their home in Venezuela. Second image: Photos of Colmenares as a child in Venezuela. (Adriana Loureiro Fernández for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Colmenares was not flagged as having a criminal history in the DHS data we obtained. Nor did we find any U.S. or foreign convictions or charges in our review. Trejo said her brother stayed out of trouble and has no criminal record in Venezuela either. She described his expulsion as a U.S.-government-sponsored kidnapping.

“It’s been so difficult. Even talking about what happened is hard for me,” said Trejo, who has scoured the internet for videos and photos of her brother in the Salvadoran prison. “Many nights I can’t sleep because I’m so anxious.”

The internal government data shows that officials had labeled all but a handful of the men as members of Tren de Aragua but offered little information about how they came to that conclusion. Court filings and documents we obtained show the government has relied in part on social media posts, affiliations with known gang members and tattoos, including crowns, clocks, guns, grenades and Michael Jordan’s “Jumpman” logo. We found that at least 158 of the Venezuelans imprisoned in El Salvador have tattoos. But law enforcement sources in the U.S., Colombia, Chile and Venezuela with expertise in the Tren de Aragua told us that tattoos are not an indicator of gang membership.

McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said the agency is confident in its assessments of gang affiliation but would not provide additional information to support them.

John Sandweg, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said, “for political reasons, I think the administration wants to characterize this as a grand effort that’s promoting public safety of the United States.” But “even some of the government’s own data demonstrates there is a gap between the rhetoric and the reality,” he said, referring to the internal data we obtained.

The government data shows 67 men who were deported had been flagged as having pending charges, though it provides no details about their alleged crimes. We found police, court and other records for 38 of those deportees. We found several people whose criminal history differed from what was tagged in the government data. In some cases that the government listed as pending criminal charges, the men had been convicted and in one case the charge had been dropped before the man was deported.

Our reporting found that, like the criminal convictions, the majority of the pending charges involved nonviolent crimes, including retail theft, drug possession and traffic offenses.

Six of the men had pending charges for attempted murder, assault, armed robbery, gun possession or domestic battery. Immigrant advocates have said removing people to a prison in El Salvador before the cases against them were resolved means that Trump, asserting his executive authority, short-circuited the criminal justice system.

Take the case of Wilker Miguel Gutiérrez Sierra, 23, who was arrested in February 2024 in Chicago on charges of attempted murder, robbery and aggravated battery after he and three other Venezuelan men allegedly assaulted a stranger on a train and stole his phone and $400. He pleaded not guilty. Gutiérrez was on electronic monitoring as he awaited trial when he was arrested by ICE agents who’d pulled up to him on the street in five black trucks, court records show. Three days later he was shipped to El Salvador.

But the majority of men labeled as having pending cases were facing less serious charges, according to the records we found. Maikol Gabriel López Lizano, 23, was arrested in Chicago in August 2023 on misdemeanor charges for riding his bike on the sidewalk while drinking a can of Budweiser. His partner, Cherry Flores, described his deportation as a gross injustice. “They shouldn’t have sent him there,” she said. “Why did they have to take him over a beer?”

Jeff Ernsthausen of ProPublica contributed data analysis. Adriana Núñez and Carlos Centeno contributed reporting.

by Jeremy Kohler

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.

Across the country, Republican lawmakers have been working to undermine or altogether undo the will of the voters by making it harder to pass amendments and laws through citizen-led initiatives.

In Missouri, the 2025 legislative session was dominated by Republican lawmakers trying to reverse two major measures that voters had put on the ballot and approved just months before; one made abortion in the state legal again, while the other created an employee sick leave requirement.

GOP lawmakers in Alaska and Nebraska also have moved to roll back sick leave benefits that voters approved last year, while legislators in Arizona are pushing new restrictions on abortion access, despite voters six months ago approving protections.

At the same time, Republican leaders in Florida, Utah, Montana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Ohio, North Dakota and South Dakota have approved efforts to restrict citizen-led ballot initiatives or are considering measures to do so, essentially trying to make it harder for voters to change laws outside legislatures.

In some cases, legislators aren’t just responding to measures that voters approved; they’re acting shortly after citizen-led efforts failed but came too close for comfort, such as an abortion-rights initiative in Florida, which in November fell just short of the 60% of votes needed to pass and loosen the state’s ban on the procedure.

Republican elected officials across these states make strikingly similar arguments: They say the initiative process is susceptible to fraud and unduly influenced by out-of-state money. What’s more, they say that they, as elected officials, represent the true will of the people more than ballot initiatives do.

In his opening speech on the first day of Utah’s legislative session in January, Senate President Stuart Adams urged lawmakers to push back against citizen-led ballot initiatives, warning that “unelected special interest groups outside of Utah” were using the process to “override our republic” and “cast aside those who are duly elected.”

Utah lawmakers then passed a law tightening the process. They required initiative sponsors to detail how their proposal would be funded and, if it makes the ballot, pay for costly publication of the ballot language in newspapers across the state — potentially adding $1.4 million in expenses. They also voted to put a 2026 measure before voters that would require a 60% supermajority for any tax-related initiatives.

The battle between direct democracy and representative government isn’t new, and it hasn’t always been the domain of just Republicans. Democrats have done the same thing, although perhaps not with the same frequency, when voters have taken steps they had campaigned against.

What’s different now, political observers say, is that the tension has reached a new level. State lawmakers, primarily Republicans the past few years, are routinely trying to undermine voter majorities.

“This is very much connected to the rise of authoritarianism that we’ve seen across the country,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a nonprofit that tracks and supports ballot measures across the 26 states and the District of Columbia that allow some form of direct democracy. “They can’t win fairly, so they’re trying to rewrite the rules to get their way no matter what a majority of folks in their state wants.”

In Missouri, overturning the will of voters has almost become the legislature’s main business. Lawmakers wasted no time moving to undo a constitutional amendment that legalized abortion up to fetal viability, advancing a new measure to place another amendment on the ballot that would ban it again.

They also moved to repeal a sick leave requirement and portions of a minimum wage increase, which had also passed through the initiative process but which Republicans have said are harmful to businesses.

The bill has gone to Gov. Mike Kehoe, who has indicated that he will sign it.

In addition, Missouri lawmakers passed, and the governor signed, a new law that limits the ability of courts to intervene when the legislature writes ballot language for proposed constitutional amendments.

Critics say the law opens the door to misleading ballot language, giving politicians and partisan officials more power to frame initiatives in a way that could mislead voters. Kehoe said in a statement that the law “streamlines complex procedures while protecting the rights of every Missourian.”

State Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Branson, has supported multiple failed efforts to change the state’s initiative process — he’d prefer a 60% threshold rather than a simple majority, as it is now — and backed the sick leave repeal and the amendment to restore Missouri’s abortion ban.

“We’ve been elected in a representative republic to see to the needs of the people,” he said, “and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

Missouri State Rep. Brian Seitz reviews a proposed constitutional amendment on abortion at the state Capitol in April. (David A. Lieb/AP Photo)

State Rep. Ashley Aune, a Democrat from Kansas City and the House minority leader, recalled that one of her first fights as a lawmaker was over the expansion of Medicaid, which voters approved in 2020 but Republican lawmakers refused to fund the following year.

“They thought they were being clever — and of course, the courts told them they are not clever. They had to fund it,” Aune said. “But I’ve seen this nearly every year I’ve been here, and this year has been the absolute worst.”

In response to lawmakers’ efforts, a new campaign called Respect Missouri Voters is recruiting volunteers to collect signatures for a statewide ballot measure in November 2026. The measure would bar lawmakers from overturning voter-approved initiatives or undermining the citizens’ ability to use the initiative process.

In several states, Republican legislators are trying to change the initiative petition process by imposing stricter rules on who can collect signatures and how petitions are submitted and raising the threshold for passing amendments. They are also trying to limit out-of-state funding, shorten signature-gathering windows and give themselves more power to rewrite or block voter-approved measures.

Arkansas is one example of where this is playing out. Last year, abortion rights supporters turned in more than 100,000 signatures for a ballot measure that would have loosened the state’s near-total abortion ban. But the state Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling blocking the proposal from making the ballot, deciding that organizers had made a technical error in how they submitted paperwork for a portion of the signatures that had been collected by paid canvassers.

This year, state Sen. Kim Hammer, a Republican from Benton, led a push to pass a series of laws aimed at the ballot initiative process. They place requirements on petition circulators and signers, including mandates that the signer read the ballot title in the presence of a canvasser or have it read to them, that canvassers ask signers to show photo ID and that they inform signers that petition fraud is a crime. They also expand state oversight, giving officials more power to disqualify petitions.

The League of Women Voters of Arkansas has filed a lawsuit challenging some of the new laws, along with existing restrictions, arguing that they violate the U.S. Constitution. Arkansas Secretary of State Cole Jester said in a statement that they were “basic, commonsense protections, and we look forward to fighting for them.”

Hammer said he’s concerned that outside groups are using Arkansas as a testing ground for policy changes, and he wants to prevent that by keeping the ballot process “as pure as possible.”

“They drop the rock in the state, and it just ripples out from there,” he said in an interview. “So it’s to the benefit of abortionists and to the benefit of the marijuana industry and others to be able to do whatever they have to do to get a foothold.”

Republican Sen. Kim Hammer, left of center, answers questions about proposed laws that would alter the citizen-initiated ballot measure process during an Arkansas Senate committee hearing in February. (Tess Vrbin/Arkansas Advocate)

Dan Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida who studies direct democracy, said it wasn’t long ago that voters might punish a candidate for opposing a popular policy — like raising the minimum wage or expanding health care.

But that connection has largely been severed in the minds of voters, he said. Today, many voters experience a kind of cognitive dissonance: They support abortion rights or paid sick leave at the ballot box but continue voting for politicians who oppose those policies.

They don’t see the contradiction, he said, because partisanship has become more about team loyalty than policy.

Smith said the disconnect is reinforced by gerrymandered legislative and congressional districts, which are drawn to favor Republican candidates and help maintain their supermajority control. They can override or ignore voter-backed initiatives with little political risk.

Direct democracy in the United States took root during the Progressive Era of the late 1800s and early 1900s, especially in the West and Midwest, where newer states had less entrenched political structures and were more open to reform. These regions were often skeptical of centralized power, and reformers pushed for tools like the initiative and referendum to give citizens a way to bypass political machines and corporate influence.

The first state to adopt the initiative process into its constitution was South Dakota in 1898. Now it’s one of the states where legislators are trying to undermine it.

Most East Coast and Southern states never adopted initiative processes at all. Their constitutions didn’t allow for it, and lawmakers have shown little interest in surrendering power to voters through direct legislation. Some academics have argued the process is barred by Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, which requires states to produce governments by electoral processes.

While efforts to override or undermine voter-approved initiatives are now almost exclusively driven by Republicans, Democratic-controlled legislatures have also tried to rein in direct democracy when it clashed with their priorities.

After California voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978 to limit property taxes — and later Proposition 209 in 1996 banning affirmative action — Democrats sought ways to blunt or undo their impact through legislation and legal challenges.

In the mid-2000s, Colorado Democrats began pushing to restrict the initiative process after a wave of conservative-backed measures passed at the ballot box. A key example was Amendment 43, a 2006 initiative placed on the ballot by citizen petition, which amended the state constitution to define marriage as between “one man and one woman.” It passed with 55% of the vote and effectively banned same-sex marriage in the state until the U.S. Supreme Court overturned such bans in 2015.

In 2008, Colorado’s Democratic-controlled legislature placed a referendum on the ballot that would have made it harder for people to petition to change the state constitution. The measure, also backed by some Republicans, failed at the polls. But in 2016, voters approved a citizen-initiated measure that raised the bar for constitutional amendments by requiring signatures from every state senate district and a 55% supermajority to pass. More recently, Democrats have sought to overturn Colorado’s “taxpayer bill of rights,” which voters enacted through initiative petition in 1992. The measure prohibits tax increases without voter approval. Democrats have argued the law may be unconstitutional because it strips the legislature of its budgetary authority.

But most of the states that allow citizen-led ballot initiatives are Republican-controlled, which means the fight over direct democracy is often playing out in red states. At the center of the GOP argument is the claim that voter initiatives are driven by outside influence and funding. Smith called it “hypocrisy.”

“If you ask lawmakers to not take any outside contributions when they are running for office, they would find every reason under the sun to oppose it,” he said.

Efforts to change the initiative process have themselves drawn heavy outside funding. In August 2023, Ohio voters decisively rejected Issue 1, a Republican-backed proposal to raise the threshold for passing constitutional amendments from a simple majority to 60%. The measure also would have made it harder to place initiatives on the ballot by requiring signatures from at least 5% of voters in all 88 counties.

Backers claimed the changes were needed to protect the constitution from out-of-state special interests — but the campaign itself was funded mostly by $4 million from conservative Illinois billionaire Dick Uihlein.

Just three months later, Ohio voters returned to the polls and approved a new Issue 1 — this time a constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights up to fetal viability. It passed with nearly 57% of the vote.

In 2006, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment to raise the threshold for future amendments to 60% — but the measure itself passed with just 57.8% of the vote, a margin that wouldn’t meet the standard it created.

That irony came into sharp focus in 2024, when a ballot measure to protect abortion rights received 57% of the vote — more support than a similar measure in Missouri, which passed with just under 52% — yet failed in Florida due to the supermajority rule.

After the election, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican lawmakers began pushing for even tougher restrictions on the process, pointing to a report issued by the governor’s administration alleging “widespread petition fraud” in the push for the abortion rights measure. The governor signed a law prohibiting felons, non-U.S. citizens and non-Florida residents from serving as petition circulators; limiting the number of signed petitions a volunteer can collect before being required to register as an official canvasser and requiring signers to write either the last four numbers of their Social Security or driver’s license number on petitions.

In response, several groups have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the new restrictions. Florida Decides Healthcare, which is working to place a Medicaid expansion initiative on the 2026 ballot, has argued that the law imposes vague and punitive restrictions that chill political speech and civic engagement. The state has not yet responded to the lawsuit; the lead defendant, Secretary of State Cord Byrd, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I think that what happens here is being watched and copied,” Mitch Emerson, executive director of Florida Decides Healthcare, said in an interview. “And if these attacks on democracy work in Florida, they’ll spread.”

by Jake Pearson

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

What Happened: Three Democratic senators asked the Justice Department and other federal authorities to investigate whether members of the Department of Government Efficiency helping to downsize federal agencies violated conflict of interest laws by holding stocks in companies that their agencies regulate.

The letter sent Wednesday by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden and Jack Reed cited ProPublica reporting on how one such aide assigned to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau helped oversee the mass layoffs of the agency’s staff while holding as much as $715,000 in stocks that bureau employees are prohibited from owning.

What They Said: The DOGE aides’ cases “underscore what appears to be a pervasive problem with Elon Musk and DOGE employees trampling ethics rules and laws to benefit their own pockets at the expense of the American public,” the lawmakers said in the letter.

Warren and Reed sit on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. Wyden is the ranking member of the chamber’s Committee on Finance.

The letter asked Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Office of Government Ethics and three inspectors general with jurisdiction over the CFPB, Treasury and IRS to investigate the DOGE aides' finances, including whether they’d appropriately divested from any conflicted holdings, and their specific work at the agencies. “The American people deserve answers regarding whether their own interests may have been undermined by Trump Administration officials that acted in violation of federal ethics laws,” the letter said.

Background: In recent weeks, ProPublica reported that at least two DOGE aides assigned to the CFPB helped coordinate mass layoffs at the agency while maintaining financial arrangements that experts have said either are or appear to be conflicts of interests. In the case of Gavin Kliger, ProPublica reported that ethics attorneys at the bureau warned the 25-year-old software engineer that he could not hold onto his stocks and also participate in major agency actions. Days later, he nevertheless helped oversee the layoffs of nearly 90% of the CFPB’s staff — an action that one expert called a “pretty clear-cut violation” of the federal criminal conflict-of-interest statute.

Response: The DOJ declined comment. Neither the Treasury Department, the IRS, DOGE nor the CFPB responded to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the OGE said the agency doesn’t comment on “situations in specific agencies.” Kliger didn’t respond to emails seeking comment. The White House has previously said that “these allegations are another attempt to diminish DOGE’s critical mission.” It added that Kliger “did not even manage” the layoffs, “making this entire narrative an outright lie.”

Why It Matters: The Trump administration has repeatedly tested the boundaries of mixing personal and public business, from the president’s own foray into the cryptocurrency industry to Elon Musk’s dual roles as both DOGE’s founder and a major federal contractor. (Musk announced Wednesday that he’s leaving the administration.)

The lawmakers’ letter adds to a growing chorus of good-government groups that have called for an outside investigation into Kliger’s actions at the CFPB. Federal prosecutors can bring charges against government workers who violate the criminal conflict of interest statute, an offense that’s punishable with a fine of up to $250,000 and up to five years in prison. But one expert previously told ProPublica that’s unlikely to happen under Trump, as the administration “greatly deprioritized public integrity, ethics and public corruption as issues for them.”

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

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

A Chattanooga, Tennessee, public charter school has agreed to pay the family of an 11-year-old boy $100,000 to settle a federal lawsuit claiming that it wrongfully reported the student to police for an alleged threat of mass violence.

The incident happened at the beginning of the school year when Junior, who is autistic, overheard two students talking. (We are using a nickname to protect his privacy.) As Junior later described it, one asked if the other was going to shoot up the school tomorrow. Junior looked at the other student, who seemed like he was going to say yes, and answered yes for him. Students then reported that Junior had threatened to shoot up the school.

Administrators said he could return to school the next day, but hours later, a sheriff’s deputy tracked him down at a family birthday dinner and handcuffed him in the restaurant parking lot.

ProPublica and WPLN News wrote about the case last October as part of a larger investigation into a new law in Tennessee making threats of mass violence at school a felony.

According to the settlement, Chattanooga Preparatory School also agreed to implement training on how to handle threats of mass violence at school, including reporting only “valid” threats to police and differentiating between “clearly innocuous statements” and “imminent” violence.

A federal judge will hold a final hearing on the settlement on July 1. According to the family’s lawyer, this is the first known monetary settlement in a case challenging this law. Chattanooga Prep did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the news organizations.

Junior’s mother, Torri, said the settlement is “bittersweet.” He still gets fearful when he sees police cars, reminded of the evening he was taken to juvenile detention. We are only using Torri’s first name at her request, to prevent her son from being identifiable. His case was dismissed in juvenile court in December.

But Torri said she is happy that employees at the school will get training on how to do better in the future.

Junior with his mother, Torri (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)

“I don’t want anyone — any child, anyone, any parent — to go through it or witness it,” she said. “Other kids will be more protected if they are ever put in that situation.”

Junior’s lawyers argued in the lawsuit that the school was at fault for reporting him to police as though he had made a valid threat, while knowing he had not. “Instead of reporting only valid threats of mass violence to police, Chattanooga Prep reports all threats to law enforcement regardless of validity,” an amended version of the lawsuit against the school reads. The school did not file a response to the legal complaint.

During the last legislative session, advocates for children with disabilities testified about problems with the law — but lawmakers did not alter the existing statute. Instead they added another similar statute to the books, which could open the door for children to be charged with harsher penalties.

The family’s lawyer, Justin Gilbert, said he hopes this settlement will force lawmakers to pay attention and make necessary changes to the law.

“Monetary figures — for better or for worse — can be a driver for policy change, and sometimes legislators can react to that, school districts can react to that,” Gilbert said. “Then that results in a deeper look at the settlement terms and what kind of training is necessary to hopefully prevent these kids from being arrested and expelled unnecessarily.”

by Hannah Allam

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

Under the watchful gaze of security guards, dozens of people streamed through metal detectors to enter Temple Israel one evening this month for a town hall meeting on hate crimes and domestic terrorism.

The cavernous synagogue outside of Detroit, one of several houses of worship along a suburban strip nicknamed “God Row,” was on high alert. Police cars formed a zigzag in the driveway. Only registered guests were admitted; no purses or backpacks were allowed. Attendees had been informed of the location just 48 hours in advance.

The intense security brought to life the threat picture described onstage by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, the recipient of vicious backlash as a gay Jewish Democrat who has led high-profile prosecutions of far-right militants, including the kidnapping plot targeting the governor. Nessel spoke as a slideshow detailed her office’s hate crimes unit, the first of its kind in the nation. She paused at a bullet point about working “with federal and local law enforcement partners.”

“The federal part, not so much anymore, sadly,” she said, adding that the wording should now mention only state and county partners, with help from Washington “TBD.”

“The federal government used to prioritize domestic terrorism, and now it’s like domestic terrorism just went away overnight,” Nessel told the audience. “I don’t think that we’re going to get much in the way of cooperation anymore.”

“The federal government used to prioritize domestic terrorism, and now it’s like domestic terrorism just went away overnight,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said at the hate crimes and extremism town hall at Temple Israel. (Brittany Greeson for ProPublica)

Across the country, other state-level security officials and violence prevention advocates have reached the same conclusion. In interviews with ProPublica, they described the federal government as retreating from the fight against extremist violence, which for years the FBI has deemed the most lethal and active domestic concern. States say they are now largely on their own to confront the kind of hate-fueled threats that had turned Temple Israel into a fortress.

The White House is redirecting counterterrorism personnel and funds toward President Donald Trump’s sweeping deportation campaign, saying the southern border is the greatest domestic security threat facing the country. Millions in budget cuts have gutted terrorism-related law enforcement training and shut down studies tracking the frequency of attacks. Trump and his deputies have signaled that the Justice Department’s focus on violent extremism is over, starting with the president’s clemency order for militants charged in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

On the ground, security officials and extremism researchers say, federal coordination for preventing terrorism and targeted violence is gone, leading to a state-level scramble to preserve efforts no longer supported by Washington, including hate-crime reporting hotlines and help with identifying threatening behavior to thwart violence.

This year, ProPublica has detailed how federal anti-extremism funding has helped local communities avert tragedy. In Texas, a rabbi credited training for his actions ending a hostage-taking standoff. In Massachusetts, specialists work with hospitals to identify young patients exhibiting disturbing behavior. In California, training helped thwart a potential school shooting.

Absent federal direction, the fight against violent extremism falls to a hodgepodge of state efforts, some of them robust and others fledgling. The result is a patchwork approach that counterterrorism experts say leaves many areas uncovered. Even in blue states where more political will exists, funding and programs are increasingly scarce.

“We are now going to ask every local community to try to stand up its own effort without any type of guidance,” said Sharon Gilmartin, executive director of Safe States Alliance, an anti-violence advocacy group that works with state health departments.

Federal agencies have pushed back on the idea of a retreat from violent extremism, noting swift responses in recent domestic terrorism investigations such as an arson attack on Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in April and a car bombing this month outside a fertility clinic in California. FBI officials say they’re also investigating an attack that killed two Israeli Embassy staff members outside a Jewish museum in Washington in a likely “act of targeted violence.”

Federal officials say training and intelligence-sharing systems are in place to help state and local law enforcement “to identify and respond to hate-motivated threats, such as those targeting minority communities.”

The Justice Department “is focused on prosecuting criminals, getting illegal drugs off the streets, and protecting all Americans from violent crime,” said a spokesperson. “Discretionary funds that are not aligned with the administration’s priorities are subject to review and reallocation.” The DOJ is open to appeals, the spokesperson said, and to restoring funding “as appropriate.”

In an email response to questions about specific cuts to counterterrorism work, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump is keeping promises to safeguard the nation, “whether it be maximizing the use of Federal resources to improve training or establishing task forces to advance Federal and local coordination.”

Michigan, long a hotbed of anti-government militia activity, was an early adopter of strategies to fight domestic extremism, making it a target of conservative pundits who accuse the state of criminalizing right-wing organizing. An anti-Muslim group is challenging the constitutionality of Nessel’s hate crimes unit in a federal suit that has dragged on for years.

In late December, after a protracted political battle, Michigan adopted a new hate crime statute that expands an old law with additions such as protections for LGBTQ+ communities and people with disabilities. Right-wing figures lobbed threatening slurs at the author, state Rep. Noah Arbit, a gay Jewish Democrat who spoke alongside Nessel at Temple Israel, which is in his district and where he celebrated his bar mitzvah.

Arbit acknowledged that his story of a hard-fought legislative triumph is dampened by the Trump administration’s backsliding. In this political climate, Arbit told the audience, “it is hard not to feel like we’re getting further and further away” from progress against hate-fueled violence.

The politicians were joined onstage by Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who leads the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab at American University and is working with several states to update their strategies. She called Michigan a model.

“The federal government is gone on this issue,” Miller-Idriss told the crowd. “The future right now is in the states.”

Michigan state Rep. Noah Arbit, center, speaks alongside Nessel, left, and extremism scholar Cynthia Miller-Idriss during the town hall at Temple Israel. (Brittany Greeson for ProPublica) “The Only Diner in Town”

Some 2,000 miles away in Washington state, this month’s meeting of the Domestic Extremism and Mass Violence Task Force featured a special guest: Bill Braniff, a recent casualty of the Trump administration’s about-face on counterterrorism.

Braniff spent the last two years leading the federal government’s main office dedicated to preventing “terrorism and targeted violence,” a term encompassing hate-fueled attacks, school shootings and political violence. Housed in the Department of Homeland Security, the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships treated these acts as a pressing public health concern.

Part of Braniff’s job was overseeing a network of regional coordinators who helped state and local advocates connect with federal resources. Advocates credit federal efforts with averting attacks through funds that supported, for example, training that led a student to report a gun in a classmate’s backpack or programs that help families intervene before radicalization turns to violence.

Another project helped states develop their own prevention strategies tailored to local sensibilities; some focus on education and training, others on beefing up enforcement and intelligence sharing. By early this year, eight states had adopted strategies, eight others were in the drafting stage and 26 more had expressed interest.

Speaking via teleconference to the Seattle-based task force, Braniff said the office is now “being dismantled.” He resigned in March, when the Trump administration slashed 20% of his staff, froze much of the work and signaled deeper cuts were coming.

“The approach that we adopted and evangelized over the last two years has proven to be really effective at decreasing harm and violence,” Braniff told the task force. “I’m personally committed to keeping it going in Washington state and in the rest of the nation.”

A Homeland Security spokesperson did not address questions about the cuts but said in an email that “any suggestion that DHS is stepping away from addressing hate crimes or domestic terrorism is simply false.”

Since leaving government, Braniff has joined Miller-Idriss at the extremism research lab, where they and others aspire to build a national network that preserves an effort once led by federal coordinators. The freezing of prevention efforts, economic uncertainty and polarizing rhetoric in the run-up to the midterm elections create “a pressure cooker,” Braniff said.

Similar discussions are occurring in more than a dozen states, including Maryland, Illinois, California, New York, Minnesota and Colorado, according to interviews with organizers and recordings of the meetings. Overnight, grassroots efforts that once complemented federal work have taken on outsized urgency.

“When you’re the only diner in town, the food is much more needed,” said Brian Levin, a veteran extremism scholar who leads California’s Commission on the State of Hate.

Levin, speaking in a personal capacity and not for the state panel, said commissioners are “pedaling as fast as we can” to fill the gaps. Levin has tracked hate crimes since 1986 and this month released updated research showing incidents nationally hovering near record highs, with sharp increases last year in anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim targeting.

The commission also unveiled results of a study conducted jointly with the state Civil Rights Department and UCLA researchers showing that more than half a million Californians — about 1.6% of the population — said they had experienced hate that was potentially criminal in nature, such as assault or property damage, in the last year.

Prevention workers say that’s the kind of data they can no longer rely on the federal government to track.

“For a commission like ours, it makes our particular mission no longer a luxury,” Levin said.

Hurdles Loom

Some state-level advocates wonder how effectively they can push back on hate when Trump and his allies have normalized dehumanizing language about marginalized groups. Trump and senior figures have invoked a conspiracy theory imagining the engineered “replacement” of white Americans, as the president refers to immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the country.

Trump uses the “terrorist” label primarily for his political targets, lumping together leftist activists, drug cartels and student protesters. In March, he suggested that recent attacks on Tesla vehicles by “terrorists” have been more harmful than the storming of the Capitol.

“The actions of this administration foment hate,” Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, a Democrat, told a meeting last month of the state’s Commission on Hate Crime Response and Prevention. “I can’t say that it is solely responsible for hate activity, but it certainly seems to lift the lid and almost encourages this activity.”

A White House spokesperson rejected claims that the Trump administration fuels hate, saying the allegations come from “hoaxes perpetrated by left-wing organizations.”

Another hurdle is getting buy-in from red states, where many politicians have espoused the view that hate crimes and domestic terrorism concerns are exaggerated by liberals to police conservative thought. The starkest example is the embrace of a revisionist telling of the Capitol riots that plays down the violence that Biden-era Justice Department officials labeled as domestic terrorism.

The next year, citing First Amendment concerns, Republicans opposed a domestic terrorism-focused bill introduced after a mass shooting targeting Black people in Buffalo, N.Y.

The leader of one large prevention-focused nonprofit that has worked with Democratic and Republican administrations, speaking on condition of anonymity because of political sensitivities, said it’s important not to write off red states. Some Republican governors have adopted strategies after devastating attacks in their states.

A white supremacist’s rampage through a Walmart in El Paso in 2019 — the deadliest attack targeting Latinos in modern U.S. history — prompted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to create a domestic terrorism task force. And in 2020, responding to a string of high-profile attacks including the Parkland high school mass shooting, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis released a targeted violence prevention strategy.

The pitch is key, the nonprofit director said. Republican officials are more likely to be swayed by efforts focused on “violence prevention” than on combating extremist ideologies. “Use the language and the framing that works in the context you’re working in,” the advocate said.

Still, gaps will remain in areas such as hate crime reporting, services for victims of violence and training to help the FBI keep up with the latest threats, said Miller-Idriss, the American University scholar.

“What feels awful about it is that there’s just entire states and communities who are completely left out and where people are going to end up being more vulnerable,” she said.

Cautionary Tale From Michigan

On a summer night in 1982, Vincent Chin was enjoying his bachelor party when two white auto workers at a nightclub outside of Detroit targeted him for what was then called “Japan bashing,” hate speech stemming from anger over Japanese car companies edging out American competitors.

The men, apparently assuming the Chinese-born Chin was Japanese, taunted him with racist slurs in a confrontation that spiraled into a vicious attack outside the club. The men beat 27-year-old Chin with a baseball bat, cracking his skull. He died of his injuries four days later and was buried the day after his scheduled wedding date.

Vincent Chin (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Asian Americans’ outrage over a judge’s leniency in the case — the assailants received $3,000 fines and no jail time — sparked a surge of activism seeking tougher hate crime laws nationwide.

In Michigan, Chin’s killing inspired the 1988 Ethnic Intimidation Act, which was sponsored by a Jewish state lawmaker, David Honigman from West Bloomfield Township. More than three decades later, Arbit — the Jewish lawmaker representing the same district — led the campaign to update the statute with legislation he introduced in 2023 and finally saw adopted in December.

“It felt like kismet,” Arbit told ProPublica in an interview a few days after the event at Temple Israel. “This is the legacy of my community.”

But there’s a notable difference. Honigman was a Republican. Arbit is a Democrat.

“It’s sort of telling,” Arbit said, “that in 1988 this was a Republican-sponsored bill and then in 2023 it only passed with three Republican votes.”

Some Republicans argued that the bill infringes on the First Amendment with “content-based speech regulation.” One conservative state lawmaker told a right-wing cable show that the goal is “to advance the radical transgender agenda.”

Arbit said it took “sheer brute force” to enact new hate crimes laws in this hyperpartisan era. He said state officials entering the fray should be prepared for social media attacks, doxing and death threats.

In the summer of 2023, Arbit was waylaid by a right-wing campaign that reduced his detailed proposal to “the pronoun bill” by spreading the debunked idea it would criminalize misgendering someone. Local outlets fact-checked the false claims and Arbit made some 50 press appearances correcting the portrayal — but they were drowned out, he said, by a “disinformation storm” that spread quickly via right-wing outlets such as Breitbart and Fox News. The bill languished for more than a year before he could revive it.

In December 2024, the legislation passed the Michigan House 57-52, with a single Republican vote. By contrast, Arbit said, the bill was endorsed by an association representing all 83 county prosecutors, the majority of them Republicans. Those who see the effects up close, he said, are less likely to view violent extremism through a partisan lens.

“These are real security threats,” Arbit said. “Shouldn’t we want a society in which you’re not allowed to target a group of people for violence?”

by Emily Schwing, KYUK

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

This story is not subject to our Creative Commons license.

NEWTOK, Alaska — A jumble of shipping containers hold all that remains of the demolished public school in Newtok, Alaska, where on a recent visit, a few stray dogs and a lone ermine prowled among the ruins.

Late last year, the final residents of this sinking village near the Bering Sea left behind the waterlogged tundra of their former home, part of a fraught, federally funded effort to resettle communities threatened by climate change.

Nearly 300 people from Newtok have moved 9 miles across the Ninglick River to a new village known as Mertarvik. But much of the infrastructure there is already failing. Residents lack running water, use 5-gallon buckets as toilets and must contend with intermittent electricity and deteriorating homes that expose them to the region’s fierce weather.

Newtok’s relocation was supposed to provide a model for dozens of Alaskan communities that will need to move in the coming decades. Instead, those who’ve worked on the effort say what happened in Newtok demonstrates the federal government’s failure to oversee the complex project and understand communities’ unique cultural needs. And it highlights how ill-prepared the United States is to respond to the way climate change is making some places uninhabitable, according to an investigation by The Washington Post, ProPublica and KYUK radio in Bethel, Alaska.

Dozens of grants from at least seven federal agencies have helped pay for the relocation, which began in 2019 and is expected to cost more than $150 million. But while the federal government supplied taxpayer dollars, it left most of the responsibility to the tiny Newtok Village Council. The federally recognized tribal government lacked the expertise to manage the project and has faced high turnover and internal political conflict, according to tribal records and interviews with more than 70 residents as well as dozens of current and former members of the seven-person village council.

Faith Carl, 7, checks on plants on the windowsill at the home of Frieda and Phillip Carl, her grandparents. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Federal auditors have warned for years that climate relocation projects need a lead agency to coordinate assistance and reduce the burden on local communities. The Biden administration tried to address those concerns by creating an interagency task force led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Interior Department. The task force’s report in December also called for more coordination and guidance across the federal government as well as long-term funding for relocations.

But the Trump administration has removed the group’s report from FEMA’s website and, as part of its withdrawal of climate funding, frozen millions in federal aid that was supposed to pay for housing construction in Mertarvik this summer. The administration did not respond to a request for comment.

“We’re physically seeing the impacts of a changing climate on these communities,” said Don Antrobus, a climate adaptation consultant for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. “And the fact that we don’t have a government framework for dealing with these issues is not just an Alaska problem, it’s a national problem.”

Newtok’s relocation follows the resettlement of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, where land vanished under rising sea levels. Both relocations have been labeled as “blueprints” for the federal government’s response to climate change. Both have been mired in complicated and disjointed funding systems and accusations that the government neglected traditional knowledge.

For centuries, the area’s Indigenous Yup’ik residents lived a nomadic subsistence lifestyle, timing their seasonal movements with the arrival of migratory birds in spring, fish in summer and the ripening of berries in early fall. But that changed in the 1950s after a barge, loaded with construction materials to build a school, got stuck near present-day Newtok and couldn’t navigate farther upriver. So the Bureau of Indian Affairs built the school there.

At the time, elders knew the location wasn’t fit for permanent settlement because the low-lying ground would shift as the permafrost froze and thawed seasonally, said Andy Patrick, 77, one of two residents who remember life in the old village before Newtok.

“My grandma used to tell me, ‘It’s going to start wobbling,’” he said. But they moved because the BIA required their children to attend its school.

First image: Tiny homes in Mertarvik, Alaska. Second image: Connor Queenie watches television in the home of Andy Patrick, a Mertarvik elder. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Born and raised in Newtok, Jack Charlie was relieved when he moved into a modest brown house in Mertarvik in 2022. His old plywood home in Newtok was moldy and sinking into the tundra as the permafrost that supported the land thawed.

But within months, the light fixtures in his new house filled with water from condensation, and gaps formed where the walls met the ceiling in his bedroom. Charlie started stuffing toilet paper into the cracks to keep out the persistent coastal winds.

“Once I found it was leaking and cold air drifting in, I said: ‘Hell! What kind of house did they build?’” he said.

An aerial view of Mertarvik (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Charlie is one of multiple residents who complained about problems with their newly built houses. When KYUK asked for inspection reports, the tribe and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said they didn’t have any. In the absence of an official inspection, KYUK hired a professional with expertise in cold climate housing to examine seven of the 46 homes in Mertarvik, which were built by three different contractors.

According to the inspection performed last year, Charlie’s home is among 17 houses, built by one contractor, that are rapidly deteriorating because they were designed and constructed the same way. The foundations are not salvageable, and the buildings do not meet minimum code requirements, said the inspector, Emmett Leffel, an energy auditor and building analyst in Alaska.

“This is some of the worst new construction I’ve ever seen, and the impact is so quickly realized because of the coastal climate,” Leffel said in an interview.

His inspection report concluded: “The totality of the work needed to correct these conditions and issues may cost substantially more than the original construction.”

There are other problems beyond housing. The BIA committed more than $6 million for roads but failed to coordinate with other agencies to install water pipes underneath, according to a former project manager, the tribal health consortium and the Denali Commission, an independent federal agency tasked with providing critical infrastructure support to Alaska’s most remote communities. As a result, none of the houses in Mertarvik has a flush toilet or shower. Residents go to the town’s small well to fill jugs for household use.

As more people have moved to Mertarvik, the town’s power plant hasn’t kept up with electricity demand, leaving residents without heat or power in the winter, said Calvin Tom, the tribal administrator. And a wastewater system that handles sewage from the school, health clinic and a dormitory for construction workers has been overwhelmed for more than a year, he said. Last spring, sewage backed up into the school’s basement.

The BIA, the largest funder of the relocation that helped plan the community, did not agree to an interview request. The agency said in an email that it’s working closely with the Newtok Village Council and that the council has established a plan to repair the homes. The tribe’s attorney, Matt Mead, said, “NVC does have a repair plan and is seeking funding from multiple sources to allow for implementation of the plan.”

That was news to council secretary Della Carl and council member Francis Tom, whose home has some of the worst problems. Both said they knew of no such plan, and Mead declined to provide one. Four other council members (one seat is vacant) declined to comment or didn’t return calls or emails. Mead said the plan to fix the houses needs to be better communicated to council members and residents. He said the tribe disagrees that the homes are deteriorating and declined to comment about its management of the project.

Francis Tom lives in one of the homes built by LeMay Engineering & Consulting. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Patrick LeMay, the Anchorage-based contractor whose company was hired by the tribe to build Charlie’s and 16 other deteriorating houses, was fired last year because of the construction and design problems, according to tribal council members. LeMay didn’t respond to questions or comment on Leffel’s report other than to say, “I do not work for Newtok any longer.”

Greg Stuckey, administrator for HUD’s Office of Native American Programs in Anchorage, said the agency is not required to inspect the LeMay houses because the grant went directly to the tribal government. Federal law allows tribes to administer government programs themselves to recognize their independence and cultural needs.

“So they can’t say it’s the federal government,” Stuckey said, “because they chose this.”

Mead said the Newtok Village Council didn’t dispute that.

The Government Accountability Office, however, has repeatedly recommended that federal agencies provide more technical assistance to small tribes in climate relocations.

“When you have 20 or 30 different programs that can all interact together and they all have different rules,” said Anna Maria Ortiz, the GAO’s director of natural resources and environment, “that’s going to cost more in the long run and can be nearly impossible for some villages.”

In 1996, after decades fighting erosion from storms and the deteriorating permafrost, the Newtok tribe began negotiating with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to exchange land for the relocation. Congress approved the trade in 2003. For the next two decades, the tribe worked with federal and state agencies to plan the new community at Mertarvik. Storm damage shut down the public school for good last year, and the Newtok Village Council voted to finish the evacuation.

First image: The former Bureau of Indian Affairs school in Newtok. Second image: The school in Mertarvik is still under construction with a projected finish date of fall 2026. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Dozens of remote communities in Alaska face similar threats from climate change, according to a 2019 report by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The issues affecting such communities are well understood in Arctic regions around the world, but policymakers aren’t heeding warnings from relocation experts, said Andrea Marta Knudsen, a relocation and disaster recovery specialist in the Iceland prime minister’s office.

“It’s not like this is a new thing or hasn’t been researched,” she said. “The government should maybe say: ‘Oh wow, we’re dealing with a disaster or relocation. Who knows this? Let’s have a team of experts working with the government on this.’”

Over the years, several government bodies tried to coordinate efforts in Newtok. At first, Alaska’s commerce department formed the Newtok Planning Group to coordinate assistance for the relocation. But in 2013, the group’s work stalled because the BIA paused its funding for the tribe after a political dispute resulted in two competing tribal governments. The planning group has met only three times since 2019.

The Denali Commission took on project management responsibilities in 2016 but ceded control to the BIA three years ago after the agency announced a $25 million grant funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

This inconsistent oversight and coordination has significantly affected the quality of housing, according to experts who have worked on the relocation.

Walter Tom and Dionne Kilongak harvest a ring seal and walrus while their 2-year-old son plays with their dog, Pobby. Tom and his family live in a tiny home in Mertarvik that is intended to be temporary. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

The first two housing projects in Mertarvik received high ratings from Leffel, the inspector hired by KYUK. The Alaska-based nonprofit Cold Climate Housing Research Center designed 14 homes to maximize energy efficiency and withstand the harsh weather. The houses also provide space for residents to cut fish, dress moose and host large family gatherings — activities integral to the Yup’ik lifestyle. An additional 15 houses were built by a regional housing authority that has decades of experience on Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

Charlie’s home and 16 others were part of a third round of houses, designed and built by LeMay Engineering & Consulting. At various times, LeMay was also employed by the tribe in other roles, including tribal administrator and relocation coordinator. Representing the tribe while simultaneously earning money from it could create a potential conflict of interest, said Ted Waters, an attorney who specializes in federal grants administration.

According to Leffel’s inspection, the foundations of Charlie’s home and the others designed and built by LeMay “do not meet minimum code requirements for corrosion resistance, adequate supports” or “structural integrity requirements.” Two years of fuel usage data provided by the tribe shows residents in the LeMay houses pay more than twice as much for energy each year compared with the other two housing projects.

Francis Tom, the council member, said outside entities like LeMay and federal agencies often ignored his community’s needs. “They don’t know. They weren’t born here,” he said. “They don’t spend enough time here.”

First image: The Carls’ home has mold, leaks and other structural issues. Second image: Photographs of life in Newtok adorn their refrigerator. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

A year before Leffel examined the houses, a group of BIA officials took a tour and saw the water pooling in light fixtures and moisture damage in several of the LeMay homes, council members said. It’s unclear what they did with that information. The BIA said its staff has made three trips to Mertarvik since, and the tribe’s attorney said multiple homes were inspected by independent engineers this past year, something both council members Carl and Tom disputed. Charlie and nearly a dozen other residents said no one other than Leffel had been inside their homes to inspect them. The attorney declined to provide copies of any inspections.

HUD was also made aware of problems after a 2022 report submitted by the tribe showed occupancy numbers that exceeded the agency’s overcrowding standards.

In addition to the problems with the LeMay homes, several other residents said they’re facing similar issues with some of the temporary tiny homes that were shipped in by barge in the fall because of the urgent need to move. Rosemary John’s was among the last families to relocate. John, who grew up in Newtok and raised her six kids there, said the move has been agonizing. Seven people are now living in her house. This winter, John posted a video to social media that showed water running down a wall and pooling on the floor.

Next door, in Dionne Kilongak’s temporary house, the windowsills are already covered in mold. She works at her kitchen table every day while her children, ages 2 and 4, scurry up and down the narrow hallway. She said winds bring water into her house.

“I think these aren’t for Alaska,” she said.

With no solution in sight, Charlie has tried to make his house feel more homey. Tired of white paint that did nothing to hide the water damage, he found scrap paneling from one of the housing authority’s projects and fastened it to his walls.

Like most people in these houses, he said he hopes they’ll be fixed, but he’s unsure where to turn.

“I have no idea who’s gonna be responsible for these homes,” he said.

A home in Mertarvik at night (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

by Rob Davis

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

When police used stun batons to hit garment workers seeking a $14 monthly raise from a Nike factory in Cambodia in 2013, reportedly leading one pregnant woman to miscarry, Nike said it was “deeply concerned.”

The following year, when Cambodian police opened fire and killed four garment workers during widespread demonstrations over low wages, Nike and other brands sent the government a letter expressing “grave concern.”

In 2018, after the government curbed union rights, Nike and other brands again protested, this time in a meeting with government officials. An industry representative described the companies in a news release as “increasingly concerned.”

A year later, another letter: “We are concerned.”

Despite the varying shades of corporate concern, Cambodia continued descending deeper into authoritarian governance, and the size of Nike’s contract workforce there kept going up.

While Nike has been shrinking its footprint in China, its presence in Cambodia has grown, from about 16,000 factory workers in May 2013, to nearly 35,000 in 2019, to more than 57,000 as of March. Today, Cambodia is the athletic apparel giant’s third-largest supplier of garments other than shoes, nearly overtaking its clothing production in China.

Other Western brands have also continued expanding in Cambodia. The country’s garment exports climbed from $4.9 billion in 2013 to $9.3 billion in 2022, according to World Bank data.

Along the way, labor leaders have been jailed; opposing politicians have gone into exile and been arrested or killed; journalists have been locked up and killed; and independent media outlets have been shuttered by the government.

Sabrina Manufacturing workers gather at their union headquarters in Phnom Penh while protesting for higher wages at the Nike supplier in 2013. (Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

The curbs on unions and free speech are in tension with Nike’s code of conduct, which recognizes workers’ rights to join trade unions and participate in union activities without interference. In countries that restrict union rights, Nike says factories must have an effective grievance process that allows employees to voice concerns over working conditions without fear of retaliation.

Nike’s continued growth in Cambodia underscores the level of political and labor repression the company has been willing to tolerate in countries that provide inexpensive labor — letters of concern notwithstanding.

“A lot of brands have been signing letters for years as a substitute for real pressure, real change,” said Jason Judd, executive director of Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute.

Brands increasing their orders from Cambodia while raising concerns about labor rights are “obviously mixed messages,” Judd said. “And one message, the purchase order, has a lot more weight than the other. Until those are credibly threatened, the government has no reason to act.”

Khun Tharo, program manager at the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, was targeted last year after his organization published a report identifying gaps in factory oversight. The government began auditing the legal aid group; Khun faced a criminal complaint that he said his lawyer had been unable to see.

Khun Tharo (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

Khun told ProPublica that brands often speak up about worker rights because of prodding by civil society groups or the ire voiced by trading partners.

For Nike and other brands, “it’s about protecting their market and accessibility and also credibility. That’s all,” Khun said. Without pressure on brands to take action, he said, “they will not do it. They will just start to ignore it.”

Nike did not respond directly to written questions from ProPublica about its expansion in Cambodia amid the country’s intensifying political repression. Instead, it said in a statement: “We continue to engage with suppliers, industry organizations and other global stakeholders to develop broad-based approaches to help mitigate longer-term impacts.”

Labor rights are tenuous in Cambodia. The U.S. State Department said in a 2023 human rights report that “significant and systematic restrictions on workers’ freedom of association” exist in Cambodia and that the government “failed to effectively enforce laws that protected union and labor rights.” Human Rights Watch said in a 2022 report that the government’s repression of independent unions had only intensified after the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Former Khmer Rouge battalion commander Hun Sen led Cambodia from 1985 until handing control to his son, Hun Manet, in 2023. Hun Sen was brazen in his public dismissals of threats from the West over its assault on labor rights and civil society, said Carlyle Thayer, emeritus professor of politics at Australia’s University of New South Wales, Canberra. The threats included warnings from Europe, U.S. lawmakers and international clothing brands.

The Cambodian government yielded just enough to avoid the full force of economic sanctions, Thayer said.

He pointed to an episode in which the European Commission threatened to end tariff exemptions for Cambodian exports over concerns about human rights and labor abuses. Hun Sen directed the country’s courts to quickly decide cases pending against union officials, Thayer said, leading to suspended sentences for some and dropped charges for others.Instead of following through on its threat, the European Commission imposed a scaled-down set of trade restrictions.

Brands, including Nike, have had some influence. After workers were killed while protesting for higher wages in 2014, brands supported increasing the minimum wage. The Cambodian government eventually established a process to annually negotiate wage increases.

A spokesperson for Cambodia’s Ministry of Labor and Vocational Training said the incidents that led foreign brands to raise concerns with the government were “old,” misleading and had been politicized. The spokesperson did not respond to subsequent questions after a reporter noted that the most recent incident happened within the last year.

Ken Loo, a spokesperson for the Cambodian garment industry’s trade association, said thousands of unions are registered in the country. “I do not agree with your presumption that there is a repressive environment here in Cambodia,” he said. “Individual incidents do not make up the whole story.”

Many of Cambodia’s unions are government-aligned groups that Human Rights Watch has called “instant noodle” unions because they take less time to make than a cup of noodles. Independent unions have long been under assault there, according to American, European and other labor rights observers.

Yang Sophorn, president of the independent Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions, was threatened in a July 2020 letter from the country’s labor ministry after joining workers who protested outside a garment factory, Violet Apparel. The factory had closed suddenly during the pandemic.

The former Nike supplier went on to become the subject of a long-standing dispute between labor advocates and Nike over wages that workers said they were still owed. Ramatex, Violet Apparel’s parent company, did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment. Nike has said publicly it’s found no evidence to support the allegations.

Yang Sophorn (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

In its 2020 letter, the government told Yang that she was breaking the law by inciting workers and pressuring the closed factory to pay its employees. The letter said the labor ministry might dissolve her independent union, which represents more than 5,000 workers who make clothes in Nike factories. (The Cambodian labor ministry did not respond to ProPublica's request for comment about the letter.)

The labor leader had already received a suspended criminal sentence. The government said she instigated protests over wages, which occurred in 2013 and 2014. That conviction was eventually vacated in what Human Rights Watch said was an effort to placate European officials threatening Cambodia’s trade access.

Yang told ProPublica she was not scared by the Cambodian government’s threats against her and her union. “If they still want to dissolve it,” she said of the union, “let it be.”

Yang said she welcomes investments by Nike and other brands because they provide more jobs for people in her country. But she said workers need good wages, the right to assemble and protections when factories close without paying them. “If they just come to exploit our workers, I don’t want them,” she said.

Nike has prided itself on the story of its turnaround since co-founder Phil Knight acknowledged in 1998 that its products had become “synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse.”

One former senior Nike executive, who requested anonymity so they could speak freely about their former employer, said the company had expanded in Cambodia to help diversify its supply chain. The executive said Nike and other brands’ presence had benefited workers in Cambodia and other countries where it manufactures.

“Nike has clearly stated that the rule of law and respect for labor rights are significant factors in where the company decides to place orders,” the executive said.

But, the person said, “Are things imperfect, and are there a lot of screwups? Absolutely. Are we concerned when Vietnam or Cambodia takes steps backward? Of course.”

After Nike last year underwent $2 billion in cost cutting that disproportionately targeted its sustainability staff, including people working on foreign factory oversight, the former executive said they worried that Nike’s cuts had affected the company’s ability to engage with its stakeholders in the countries where its factories operate.

Nike was silent last year when Cambodian authorities cracked down on the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, the legal aid group. The government launched what was described as a “national security audit” of the organization, also known as CENTRAL, after it reported on oversight gaps by a United Nations-backed factory watchdog.

Two industry groups, one of which counts Nike as a participant, wrote to the government on July 12 saying they had “serious concerns” that the audit’s only purpose was retaliation, condemning it “in the strongest possible terms.”

Nineteen major clothing companies — from Adidas to VF Corp., owner of the North Face brand — followed up Sept. 10 with a joint letter protesting Cambodia’s assault on the group, also saying they had “serious concerns.” Nike did not sign that letter.

“A vibrant civil society, guaranteed in part by freedom of speech, is a key part of what makes Cambodia an important sourcing partner for the apparel and footwear industry,” the companies said.

Nike did not explain why it was not a signatory when asked by ProPublica.

Bryony Lau, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said with the steady deterioration in workers’ rights in Cambodia and President Donald Trump’s cuts to U.S. foreign aid, Western apparel companies have an imperative to speak up in Cambodia.

“Nike and other brands sourcing from Cambodia have an interest in ensuring that organizations like CENTRAL continue to exist and can speak about labor rights issues,” Lau said.

Khun, the CENTRAL staffer, said he knew the Nike employee who focused on corporate social responsibility in Cambodia, but he said she left the company within the last year. Khun said he didn’t know whether anyone had replaced her. (She did not respond to ProPublica, and Nike did not respond to questions about her departure.)

CENTRAL this year faced a new government problem. When Trump began to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development in January, CENTRAL and two other groups received notice that they were losing $1.5 million in funding promised for a project intended to document human rights violations and counter Cambodia’s repression.

Less than two months later, the Trump administration attempted to gut Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, some of the only news sources available in Cambodia’s native language that reported on the country’s authoritarian turn. Former Prime Minister Hun Sen praised Trump’s “courage,” posting an image from 2017 of the two men shaking hands and smiling.

Trump was giving a thumbs up.

After Donald Trump attempted in 2025 to gut federally funded agencies that published news about Cambodia’s political repression, Hun Sen, Cambodia’s longtime leader, shared photos of himself meeting the U.S. president in 2017. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Keat Soriththeavy and Ouch Sony contributed reporting and translation.

by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards

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.

Illinois legislators on Wednesday passed a law to explicitly prevent police from ticketing and fining students for minor misbehavior at school, ending a practice that harmed students across the state.

The new law would apply to all public schools, including charters. It will require school districts, beginning in the 2027-28 school year, to report to the state how often they involve police in student matters each year and to separate the data by race, gender and disability. The state will be required to make the data public.

The legislation comes three years after a ProPublica and Chicago Tribune investigation, “The Price Kids Pay,” revealed that even though Illinois law bans school officials from fining students directly, districts skirted the law by calling on police to issue citations for violating local ordinances.

“The Price Kids Pay” found that thousands of Illinois students had been ticketed in recent years for adolescent behavior once handled by the principal’s office — things like littering, making loud noises, swearing, fighting or vaping in the bathroom. It also found that Black students were twice as likely to be ticketed at school than their white peers.

From the House floor, Rep. La Shawn Ford, a Democrat from Chicago, thanked the news organizations for exposing the practice and told legislators that the goal of the bill “is to make sure if there is a violation of school code, the school should use their discipline policies” rather than disciplining students through police-issued tickets.

State Sen. Karina Villa, a Democrat from suburban West Chicago and a sponsor of the measure, said in a statement that ticketing students failed to address the reasons for misbehavior. “This bill will once and for all prohibit monetary fines as a form of discipline for Illinois students,” she said.

The legislation also would prevent police from issuing tickets to students for behavior on school transportation or during school-related events or activities.

The Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police opposed the legislation. The group said in a statement that while school-based officers should not be responsible for disciplining students, they should have the option to issue citations for criminal conduct as one of a “variety of resolutions.” The group said it’s concerned that not having the option to issue tickets could lead to students facing arrest and criminal charges instead.

The legislation passed the House 69-44. It passed in the Senate last month 37-17 and now heads to Gov. JB Pritzker, who previously has spoken out against ticketing students at school. A spokesperson said Wednesday night that he “was supportive of this initiative” and plans to review the bill.

The legislation makes clear that police can arrest students for crimes or violence they commit, but that they cannot ticket students for violating local ordinances prohibiting a range of minor infractions.

That distinction was not clear in previous versions of the legislation, which led to concern that schools would not be able to involve police in serious matters — and was a key reason legislation on ticketing foundered in previous legislative sessions. Students also may still be ordered to pay for lost, stolen or damaged property.

“This bill helps create an environment where students can learn from their mistakes without being unnecessarily funneled into the justice system,” said Aimee Galvin, government affairs director with Stand for Children, one of the groups that advocated for banning municipal tickets as school-based discipline.

The news investigation detailed how students were doubly penalized: when they were punished in school, with detention or a suspension, and then when they were ticketed by police for minor misbehavior. The investigation also revealed how, to resolve the tickets, children were thrown into a legal process designed for adults. Illinois law permits fines of up to $750 for municipal ordinance violations; it’s difficult to fight the charges, and students and families can be sent to collections if they don’t pay.

After the investigation was published, some school districts stopped asking police to ticket students. But the practice has continued in many other districts.

The legislation also adds regulations for districts that hire school-based police officers, known as school resource officers. Starting next year, districts with school resource officers must enter into agreements with local police to lay out the roles and responsibilities of officers on campus. The agreements will need to specify that officers are prohibited from issuing citations on school property and that they must be trained in working with students with disabilities. The agreements also must outline a process for data collection and reporting. School personnel also would be prohibited from referring truant students to police to be ticketed as punishment.

Before the new legislation, there had been some piecemeal changes and efforts at reform. A state attorney general investigation into a large suburban Chicago district confirmed that school administrators were exploiting a loophole in state law when they asked police to issue tickets to students. The district denied wrongdoing, but that investigation found the district broke the law and that the practice disproportionately affected Black and Latino students. The state’s top legal authority declared the practice illegal and said it should stop.

by Brett Murphy and Anna Maria Barry-Jester

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American diplomats in at least two countries have recently delivered internal reports to Washington that reflect a grim new reality taking hold abroad: The Trump administration’s sudden withdrawal of foreign aid is bringing about the violence and chaos that many had warned would come.

The vacuum left after the U.S. abandoned its humanitarian commitments has destabilized some of the most fragile locations in the world and thrown refugee camps further into unrest, according to State Department correspondence and notes obtained by ProPublica.

The assessments are not just predictions about the future but detailed accounts of what has already occurred, making them among the first such reports from inside the Trump administration to surface publicly — though experts suspect they will not be the last. The diplomats warned in their correspondence that stopping aid may undermine efforts to combat terrorism.

In the southeastern African country of Malawi, U.S. funding cuts to the United Nations’ World Food Programme have “yielded a sharp increase in criminality, sexual violence, and instances of human trafficking” within a large refugee camp, U.S. embassy officials told the State Department in late April. The world’s largest humanitarian food provider, the WFP projects a 40% decrease in funding compared to last year and has been forced to reduce food rations in Malawi’s sprawling Dzaleka refugee camp by a third.

To the north, the U.S. embassy in Kenya reported that news of funding cuts to refugee camps’ food programs led to violent demonstrations, according to a previously unreported cable from early May. During one protest, police responded with gunfire and wounded four people. Refugees have also died at food distribution centers, the officials wrote in the cable, including a pregnant woman who died under a stampede. Aid workers said they expected more people to get hurt “as vulnerable households become increasingly desperate.”

“It is devastating, but it’s not surprising,” Eric Schwartz, a former State Department assistant secretary and member of the National Security Council during Democratic administrations, told ProPublica. “It’s all what people in the national security community have predicted.”

“I struggle for adjectives to adequately describe the horror that this administration has visited on the world,” Schwartz added. “It keeps me up at night.”

In response to a detailed list of questions, a State Department spokesperson said in an email: “It is grossly misleading to blame unrest and violence around the world on America. No one can reasonably expect the United States to be equipped to feed every person on earth or be responsible for providing medication for every living human.”

The spokesperson also said that “an overwhelming majority” of the WFP programs that the Trump administration inherited, including those in Malawi and Kenya, are still active.

But the U.S. funds the WFP on a yearly basis. For 2025, the Trump administration so far hasn’t approved any money in either country, forcing the organization to drastically slash food programs.

In Kenya, for example, the WFP will cut its rations in June down to 28% — or less than 600 calories a day per person — a low never seen before, the WFP’s Kenya country director Lauren Landis told ProPublica. The WFP’s standard minimum for adults is 2,100 calories per day.

“We are living off the fumes of what was delivered in late 2024 or early 2025,” Landis said. On a recent visit to a facility treating malnourished children younger than 5, she said she saw kids who were “walking skeletons like I haven’t seen in a decade.”

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has pledged to restore safety and security around the world. At the same time, his administration, working alongside Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, swiftly dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, canceling thousands of government-funded foreign aid programs they considered wasteful. More than 80% of USAID’s operations were terminated, which crippled lifesaving humanitarian efforts around the world.

Musk, who did not respond to a request for comment, has said that DOGE’s cuts to humanitarian aid have targeted fraudulent payments to organizations but are not contributing to widespread deaths. “Show us any evidence whatsoever that that is true,” he said recently. “It’s false.”

For decades, American administrations run by both parties saw humanitarian diplomacy, or “soft power,” as a cost-effective measure to help stabilize volatile but strategically important regions and provide basic needs for people who might otherwise turn to international adversaries. Those investments, experts say, help prevent regional conflict and war that may embroil the U.S. “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition,” Jim Mattis, who was defense secretary during Trump’s first administration, told Congress in 2013 when he led U.S. Central Command.

Food insecurity has long been closely linked with regional turmoil. But despite promises from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that lifesaving operations would continue amid widespread cuts to foreign aid, the Trump administration has terminated funding to WFP for several countries. Nearly 50% of the WFP’s budget came from the U.S. in 2024.

Since February, U.S. officials throughout the developing world have issued urgent warnings forecasting that the Trump administration’s decision to suddenly cut off help to desperate populations could exacerbate humanitarian crises and threaten U.S. national security interests, records show. In one cable, diplomats in the Middle East communicated concerns that stopping aid could empower groups like the Taliban and undermine efforts to address terrorism, the narcotics trade and illegal immigration. The shift may also “significantly de-stabilize the transitioning” region and “only serve to benefit ISIS’ standing,” officials warned in other correspondence. “It could put US troops in the region at risk.”

Embassies in Africa have delivered similar messages. “We are deeply concerned that suddenly discontinuing all USAID counter terrorism-focused stabilization and humanitarian programs in Somalia … will immediately and negatively affect U.S. national security interests,” the U.S. embassy in Mogadishu, Somalia, wrote in February. USAID’s role in helping the military prevent newly liberated territory — “purchased at a high cost of blood and treasure” — from getting back into the hands of terrorists “is indisputable, and irreplaceable,” the officials added.

The embassy in Nigeria described how stop-work orders had caused lapses in oversight that put U.S. resources at risk of being diverted to criminal or terrorist groups. (A February whistleblower complaint alleged USAID-purchased computers were stolen from health centers there.) And U.S. officials said the Kenyan government “faces an impending humanitarian crisis for over 730,000 refugees” without additional resources, as local officials struggle to confront al-Shabaab, a major terrorist threat in the region, while also maintaining security inside the country’s refugee camps.

In early April, Jeremy Lewin — an attorney in his late 20s with no prior government experience who is currently in charge of the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance and running USAID operations — ordered the end of WFP grants altogether in more than a dozen countries. (Amid outcry, he later reinstated a few of them.) The State Department spokesperson said the agency was responding on Lewin’s behalf.

In Kenya, the WFP expects a malnutrition crisis after rations are cut to a fourth of the standard minimum, Landis said. She is also concerned about the security of her staff, who already travel with police escorts, given the likelihood that there will be more protests and that al-Shabaab might make further incursions into the camps.

In order for the U.S. to deliver its usual food aid to Kenya by the end of the year, it needed to be put on a boat already, Landis said. That has not happened.

A nurse evaluates a child for malnourishment at a WFP-supported health clinic in Turkana County, Kenya, in April 2025. (Courtesy of World Food Program/Kevin Gitonga)

In recent days, South Sudanese refugees in Ethiopia have begged a visiting government delegation from the U.S. not to cut food rations any further, according to a cable documenting the visit. Aid workers in another group of camps in North Africa reported that they expect to run out of funding by the end of May for a program that fights malnutrition for 8,600 pregnant and nursing mothers.

Despite being one of the poorest countries in the world, Malawi has been a relative beacon of stability in a region that’s seen numerous civil wars and unrest in recent decades. Yet in early March, officials there warned Washington counterparts that cuts to the more than $300 million USAID planned to provide to the country in aid a year would dramatically increase “the effects of the worsening economy already in motion.”

At the time, 10 employees from a USAID-funded nonprofit had recently shown up unannounced at USAID’s offices in the capital Lilongwe asking for their unpaid wages after the U.S. froze funding. The group left without incident, and it’s unclear if they were paid, but officials reported that they expected countries around the world would face similar issues and were closely monitoring for “increased risks to the safety and security of Embassy personnel.” (Former employees at another nonprofit in a nearby country also raided their organization “out of desperation for not being paid,” according to State Department records.)

An hour’s drive from the nation’s capital, Dzaleka is a former prison that was transformed into a refugee camp in the 1990s to house people fleeing war in neighboring Mozambique. In the decades since, it has ballooned, filling with people running from conflicts in Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. The camp, which was built to hold around 10,000, is now home to more than 55,000 people.

A woman goes door to door selling secondhand clothes in the Dzaleka refugee camp. (African Media Online/Alamy Stock)

Iradukunda Devota, a refugee from Burundi, came to Malawi when she was 3 and has lived at Dzaleka for 23 years. She now works for Inua Advocacy, which provides legal services and advocates on behalf of refugees in the camp. She said tension is high amid rumors that food and other aid will be cut further. Since 2023, the Malawi government has prohibited refugees from living or working outside the camp, and there has already been an increase in crime and substance abuse after food was cut earlier this year. “This is happening because people are hungry,” Devota told ProPublica. “They have nowhere to turn to.”

Now, the Malawi government is likely to close its borders to refugees in response to the funding crisis and congestion in Dzaleka, the WFP’s country representative told the State Department, according to agency records.

Diplomats continue to warn the Trump administration of even worse to come. The WFP expects to suspend food assistance in Dzaleka entirely in July.

“The WFP anticipates violent protests,” the embassy told State Department officials, “which could potentially embroil host communities and refugees, and targeting of UN and WFP offices when the pipeline eventually breaks.”

ProPublica plans to continue covering USAID, the State Department and the consequences of ending U.S. foreign aid. We want to hear from you. Reach out via Signal to reporters Brett Murphy at +1 508-523-5195 and Anna Maria Barry-Jester at +1 408-504-8131.

ProPublica

ProPublica announced Wednesday it’s joining a cross-industry effort to explore how artificial intelligence technologies can responsibly contribute to the work of investigative journalism. As part of the program, ProPublica will hire an engineer for the two-year fellowship. The program is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and will include four other newsrooms: The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, The Baltimore Banner and Arizona State University’s NEWSWELL.

At ProPublica, the engineer will explore how machine learning might help its award-winning engagement reporting group, which powers many of our most ambitious, crowdsourced investigations. From callouts and tip lines to citizen-fueled science, these reporters gather leads and evidence from communities around the country. We’re eager to explore how large language models can help us evaluate, categorize and route incoming tips more efficiently — ensuring they reach the right journalist, faster.

“We believe these technologies have the potential to help our journalists and our readers find needles in the haystack,” said Ben Werdmuller, senior director of technology. “We’re excited to explore what’s possible in ways that align with our values and standards.”

As part of the program, the participating news organizations will work collaboratively with one another and the broader news industry to share what they learn, product developments, case studies and technical information needed to help replicate their work in other newsrooms.

The goal of the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship is to help local news publishers leverage new AI technology to build sustainable businesses. The program launched in October 2024 with $10 million in support from OpenAI and Microsoft — each awarding $2.5 million in direct funding and $2.5 million in software and enterprise credits.

“The Lenfest Institute is proud to partner with OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the AI Collaborative and Fellowship program. The five publishers joining the program are leaders in the field, and we look forward to sharing what they learn with the rest of the industry,” said Lenfest Institute Executive Director and CEO Jim Friedlich. “Together with Open AI and Microsoft, the Institute is committed to exploring ethical uses of AI to advance sustainable solutions for local news.”

About ProPublica ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. With a team of more than 150 dedicated journalists, ProPublica covers a range of topics, focusing on stories with the potential to spur real-world impact. Its reporting has contributed to the passage of new laws; reversals of harmful policies and practices; and accountability for leaders at local, state and national levels. Since it began publishing in 2008, ProPublica has received eight Pulitzer Prizes, five Peabody Awards, eight Emmy Awards and 16 George Polk Awards.

About The Lenfest Institute for Journalism  The Lenfest Institute creates solutions for the next era of local news by investing in sustainable business models at the intersection of local journalism and community in Philadelphia and nationwide. 

by Mary Hudetz

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.

As he has promoted the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, has lamented the toll that processed foods have taken on the health of Americans, in particular Native Americans.

Prepackaged foods have “mass poisoned” tribal communities, he said last month when he met with tribal leaders and visited a Native American health clinic in Arizona.

Weeks later, in testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, he said processed foods had resulted in a “genocide” among Native Americans, who disproportionately live in places where there are few or no grocery stores.

“One of my big priorities will be getting good food — high-quality food, traditional foods — onto the reservation because processed foods for American Indians is poison,” Kennedy told the committee. Healthy food is key to combating the high rates of chronic disease in tribal communities, he said.

Yet even as the president tasks Kennedy’s agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture with improving healthy eating programs, the USDA has terminated the very program that dozens of tribal food banks say has helped them provide fresh, locally produced food that is important to their traditions and cultures.

That program — the USDA’s Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement program — began under President Joe Biden in late 2021 as a response to challenges accessing food that were magnified by the pandemic. Its goal was to boost purchases from local farmers and ranchers, and the funding went to hundreds of food banks across the country, including 90 focused on serving tribes.

In March, the Trump administration decided the program did not align with its priorities. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins defended the cut of a half-billion dollars by calling the program a remnant of the COVID era.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in a statement, a USDA spokesperson said the department continues to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars through more than a dozen other nutrition programs that help families meet their nutrition needs. For tribal communities, the spokesperson said, that includes the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations for low-income households.

When that program started in the 1970s, it offered processed foods colloquially known as “commodities.” Over the years, the government has added salmon, frozen chicken, produce and other more nutritious options for tribes to include in recipients’ monthly food packages. But few tribes who participate in the Food Distribution Program can purchase food directly from farmers and ranchers, as they were able to do with the now-canceled grant program. Instead, most choose from the USDA’s list of approved and available foods.

Kelli Case, an attorney for the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative at the University of Arkansas, said the program cut by the Trump administration was widely considered an overwhelming success because tribes selected foods based on their nutritional needs and “what people actually want to eat.”

“Having the opportunity to tailor a program makes a huge difference,” she said.

On reservations, the problems addressed by the now-canceled program had been an issue for generations, perpetuated by a string of federal policies, Case added. The pandemic merely “highlighted and exacerbated those issues,” she said.

For instance: In the 1800s, tribes in the West began losing access to traditional food sources — such as berries, salmon and bison — even though treaties promised tribes the right to hunt and fish. Some were removed from their homelands.

The federal government instead provided tribal members with food rations — flour, lard, sugar, coffee and other staples. At the same time, the forcible removal of Native children to boarding schools upended families’ ability to pass along knowledge about the foods they hunted and harvested.

The now-canceled grants helped fill a void, tribes said.

First image: Jason Belcourt, the Chippewa-Cree Tribe’s sustainability coordinator. Second image: Two of the tribe’s bison bulls at the Buffalo Child Ranch. (Aaron Agosto for ProPublica)

On the Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation, in an especially remote stretch of Montana, Jason Belcourt said he believed the Chippewa-Cree Tribe was finally getting closer to providing nutritious, local food to every tribal member in need. He expects the tribe’s USDA funding for local food purchases to run out within weeks.

The funding — $400,000 in the past several years — helped the tribe buy beef and produce from local ranchers and farmers. The money supplied roughly 250 households on a reservation where the nearest supermarket is about 20 miles away.

“We wanted to make sure that we didn’t turn away anybody,” Belcourt said. “There are families that go without meals; there are kids that go without meals.”

The tribe also used the money to help harvest bison from the tribe’s herd, which Belcourt said has “done wonders, not only in terms of the food value.” The harvests became community events where younger tribal members learned how their ancestors butchered and used the buffalo. A sense of tribal identity was being restored, he said.

“There’s a lot of cultural sharing. There’s a lot of remembrance from the old timers of what their grandparents told them and how to use the buffalo,” Belcourt said. “And, believe it or not, there’s some healing that’s going on.”

The harvests will continue, Belcourt said. But it’s unclear how he will make up for the loss of $150,000 in funding that the USDA previously awarded the tribe for local food purchases over the next year.

Other tribes are similarly concerned about the future.

The Walker River Paiute in Nevada was the first to receive one of the grants to source local food, including $249,091 in 2022. The community, 115 miles southeast of Reno, used most of the money on locally sourced produce and eggs, according to the USDA. Of the reservation’s 830 residents, both Native American and not, 40% had received food purchased using the grant, according to the tribe.

“I truly believe no one knows the needs of our tribal citizens better than the tribe,” Amber Torres, then the tribe’s chairman, said in a news release.

In late March, a dozen nonprofits that advocate for Native Americans sent a letter to USDA Secretary Rollins, urging her to reinstate the “critical” program as a step toward respecting the sovereign status of tribes. At a recent meeting with USDA officials, tribal leaders again emphasized that they want a say over the food distributed on their reservations.

First image: A community garden run by the Help Lodge to foster food sovereignty and sustainability on the Rocky Boy's Reservation. Second image: Empty planter shelves in an unused greenhouse at the Help Lodge. Funding cuts have made it difficult to maintain a full staff. (Aaron Agosto for ProPublica)

Tribal communities still have access to the handful of federal food programs. However, last year, the Government Accountability Office, the watchdog arm of Congress, found that some posed barriers to people’s ability to get the food they want or need.

For example, individuals who accept the commodity program’s offerings cannot also receive assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps. As a result, a household’s needs can go unmet. Sometimes SNAP offers essential cooking ingredients — oil, seasoning or yeast — that the commodity program may not provide, according to the study.

(The local food program was not included in the GAO report.)

On the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana, the USDA’s local food program had become a reliable fixture, especially since the federal commodity program was paused there, said Tescha Hawley, who is Gros Ventre, or Aaniiih, and a social worker on the reservation. Structural problems had shuttered the building where the commodity program food was warehoused.

A nonprofit Hawley founded, Day Eagle Hope Project, helped her tribe secure $2 million from the USDA to buy fresh local food and process bison meat from its herd. Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribal members who are capable of gathering wild, nutrient-rich berries exchange them for payment through the grant. She distributed the food first from a shipping container on her property and later a community center.

Over the past few years, the tribe and her nonprofit have distributed thousands of pounds of food. She anticipates the money that remains from past grant funding cycles will run out this winter. For people who can get to a grocery store, up to 45 miles away from some of the reservation’s communities, many will have to make SNAP benefits stretch at a time when food prices are rising.

“So that means even less food for the month,” Hawley said. “People will go without.”

Belcourt said he has begun seeking other grants, and a tribal staffer makes runs to collect food donations in Havre, more than 20 miles away, and Great Falls, about 90 miles away.

“We don't have a Plan B,” Belcourt said of the abruptly canceled grant. “Given the short notice, it’s tough to find a funder in that timeframe.”

by Aliyya Swaby

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 day after a teenager opened fire in a Nashville high school cafeteria early this year, officials in the district scrambled to investigate potential threats across their schools. Rumors flew that the shooter, who killed a student before turning the gun on himself, had accomplices at large.

At DuPont Tyler Middle School, the assistant principal’s most urgent concern was a 12-year-old boy. James, a seventh grader with a small voice and mop of brown hair, had posted a concerning screenshot on Instagram that morning, Jan. 23. He was arrested at school hours later and charged with making a threat of mass violence.

The assistant principal had to complete a detailed investigation called a threat assessment, as required by Tennessee law. First, she and other school employees had to figure out whether James’ threat was valid. Then, they had to determine what actions to take to help a potentially troubled child and protect other students.

Threat assessments are not public, but the district gave ProPublica a copy of James’ with his father’s permission. School officials did not carry out the threat assessment properly, according to experts who reviewed it at ProPublica’s request. Instead, the school expelled James without investigating further and skipped crucial steps that would help him or protect others. (We are using the child’s middle name to protect his privacy.)

The way school officials handled James’ case also exposes glaring contradictions in two recent Tennessee laws that aim to criminalize school threats and require schools to expel students who make them — with minimal recourse, transparency or accountability.

One obvious issue in the threat assessment, according to the experts, appeared on Page 20. That page features a checklist of options for how the school could address its concerns about James, including advising his parents to secure guns in their home and ensuring he has access to counseling.

Schools should take steps like these even when a student is expelled, according to John Van Dreal, a former school administrator who has spent decades helping schools improve their violence prevention strategies. Officials at James’ school opted for none of the options they could have taken. Instead, the assistant principal wrote under the list in blue pen, “student was expelled.”

“That’s actually about the most dangerous thing you can do for the student,” Van Dreal said, “and honestly for the community.”

Van Dreal’s name appears in tiny print at the bottom of each page of James’ threat assessment, because he helped the school district set up its current process. After ProPublica shared details about James’ case, Van Dreal said, “What I’m hearing is probably more training and more examples are needed.”

One page of the threat assessment form, created by John Van Dreal, used in James’ case (Obtained by ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Nashville’s school district does not collect data on how many threat assessments it does or how many result in expulsions, according to spokesperson Sean Braisted. “The goal is always to ensure the safety and well-being of all students while addressing incidents appropriately,” Braisted wrote. He later declined to answer questions ProPublica asked about James’ case, although James’ father signed a privacy waiver allowing the school to do so.

Tennessee schools must submit data to the state on how effective their threat assessments are — but the state does not release that information to the public. School districts are required to get training on threat assessments, but lawyers and parents say they often carry them out inconsistently and use varying definitions for what makes a threat valid.

Two recent contradictory Tennessee laws make it even harder to handle student threats. One mandates a felony charge for anyone who makes a “threat of mass violence” at school, without requiring police to investigate intent or credibility. The other requires schools to determine that a threat of mass violence is “valid” before expelling a student for at least a year.

James’ alleged threat was a screenshot of a text exchange. One person said they would “shoot up” a Nashville school and asked if the other would attack a different school. “Yea,” the other person replied. “I got some other people for other schools.” The FBI flagged the post for school officials and police. James told school officials that he reposted the screenshot from the Instagram page of a Spanish-language news site.

The Tennessean published a story in April detailing James’ arrest and overnight stay in juvenile detention. The story, and the ones ProPublica and WPLN published last year on other arrests, shows how quickly police move to take youth into custody.

Schools in Tennessee are supposed to follow a higher standard than police when it comes to investigating threats of mass violence: They’re supposed to determine whether a threat is valid. For instance, in Hamilton County, a few hours southeast of Nashville, school officials chose not to expel two students even after police arrested them for threats of mass violence, ProPublica and WPLN previously reported.

Yet when James’ father appealed his son’s expulsion at a March school district hearing, the assistant principal said repeatedly that James had to be expelled simply because he’d been arrested. “We did not investigate further,” she said. James’ father shared an audio recording of the hearing with ProPublica.

James, who turned 13 in February, is small for his age, still awaiting the teenage growth spurt of his three older brothers. At the hearing, his voice was soft but assured as he explained what happened. He said he understands why he shouldn’t have posted the screenshot. But he said he wanted to warn others and feel “heroic.”

Melissa Nelson, a national school safety consultant based in Pennsylvania who trains school employees on managing threats, reviewed James’ threat assessment at ProPublica’s request and concluded that “this is gross mismanagement of a case.”

“This tool has not been used as intended,” she said. “They didn’t do a behavior threat assessment. They filled out some paperwork.”

After the police took James away, assistant principal Angela Post convened a team of school employees to decide whether to expel him. They used a threat assessment form that Van Dreal had developed, one of the most commonly used across the country, to guide them on how to respond.

According to Van Dreal, Metro Nashville Public Schools is in an early phase of using the form, and its staff have flown to Oregon at least once to learn from his consulting group.

Van Dreal tells school officials to use the threat assessment to collect information about a student in trouble and address behavior that could signal future violence. If school officials worried that James was planning an act of violence, they should have pursued some of the many options outlined in the threat assessment to get him help and protect the school from harm.

Instead, they chose none of those options.

Experts said that is one of the biggest mistakes school officials make. “Even if a child is expelled, what I always train is: Out of sight, out of mind doesn’t help,” Nelson said. “Expelling a child doesn’t deescalate the situation or move them off the pathway of violence. A lot of times, it makes it worse.”

School officials also failed to seek out more information that could have helped them figure out whether the threat was valid. Post checked a box acknowledging that she hadn’t notified James’ parents of the threat assessment. She wrote beside it, as an explanation, “student was arrested and expelled.” On a line asking whether James had access to weapons, Post wrote that the threat assessment team did not know.

Interviewing parents is a crucial part of the process, said Rob Moore, a Tennessee psychologist who has helped schools conduct threat assessments for more than two decades. “When you sit in that room with those parents and you collect data from them, you really get a sense of things that teachers would never know, that the administrators would never know.”

Although school officials did not opt to investigate further or to monitor James, the threat assessment indicated they had concerns he may pose a threat. In response to a question about whether James’ caregivers, peers or staff were concerned about his potential for acting out aggressively, Post checked yes and wrote, “He has little to no supervision in discipline structures at home but might think he could get away with it.”

And although James told school administrators he was not a participant in the text thread he shared on Instagram, Post wrote that he had indicated a plan and intention to harm others. “See attached image. Shows location, intent to harm, targets and date,” she wrote, referencing a screenshot of James’ Instagram post. She also wrote that he had a motive: “The post indicated that he was being made fun of. See attached image.”

The threat assessment included questionnaires from James’ teachers; three out of four said they did not have concerns about potential aggression. One teacher, who taught James social studies, cited his disciplinary history: using racial slurs, fighting another student and “researching racially motivated things” on the school computer. “Dad seemed disengaged in conference & somewhat unaware of the child’s school or social or personal issues,” she wrote.

James’ dad and stepmom did not know that the threat assessment accused them of lax supervision at home. That’s because they didn’t even know the threat assessment existed until ProPublica told them about it, more than a week after it took place.

Upon reading the document, their first emotion, after shock, was anger. They said they hadn’t known about the incident with the racial slur, and it was not directly referenced in a copy of James’ disciplinary history. But they felt upset at the insinuation that they had not been involved in James’ life. “We’ve been asking for help, for grades, tutoring,” his dad, Kyle Caldwell, said. “And we really didn’t get any.”

James relaxes at home with his dad, Kyle Caldwell, and the family dog. James was put on court supervision following his arrest. (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)

James said that in early September, his social studies teacher taught the class about World War II. He said the teacher didn’t answer enough of his questions, so he started searching online. The school flagged that he had looked up swastikas. “I didn’t know much about it,” he said. “That’s why I searched it.”

As part of his discipline, the school prohibited him from using its computers. His stepmother, Breanne Metz, shared emails she sent to James’ teachers explaining she and Caldwell were worried about his grades and wanted to help him catch up.

James had been struggling with his parents’ contentious divorce; after his mom lost custody of him, he hadn’t been able to see her in months. Worried, his dad and stepmom arranged for him to see a school counselor. James said the counselor tried to connect with him through their mutual love of video games over about five sessions, which was nice, though “it didn’t really help.” Post wrote in the threat assessment that James had “disclosed confidential information to the school counselor that would support a feeling of being overwhelmed or distraught.”

Then James lost his best friend: Lieutenant Dan, a three-legged pitbull-lab mix named after a character from the movie “Forrest Gump.” Dan joined the family when he and James were both 1, and he died of cancer last November. As James describes it, he was at capacity with the emotions he was dealing with, and his dog’s death was the tipping point. “When someone you love or something you love for your whole life passes away, you can’t hold it,” he said. He sat in class feeling sad and exhausted.

Records show school staff talked with James’ parents about his attendance at school and he was disciplined for not complying with an unspecified request. Then in mid-December, he began a fight with another student, who had been “horseplaying” with him “off and on” and went too far, according to the school report. The following month, he was arrested and expelled.

In the days after the arrest, Caldwell considered hiring a lawyer. Reading the threat assessment “added the urgency” for him to finally make the call. “The puzzle pieces weren’t coming together in their story,” he said. “It really looked like they were going to try to be sweeping their stuff under the rug.”

In mid-March, James sat at the oval table in the district conference room next to his father and across from assistant principal Post. He wore a gray vest over his T-shirt in preparation for an appeal hearing that would determine whether he would be allowed back in school. It had been nearly two months since he had set foot on district property.

Caldwell brought his private lawyer, a rare resource for a school hearing. He showed up that morning nervous but eager to make his case directly to school administrators. The public rarely gets insight into what happens at a school appeal hearing, but Caldwell shared an audio recording with ProPublica.

Post started by reading aloud the social media post that landed James in trouble, stumbling over the shorthand and unfamiliar internet slang. Then, it was James’ turn to speak for himself.

Lisa Currie, the school district’s director of discipline, asked him to explain why he had reposted the screenshot of the texts. “You do understand that once you reposted them from somewhere else, it gave the appearance that this was a conversation that you were having?” she said.

“I just wanted to let people know, feel heroic,” James said. “I didn’t want more people to get hurt.”

James enjoys building and painting the model F-15E fighter jet his dad bought him. (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)

Over the next 40 minutes, Caldwell’s lawyer questioned Post about the process the school used to determine whether James should be expelled. When he pressed her for direct responses, Post repeatedly said that law enforcement and not the school held the primary responsibility for investigating the threat. Although the law requires schools to use a threat assessment to determine if the threat is “valid,” Post and her team based the expulsion entirely on the police’s arrest.

Once local police take over a case, she said, “then it’s not really our investigation anymore.”

“Was it your assessment at the time that he wrote this statement, like physically typed it out on a computer and posted it?” the lawyer asked.

“We did not make that determination,” Post said.

She said school staff did not look deeply through James’ disciplinary history as part of the threat assessment. “That’s not necessarily the purpose of the threat assessment,” she told the lawyer. Because James had been expelled and arrested, “there would not be a reason to be concerned about the return of a student.”

Currie indicated that Post’s approach was supported by district leaders. “The purpose of the threat assessment is to determine appropriate supports and interventions around the students while they’re in the building,” she said. Post and Currie did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment or to written questions.

Post told the lawyer she couldn’t remember whether school staff investigated the origin of the original threat.

“So if there was an actual threat made and somebody else authored this threat, then we don’t know who that is. Would that be a fair statement?” the lawyer asked.

“That is possible,” Post responded. She said James didn’t initially say that he had shared the post to warn others and it wasn’t her place to decide whether he intended to make a threat. “I don’t want to think, ‘Oh, he’s not going to do that.’ And then something just like the previous day happened,” she said, referring to the Antioch High School shooting. Once James was arrested, “it’s in MNPD’s hands,” Post said, referring to the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department.

The lawyer asked Post to explain whether the threat assessment could ever have changed school officials’ decision to expel James: What if school officials found out that the threat was not valid? “Had y’all come on information that he had not written these texts,” he asked, “would it have changed the punishment?”

“We would have had to let our [school resource officer] know and they would have had to go through the MNPD channels,” she said.

“You did not at that time know whether he wrote those text messages or not?” the lawyer asked again.

“Correct,” Post said.

Then, it was Caldwell’s turn to speak. He criticized the school’s decision to leave him out of the initial disciplinary process. He would have explained to James why he should go through “appropriate channels” to report a threat instead of posting it on Instagram. “As a dad,” he said, “there was a teachable parent moment that I didn’t get to have.”

As the hearing came to a close, Currie told Caldwell to expect a decision soon.

The arrest and expulsion cleaved James’ life in two. He now begins many sentences with the phrase “before everything happened.” Before everything happened, he would ride his bike with his brothers and friends to explore the forested land and abandoned houses in the surrounding neighborhoods. They found all sorts of strange garbage: a fire engine’s license plate, wooden pictures of “demonic rituals,” a dentist chair adorned with rusty handcuffs.

James looks for four-leaf clovers in his backyard. (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)

He was able to come home from his night in detention in exchange for agreeing to pretrial diversion with six months of court supervision, a common outcome for students charged with threats of mass violence. While under supervision, he wasn’t allowed to use the computer or phone unsupervised by an adult and was mostly restricted to the streets around his house. “It’s a big neighborhood, but once you get used to it, it’s small,” he said.

The court recently lifted his supervision, earlier than expected. Because he had completed the terms of pretrial diversion, his case was dismissed.

His parents declined Metro Nashville Public Schools’ offer to enroll him in the local alternative school, which primarily serves kids with disciplinary issues who were suspended or expelled from their original schools. Instead, they enrolled him at an online public charter school; he starts in the fall.

As James waited to hear the result of the expulsion hearing, he followed the schedule his dad and stepmom created for him — less a rigorous academic curriculum than a routine to keep him occupied while his stepmom takes calls in her home office. He gets most excited about the hands-on activities, like building and painting the model F-15E fighter jet his dad bought him online.

One night in early April, tornadoes touched down just outside Nashville. James, his five siblings, and two dogs huddled with Caldwell and Metz in the windowless laundry room; the kids wore helmets in case of falling debris. When they got up the next morning, groggy but unharmed, Caldwell checked the mailbox: A letter from the school district was inside.

District officials had reviewed the information from the hearing and determined that “there was not a due process violation of MNPS’ expulsion process.” James was still expelled. Caldwell had prepared his son for this outcome so that he wouldn’t be devastated. James would later joke that the storm had delivered the bad news.

The letter gave the family the option to escalate the appeal through the district process. But the odds of winning and the costs of retaining the lawyer made the effort feel futile. The more the family fought back, the more anxious the 13-year-old felt about his future. Would he feel even worse if they lost again? Would people start to think of him as a bad kid?

That afternoon, talking with his dad about the letter, James quietly considered these questions. Then he went outside to watch the storm clouds.

Paige Pfleger of WPLN contributed reporting.

by Nicole Santa Cruz

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

When a homeless man questioned the Phoenix police’s authority to stop him in February 2020, an officer grabbed him and knelt on his neck while another officer shocked him with a Taser. Another unhoused man said officers threw away his belongings, telling him, “You guys are trash and this is trash.” Other people experiencing homelessness were regularly cited and arrested by the city’s officers during early morning hours for “conduct that is plainly not a crime.”

Those were among the abuses alleged by the Department of Justice last June, following a nearly three-year investigation into the city of Phoenix and its police department. The investigation marked the first time the DOJ had found a pattern of violations against homeless people, including that officers and other city employees illegally threw away their belongings.

In addition, DOJ investigators found that officers disproportionately cited and arrested people experiencing homelessness. They comprised 37% of all Phoenix Police Department arrests from 2016 to 2022, though homeless people account for less than 1% of the population. Investigators said many of those stops, citations and arrests were unconstitutional.

The wide-ranging probe also found officers used excessive force, discriminated against people of color, retaliated against protesters and violated the rights of people with behavioral health disabilities — similar issues to those the DOJ has documented in troubled law enforcement agencies in other cities.

But federal officials announced Wednesday that they had abandoned efforts to compel the city and police to address those issues. The DOJ closed its investigations and retracted findings of constitutional violations in Phoenix and five other jurisdictions, including Trenton, New Jersey. Beyond that, the Department of Justice said it was dismissing Biden-era lawsuits against several other police departments, including in Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by police five years ago.

The DOJ said requiring the cities to enter consent decrees, which are intended to ensure reforms are enacted, would have “imposed years of micromanagement of local police departments by federal courts and expensive independent monitors, and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of compliance costs, without a legally or factually adequate basis for doing so.”

The city of Phoenix said in a statement that it has “tirelessly focused on enhancing policy, training and accountability measures to ensure the best public safety for everyone who lives, works and plays in Phoenix.” In recent years, the city has enacted policy changes including employee training and the implementation of body-worn cameras.

Legal experts told ProPublica the wrongdoing the DOJ uncovered in Phoenix should be corrected — even though city officials will be under less pressure to act.

“It is a very real shame and a disservice to the residents of these communities to end the work, to stand down and unwind the investigations and to purport to retract the findings,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

The report’s retraction, along with last year’s Supreme Court decision allowing cities to arrest and cite people for sleeping outside even when they have nowhere else to go, could further embolden cities and police departments to marginalize homeless people, said Brook Hill, senior counsel with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a legal advocacy group that focuses on racial justice issues. “They will feel like they have a license to do the sweeps and to otherwise make life in public view uncomfortable for unhoused people,” he said.

Indeed, just last week California Gov. Gavin Newsom urged all local governments in that state to “use their authority affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court” to address encampments.

After the DOJ began the Phoenix investigation in August 2021, Fund for Empowerment, an Arizona advocacy group for homeless people, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona sued the city and police department to stop what attorneys called “unconstitutional raids” on unsheltered people. Its lawsuit accused the city of failing to provide housing and instead turning to encampment removals to clear sidewalks and other areas. “The City has made its message to unhoused individuals clear: engaging in sleep and other essential life activities on the city’s public grounds will lead to detention, arrest, displacement, and the loss of the individual’s personal effects,” the Fund for Empowerment alleged in court documents.

Nearly a month later, a judge issued an injunction preventing the city from enforcing its camping ban against people who can’t find shelter, as well as from seizing and throwing away people’s belongings. The lawsuit is ongoing.

The DOJ’s June 2024 report stated that even after the injunction and new city policies were in place, city officials continued to arrest people for camping and to destroy people’s belongings without notice or the opportunity to reclaim them.

ProPublica, as part of its investigation into cities’ handling of homeless people’s possessions, found that Phoenix rarely stored property seized from encampments. From May 2023 to 2024, the city responded to 4,900 reports from the public involving encampments, according to its records. The city said workers, trained to assess which items are property and which are trash, found items that could be stored at only 405 of the locations it visited. Not all of those belongings required storage because people may have removed them between a report of an encampment and the city’s arrival. The city stored belongings 69 times.

In January 2024, the city issued its own report in anticipation of the DOJ’s allegations. The city said it found nothing to support accusations that police “interfered with the possessions of people experiencing homelessness.” Phoenix officials also said in the report that although the city and police department “welcome additional insights” from the DOJ, they were unwilling to be subjected to a consent decree, a binding plan in which an appointed monitor oversees implementation of reforms.

Attorneys and advocates said that the DOJ’s decision has no bearing on lawsuits filed by private attorneys alleging civil rights violations, including against people who are homeless. The ACLU this week also launched a seven-state effort to file records requests to hold police departments accountable, it said.

Elizabeth Venable, lead community organizer with the Fund for Empowerment, who also helped the DOJ connect with the unhoused community in Phoenix, said she viewed the federal findings as a victory for unhoused people. Despite the retraction by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Venable said, the report still has weight.

“No matter what Pam Bondi says, people are not going to forget it, especially people who learned about something that they were horrified by,” she said.

by Molly Redden

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When top Trump adviser Stephen Miller threatened on May 9 that the administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus in response to an “invasion” from undocumented immigrants, he was operating on a fringe legal theory that a right-wing faction has been working to legitimize for more than a decade.

“The Constitution is clear — and that of course is the supreme law of the land — that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,” Miller said earlier this month in response to a question about Trump’s threat to suspend habeas corpus, the legal right of a prisoner to challenge their detention. Days after Miller’s remarks, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem issued the same warning when a member of a House panel asked her if the number of illegal border crossings meets the threshold for suspending the right. “I’m not a constitutional lawyer,” Noem said. “But I believe it does.”

Hard-liners have referred to immigrants as “invaders” as long as the U.S. has had immigration. By 2022, invasion rhetoric, which had previously been relegated to white nationalist circles, had become such a staple of Republican campaign ads that most of the public agreed an invasion of the U.S. via the southern border was underway.

Now, however, the claim that the U.S. is under invasion has become the legal linchpin of President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-immigrant campaign.

The claim is Trump’s central justification for invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport roughly 140 Venezuelans to CECOT, the Salvadoran megaprison, without due process. (The administration cited different legal authority for the remaining deportees.) The Trump administration contends they are members of a gang, Tren de Aragua, that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is directing to infiltrate and operate in the United States. Lawyers and families of many of the deportees have presented evidence the prisoners are not even members of Tren de Aragua.

The contention is also the throughline of Trump’s day one executive order “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” That document calls for the expansion of immigration removal proceedings without court hearings and for legal attacks against sanctuary jurisdictions, places that refuse to commit local resources to immigration enforcement.

So far, no court has bought the idea that the U.S. is truly under invasion, as defined by the Constitution or the Alien Enemies Act, on the handful of occasions the government has used the argument to justify supercharged immigration enforcement. Four federal judges, including one Trump appointee, have said the situation Trump describes fails to meet the definition of an invasion. Tren de Aragua “may well be engaged in narcotics trafficking, but that is a criminal matter, not an invasion or predatory incursion,” U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein wrote. Indeed, Trump’s own intelligence agencies found that Maduro is not directing the gang. The Supreme Court has not ruled on the question but froze any more deportations without due process on May 16.

The Trump legal push has been in the works for years. After Trump left the White House, two of his loyalists, former Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli and his now-two-time budget chief Russell Vought, quietly built a consensus for the invasion legal theory among state Republican officials and ultimately helped persuade Texas to give it a test run in court.

Former Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli, first image, and President Donald Trump’s two-time budget chief Russell Vought (Bloomberg and Tom Williams/Getty Images)

Most legal scholars reject the idea that the wave of undocumented immigration fits the original definition of what an invasion is, but they worry nonetheless. When U.S. District Judge Stephanie L. Haines, a Trump appointee, issued a preliminary ruling earlier this month that allowed Trump to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, she did not label immigrants “invaders.” Instead, she proposed that Tren de Aragua was “the modern equivalent of a pirate or a robber.”

If the Supreme Court ultimately takes up the invasion question, a ruling like Haines’ offers a blueprint for sidestepping the issue while giving Trump what he wants, or for embracing the invasion theory wholesale, legal scholars said.

“All this really comes down to the issue of whether the United States Supreme Court is going to allow a president to behave essentially as an autocratic dictator if he’s prepared to make entirely fictitious factual declarations that trigger monarchical power,” said Frank Bowman, a legal historian and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Law.

Under the Constitution, if the United States is invaded, Congress has the power to call up the militia and can allow the suspension of habeas corpus, the constitutional right that is the core of due process. The states, which are normally forbidden from unilaterally engaging in war, can do so according to the Constitution if they are “actually invaded.”

The Alien Enemies Act, an 18th century wartime law enacted during a naval conflict with France, also rests on the definition of an invasion. It allows the president to expel “aliens” during “any invasion or predatory incursion … by any foreign nation or government.” It has only ever been invoked three times, during the War of 1812 and World Wars I and II.

Habeas corpus has likewise been suspended only a handful of times in the Constitution’s nearly 240-year history, including during Reconstruction, to put down violent rebellions in the South by the Ku Klux Klan; in 1905, to suppress the Moro uprising against U.S. control of the Philippines; and in Hawaii after Pearl Harbor in order to place Japanese Americans under martial law. In each of these cases, the executive branch acted after receiving permission from Congress.

An exception was in 1861, when President Abraham Lincoln unilaterally suspended habeas corpus at the outbreak of the Civil War. This provoked a direct confrontation with Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, who ruled that only Congress was empowered to take such an extraordinary step. Congress later papered over the conflict by voting to give Lincoln the authority for the war’s duration.

Today, nearly every historian and constitutional scholar is in agreement that, when it comes to suspending habeas, Congress has the power to decide if the conditions are met.

“The Constitution does not vest this power in the President,” future Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in 2014. “Scholars and courts have overwhelmingly endorsed the position that, Lincoln’s unilateral suspensions of the writ notwithstanding, the Constitution gives Congress the exclusive authority to decide when the predicates specified by the Suspension Clause are satisfied.” Even then, the Constitution only allows Congress to act in extreme circumstances — “when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University who has closely followed these arguments, argues there is virtually no evidence that the drafters of the Constitution thought of an “invasion” as anything other than the kind of organized incursion that would traditionally spark a war.

“The original meaning of ‘invasion’ in the Constitution is actually what sort of the average normal person would think it means,” Somin said. “As James Madison put it, invasion is an operation of war. What Vladimir Putin did to Ukraine, that’s an invasion. What Hamas did to Israel, that’s an invasion. On the other hand, illegal migration, or drug smuggling, or ordinary crime — that’s not an invasion.”

In 1994, Florida Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles Jr. filed the first modern-day lawsuit arguing otherwise. The Haitian and Cuban refugee crises had spawned a new wave of anti-immigration sentiment, and hard-liners accused the federal government of owing states billions for handling immigrants’ supposed crimes and welfare claims. Chiles, who died in 1998, took the concept one step further. He filed a $1.5 billion suit claiming the U.S. had violated the section of the Constitution stating the federal government “shall protect each [state] against Invasion.”

Federal courts slapped down his lawsuit — and a spate of copycat suits from Arizona, California, New York and New Jersey — and the legal case for calling immigration an invasion died out.

In the late 2000s, a group of far-right voices began to revive this approach. Ken Cuccinelli was among the first and most strident. He was an early member of State Legislators for Legal Immigration, part of a powerful network of anti-immigration groups that pioneered efforts like ending birthright citizenship. The organization contended that immigrants were “foreign invaders” as described in the Constitution.

Cuccinelli evangelized for the theory as he rose from a state legislator to an official in Trump’s first Department of Homeland Security.

“Under war powers, there’s no due process,” Cuccinelli told Breitbart radio shortly before his appointment in the first Trump administration. “They can literally just line their National Guard up with, presumably with riot gear like they would if they had a civil disturbance, and turn people back at the border. … You just point them back across the river and let them swim for it.”

Cuccinelli got traction after Trump’s reelection loss. He joined a think tank Vought had founded as its immigration point man. During his time in the first Trump administration, Vought became frustrated that the president’s goals were frequently thwarted. He founded the Center for Renewing America, dedicated to a sweeping vision of remaking the government and society — what ultimately became Project 2025.

In remarks to a private audience at his think tank in 2023, Vought, who is now Trump’s budget chief and the intellectual force behind Trump’s unprecedented executive power grab, said he specifically championed the term “invasion” because it “unlocked” extraordinary presidential powers.

“One of the reasons why we were very, so insistent about coming up with the whole notion of the border being an ‘invasion’ because there were Constitutional authorities that were a part of being able to call it an invasion,” Vought said. Documented and ProPublica obtained videos of Vought’s speech last year. Vought and Cuccinelli did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2021 and 2022, Cuccinelli, with Vought’s help, mounted press conferences and privately urged Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas to proclaim that their states were being invaded.

After Arizona’s then-attorney general, Mark Brnovich, released a legal opinion in February 2022 proclaiming violent cartels had “actually invaded” and opened the door for Ducey to deploy the state’s National Guard, Vought bragged to his audience that he and Cuccinelli had personally provided draft language for the opinion. In a previous email to ProPublica, Brnovich acknowledged speaking to Cuccinelli but said his opinion was “drafted and written by hard working attorneys (including myself) in our office.”

Ducey never acted on the invasion theory. But Abbott was more receptive. He invoked the state’s war powers, citing the “actually invaded” clause, in a 2022 open letter to President Joe Biden. “Two years of inaction on your part now leave Texas with no choice,” he wrote. Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Abbott, said the governor “declared an invasion due to the Biden Administration’s repeated failures in upholding its constitutional duty to secure the border and defend states.”

Abbott ordered the banks of the Rio Grande river to be strung with razor wire and a shallow section to be obstructed by a 1,000-foot string of man-sized buoys and blades and signed a law, S.B. 4, giving state authorities the power to deport undocumented immigrants.

When the Justice Department sued, Abbott’s administration argued in legal briefs that its actions were justified in part because his state was under “invasion.” Twenty-three Republican attorneys general filed a brief in agreement.

“In both scope and effect, the wave of illegal migrants pouring across the border is like an invasion,” their brief read. “The Constitution’s text, the principle of sovereignty in the federal design, and the broader constitutional structure all support the conclusion that the States have a robust right to engage in self-defense. Contained within that right is presumptively acts to repel invasion.”

Texas’ invasion argument did not prevail. The 5th Circuit has blocked S.B. 4., and a lower court and a three-judge panel skewered Abbott’s constitutional argument in the buoy case. In 2024, the full 5th Circuit ruled under another law that Abbott was entitled to leave the floating barriers in place. It avoided ruling on Texas’ invasion claim altogether — but not without one judge dissenting. Trump appointee James Ho argued courts have no ability to second-guess executives about which threats rise to the level of an invasion and justify military action.

In his speech, Vought credited “the massive take-up rate” of the invasion legal theory to his and Cuccinelli’s behind-the-scenes efforts. Now the concept is being taken seriously by the president’s top advisers as they threaten to upend a core civil liberty.

“The definition of ‘invasion’ has broad implications for civil liberties — that’s pretty obvious,” Somin said. “They’re trying to use this as a tool to get around constitutional and other legal constraints on deportation and exclusion that would otherwise exist. But they also want to use it to undermine civil liberties” for U.S. citizens.

Molly Redden is covering legal affairs and how the second Trump administration is attempting to reshape the legal system. You can send her tips at molly.redden@propublica.org or via Signal at mollyredden.14.

by Robert Faturechi, Pratheek Rebala and Brandon Roberts

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

The week before President Donald Trump unveiled bruising new tariffs that sent the stock market plummeting, a key official in the agency that shapes his administration’s trade policy sold off as much as $30,000 of stock.

Two days before that so-called “Liberation Day” announcement on April 2, a State Department official sold as much as $50,000 in stock, then bought a similar investment as prices fell.

And just before Trump made another significant tariff announcement, a White House lawyer sold shares in nine companies, records show.

More than a dozen high-ranking executive branch officials and congressional aides have made well-timed trades since Trump took office in January, most of them selling stock before the market plunged amid fears that Trump’s tariffs would set off a global trade war, according to a ProPublica review of disclosures across the government.

All of the trades came shortly before a significant government announcement or development that could influence stock prices. Some who sold individual stocks or broader market funds used their earnings to buy investments that are generally less risky, such as bonds or treasuries. Others appear to have kept their money in cash. In one case unrelated to tariffs, records show that a congressional aide bought stock in two mining companies shortly before a key Senate committee approved a bill written by his boss that would help the firms.

Using nonpublic information learned at work to trade securities could violate the law. But even if such actions aren’t influenced by insider knowledge, ethics experts warn that trading stock while the federal government’s actions move markets can create the appearance of impropriety. The recent trades by government officials, they said, underscore that there should be tighter rules on how, or if, federal employees can trade securities.

“The executive branch is routinely engaged in activities that will move the market,” said Tyler Gellasch, who, as a congressional aide, helped write the law on insider trading by government officials and now runs a nonprofit focused on transparency and ethics in capital markets. “I don’t think members of Congress and executive branch officials should be trading securities. To the extent they have investment holdings, it should be managed by someone else outside their purview. The temptation to put their own personal self-interest ahead of their duties to the country is just too high.”

There is no evidence that the trades by government officials identified by ProPublica were informed by nonpublic information. Still, when government officials trade stock at opportune times, Gellasch said, even if it was based on luck and not inside information, it undermines trust in government and the markets

“It then becomes a thing where our markets look rigged,” he said.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the officials who made the trades either said they had no insider information that would help them time their decisions or did not respond to questions about the transactions.

Questions about trades based on nonpublic information have swirled around Congress for years and began anew after Trump’s tariffs announcements led to wild swings in the market. Lawmakers’ trades are automatically posted online and, after multiple congressional stock-trading scandals, are widely scrutinized as soon as they become public.

But less attention is paid to the trades of executive branch employees and congressional aides whose work could give them access to confidential information likely to influence markets once made public.

Last week, ProPublica reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media, the president’s social media company, on April 2. After the market closed that day, Trump unveiled his “Liberation Day” tariffs, sending the market reeling. Bondi’s ethics agreement required her to sell by early May, but why she sold on that date is unclear. She has yet to answer questions about the trades, and the Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Earlier this week, ProPublica reported that Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, sold shares in almost three dozen companies on Feb. 11, two days before Trump announced plans to institute wide-ranging “reciprocal” tariffs. A Transportation Department spokesperson said Duffy’s account manager made the trades and that Duffy had no input on the timing.

Using insider government information to buy or sell securities could violate the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge, or STOCK, Act. But no cases have ever been brought under the law, and some legal experts have doubts it would hold up to scrutiny from the courts, which in recent years have generally narrowed what constitutes illegal insider trading.

Thousands of government employees are required to file disclosure forms if they sell or buy securities worth more than $1,000. In many cases, the records are available only in person in Washington, D.C., or through a records request. The documents do not include exact amounts bought or sold but instead provide a broad range for the totals of each transaction.

ProPublica examined hundreds of records for trades shortly before major tariff announcements or other key government decisions. Trump, of course, repeatedly said on the campaign trail that he intended to institute dramatic tariffs on foreign imports. But during the first weeks of his term, investors were not panic selling, seeming to assume that his campaign promises were bluster. Several tariff announcements by Trump early on shook the markets, but it wasn’t until he detailed his new tariffs on April 2 that stocks dived.

Among those who sold securities before one of Trump’s main tariff announcements was Tobias Dorsey. Dorsey, a lawyer in the executive branch since the Obama administration, was named acting general counsel for the White House’s Office of Administration in January, when Trump was inaugurated. The division provides a range of services, including research and legal counseling across the president’s staff, including the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which helps craft trade policy. In his LinkedIn bio, Dorsey describes his duties since 2022 as giving “expert advice on a wide range of legal and policy matters to help White House officials achieve their policy goals.”

On Feb. 25 and 26, disclosure records show, Dorsey unloaded shares of an index fund and nine companies, including cleaning products manufacturer Clorox and engineering firm Emerson Electric. The total dollar figure for the sales was between $12,000 and $180,000. (He purchased one stock, defense contractor Palantir, which was selling for a bargain after recently plummeting on news of Pentagon budget cuts.)

At the time of Dorsey’s trades, investors were still largely in denial that Trump was going to go through with the massive tariffs he had promised during the campaign. But the next morning, Trump posted on social media that significant tariffs on Mexico and Canada “will, indeed, go into effect, as scheduled” in several days, and that “China will likewise be charged an additional 10% Tariff on that date.”

The S&P 500, a stock index that tracks a wide swath of the market, fell almost 2% that day alone and ultimately dropped nearly 18% in six weeks.

In an interview, Dorsey said the sale was made by his wife from an account belonging to her. He said she decided to sell around $20,000 worth of shares so they could make tuition payments and that he had no nonpublic information on the impending tariff announcements. The kind of work he does as a career employee, he said, focuses not on public policy, but on how the White House operates, including personnel, workplace technology, contracts and records issues.

“I’m not advising Stephen Miller or Peter Navarro,” he said, referring to top policy advisers to the president. “I’m advising the people running the campus. … I don’t have access to any sensitive political information.”

Another well-timed set of transactions was made by Marshall Stallings, the director of intergovernmental affairs and public engagement for Trump’s Trade Representative. The office helps shape the White House’s trade policy and negotiates trade deals with foreign governments.

On March 25 and 27, Stallings sold between $2,000 and $30,000 of stock in retail giant Target and mining company Freeport-McMoRan. The sales appear to have been an abrupt U-turn. He had purchased the shares less than a week earlier. Days after Stallings’ sales, Trump unveiled his most dramatic tariffs. Target stock fell 17%. Freeport-McMoRan fell 25%.

Stallings and the Trade Representative’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

A longtime State Department official, Stephanie Syptak-Ramnath, who until April was ambassador to Peru, also appeared to make a bet against the stock market. On March 24 and 25, she sold between $255,000 and $650,000 in stocks, and bought between $265,000 and $650,000 in bond and treasury funds (along with $50,000 to $100,000 in stocks). Then, on March 31, two days before Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement, she sold between $15,000 and $50,000 of a broad-based stock fund. When the market started to plummet, she bought back the same dollar range in another stock fund. Syptak-Ramnath said she did not have any information about the administration's decisions beyond what was publicly available. The trades, she said, were “undertaken as a result of family obligations” and in “response to a changing economy.”

A second longtime State Department official, Gautam Rana, who is now ambassador to Slovakia, sold between $830,000 and $1.7 million worth of stock on March 19, a week before Trump declared new tariffs on cars and two weeks before his “Liberation Day” announcement. The shares he sold were largely broad-based index funds. Rana declined to comment for this story.

Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer, said executive branch employees who don’t have nonpublic information and want to trade stock should consult with ethics officials before doing so, thereby allowing an independent third party to assess their actions.

“If you trade and you don’t seek advice in advance, you kind of do it at your own risk, and if you’re asked about it, you have to hope there aren’t factors that make someone question your motivations,” Canter said. “If you seek ethics official advice, you have some cover.”

Executive branch employees are barred from taking government actions that would narrowly benefit them personally, and some are required to sell stock in companies and industries they have purview over in their jobs. But like members of Congress, they are allowed to trade securities.

Since Trump’s tariff announcements and walkbacks began causing fluctuations in the market, questions have been raised about whether anyone has profited off advance notice of the moves. After Trump unexpectedly rolled back some of his tariffs in early April, causing stocks to surge, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned on social media that “any member of Congress who purchased stocks in the last 48 hours should probably disclose that now.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene bought between $21,000 and $315,000 of stock the day before and the day of the announcement. In a statement, Greene said a financial adviser controls her investments: “Since my portfolio manager makes my trades for me, I usually find out about them when the media asks.”

ProPublica’s review of disclosures also found trades by congressional aides that took place before the market tumbled.

Michael Platt, a veteran Republican staffer who served in the Commerce Department during Trump’s first term and now works for the House committee that handles administrative matters for the chamber, restructured his portfolio in March. An account under his wife’s name sold off between $96,000 and $390,000 in mostly American companies, and purchased at least $45,000 in foreign stocks and at least $15,000 in an American and Canadian energy index fund. Some stock forecasters considered international markets a relatively safe haven if Trump went through with his tariffs. Platt did not respond to requests for comment.

Stephanie Trifone, a Senate Judiciary Committee aide, sold stock in mid-March and bought at least $50,000 in treasuries. A spokesperson for the committee’s Democratic minority said Trifone had no nonpublic information about the tariffs and her trades were conducted by a financial adviser without her input. Kevin Wheeler, a staffer for the Senate Appropriations Committee, made a similar move. In late February, he and his spouse offloaded between $18,000 and $270,000 in funds composed almost entirely of stocks and bought between $50,000 and $225,000 in bonds. A spokesperson for the Appropriation Committee’s Republican majority said Wheeler had no nonpublic information about Trump’s tariff plans and that a financial planner made the trades after advising Wheeler to take a more conservative approach with his portfolio.

Another staffer, Ryan White, chief of staff to Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, bought shares worth between $2,000 and $30,000 in two precious metals mining companies two days before Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement. He continued buying more shares in the companies, Hecla Mining and Coeur Mining, in the following days.

Precious metals can be a safe haven during a bear market turn, but those stocks, like the rest of the market, declined after Trump’s tariff announcements.

Two days after White’s last purchase in April of the mining companies’ shares, however, the firms got some good news. A bill White’s boss introduced to make it easier for mining companies like Hecla and Coeur to operate on public lands was approved by a Senate committee, an important step in passing a bill. (White added to his Hecla shares earlier this month and sold his stake in Coeur.)

White told ProPublica that “all required reporting and ethics rules were followed.” Any suggestion that the committee passing the bill played a role in his stock purchases “is a stretch and patently false,” he said, adding that the legislation “has not become law and even if it does, would take decades to have any appreciable impact.”

Update, May 22, 2025: This story has been updated to include a statement from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

by Dana Brozost-Kelleher, Isabelle Senechal and María Inés Zamudio, Invisible Institute

A team of reporters from the nonprofit journalism organizations Invisible Institute and ProPublica have reviewed more than 300 sexual assault and misconduct complaints that were filed over the past decade against Chicago police officers.

But experts say that’s likely an undercount.

We need your help to understand the scope and scale of this issue. We want to talk to people who have experienced sexual misconduct or sexual assault by Chicago police. For this investigation, we defined police sexual misconduct as sexual assault, unwanted, inappropriate touching or comments, and sexual harassment by police officers either on or off duty. Researchers and advocates say sexual misconduct is a “spectrum of behavior.”

This behavior can include but is not limited to:

• A Chicago police officer flirting with someone, including by asking for their phone number for reasons not related to a case or by making other inappropriate comments while on duty
• A Chicago police officer asking someone for sexual favors in exchange for not ticketing or arresting them
• A Chicago police officer sexually assaulting or making unwanted physical contact with someone, including when the officer is off duty

You can share your experience in the form below. Please also get in touch if you are a current or retired Chicago police officer who has information you can share on this issue.

If you prefer to speak with a reporter directly, you can contact the reporting team by calling or texting 312-488-9552. You can also send a message to reporter María Inés Zamudio on Signal, which is more secure, at mizamudio.95.

We appreciate you sharing your story and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering this information for the purposes of our reporting, and we will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.

As journalists, our role is to write about issues. We cannot provide legal advice or other support. However, there are resources available. We know these cases can stem from painful experiences, and support is available if you need it:

• The National Sexual Assault Hotline is available online or by calling 800-656-4673.
• The National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available online or by calling or texting 988.
• The Chicago Rape Crisis Hotline can be reached at 888-293-2080.
• Resilience in Chicago offers support groups, trauma-informed counseling and advocacy support for survivors.
• Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation (CAASE) offers legal advice and can make referrals for survivors.
• The Network offers support for survivors of domestic violence.

Andrew Fan, Maheen Khan, Maira Khwaja and Trina Reynolds-Tyler of Invisible Institute contributed reporting, and Ashley Clarke of ProPublica contributed research.

by María Inés Zamudio and Dana Brozost-Kelleher, Invisible Institute

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Invisible Institute and co-published with the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Alexus Byrd-Maxey had just finished her second month at the Chicago police academy, well on her way to fulfilling her childhood dream.

The South Side native wanted to become a detective so she could bring closure to families who have lost loved ones to homicides by arresting those responsible.

Byrd-Maxey, then 26, was proud of herself for making it this far: completing college classes, applying to the academy multiple times, passing a background check and physical tests. She was delighted to be part of the academy despite the sacrifices it required, including leaving her toddler son most mornings at 5 a.m. and having her mom spend thousands to buy her new uniforms and equipment.

“Actually sitting in those chairs at the academy was very rewarding,” she said.

But on March 17, 2023, an encounter with a fellow recruit derailed that dream. On that day, she was leaning over a classmate’s computer, helping him log on to do their lesson. As another recruit walked behind her, she said she felt his hands on her waist and his body pressed up against her. He was close enough, she told reporters, that she felt “his penis on my butt.”

She recalled that she confronted him immediately — hoping to hear remorse in his voice. Instead, she said, she saw him smirk.

“That’s when I knew,” she said. “You’re not sorry.”

Help Us Report on Sexual Assault and Misconduct by the Chicago Police Department

In the days that followed, Byrd-Maxey wrestled with how to report her fellow recruit, a man named Eric Tabb, or whether to let it go.

At the same time, police department investigative records show, Tabb started telling other recruits that Byrd-Maxey had overreacted and that he had only tapped her on the shoulder so he could get to his seat.

The following week, when Byrd-Maxey reported the incident to her class leader, he talked to fellow recruits and they downplayed the encounter. A recruit who allegedly witnessed the incident and was friends with Tabb later told investigators that Byrd-Maxey was “trying to victimize herself.”

The academy instructor never filed a sexual misconduct complaint. Two and a half weeks later, Byrd-Maxey was fired from the academy for supposedly cursing and using gang language — allegations she has denied. Tabb soon became an officer and began patrolling streets.

But he didn’t last long.

Eight months after Byrd-Maxey was fired, Tabb was arrested for allegedly grabbing a fellow officer’s genitals repeatedly over her uniform after roll call in their police precinct.

That woman, too, had been in the academy with Byrd-Maxey. Two additional female recruits also have said Tabb assaulted them, and witnesses allege yet another was assaulted but did not report it, meaning five of 17 women in his academy class have given similar accounts, investigative files show.

Tabb now faces multiple felony charges, including aggravated criminal sexual abuse.

He has pleaded not guilty, and the criminal case is ongoing. He declined to comment.

Police department records, including interviews and investigative files obtained by the Invisible Institute and ProPublica, together with court records, highlight how police officials failed to intervene while Tabb was at the academy and head off potential harm to other women.

Reporters identified 14 officers who disciplinary records suggest may be repeat offenders, having been accused of sexual assault in the last decade and of at least one other incident of sexual misconduct. Five of those officers faced criminal charges and were convicted, in some cases pleading to a lesser offense that was not a sex crime, and three others have ongoing criminal cases.

In reviewing more than 300 sexual misconduct and assault complaints against Chicago police officers, the Invisible Institute and ProPublica found a pattern of the department failing to vigorously investigate accusations of sexual assault by officers, whether those complaints were lodged by fellow cops or members of the public. The claims were often downplayed or ignored, sometimes allowing officers to abuse again and again.

A 2017 U.S. Department of Justice investigation into Chicago police found officers frequently minimized the seriousness of sexual misconduct accusations against colleagues and didn’t employ best-practice investigative techniques. Police, the investigation found, closed cases without conducting full investigations.

Police spokesperson Don Terry declined requests for an interview but said in a statement that the department “takes all allegations of sexual assault seriously, including allegations against CPD members.” He said the department has “zero tolerance for sexual misconduct and any member in violation will be held accountable.”

He also said the department works with victim advocacy groups “to assist in the appropriate reporting of sexual assault allegations against department members in a way that eliminates barriers to reporting and provides support services to the survivors.”

That Tabb allegedly assaulted women while training to become a police officer is particularly troubling. The police academy is where aspiring officers learn the department’s culture. Recruits get their first lessons in how officers should behave in uniform — and out of it. They also have fewer job protections while undergoing their academy training, so they can be easily dismissed if they break the rules. Four other academy recruits have filed sexual misconduct or harassment complaints in the last four years. Records show three of the complaints ended in no discipline for the accused officer and one is still ongoing.

“I think of it as behavior that you’re sort of taught in the first few years on the job, starting with your field training officer, what you can get away with,” said Philip Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University who has done extensive research on police misconduct and created a national database of officer arrests. “They learn that it’s accepted behavior within that culture, within that squad, or that shift, quite often. And I do think that it’s behaviors that escalate.”

In June 2023, a little over two months after Byrd-Maxey was kicked out of the academy, the department implemented its first sexual misconduct policy, one it had been working on before she began her training.

Former Chicago police Officer Eric Tabb walks out of a Chicago courthouse after a hearing. He faces multiple charges, including aggravated criminal sexual abuse. (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica) A Pattern of Missed Opportunities

The Chicago Police Department has a long history of failing to identify and deal with patterns of troubling behavior within its ranks.

Officers who stole from suspects were able to do so repeatedly before getting caught. Detectives who coerced confessions, sending innocent people to prison and costing the city tens of millions of dollars in legal settlements, did so without ever being disciplined. And some cops who abused and tortured Chicagoans did so for years before they were stopped.

This failure of the department to police its own officers has also had devastating consequences for people who have accused officers of sexual assault or harassment.

In 2019, then-Superintendent Eddie Johnson praised the department’s internal investigation of 13-year police veteran Officer Corey Deanes, who had been accused of sexual misconduct by four women. He called it a “testament to our ability to police ourselves.”

But what Johnson didn’t mention was that the department allowed Deanes to police the city’s streets for nearly a year despite two allegations of sexual misconduct. It took the city’s civilian police oversight agency to identify his behavior and stop him.

Deanes was suspended for seven days in 2011 for sexually harassing a woman during a traffic stop. He insisted on getting her phone number, then called or texted nearly 30 times. He told investigators he had no official reason to pull the woman over but did so because he wanted to talk to her.

Six years later, in August 2017, he again was accused of abusing his position while pulling over a 23-year-old woman during a traffic stop. Deanes, according to internal affairs records, made inappropriate comments to her and threatened to write the woman a ticket if she did not give him her phone number. Then Deanes allegedly hugged her and, though she resisted, touched her buttocks before leaving without giving her a ticket.

The woman reported the incident to the Chicago police and to the Independent Police Review Authority, the civilian oversight agency at the time. Police records and a lawsuit brought by the woman indicate it took police investigators more than a year to interview her, and the department lost an opportunity to get Deanes off the streets. The city settled the woman’s lawsuit for $100,000.

In July 2018, another Chicago woman reported Deanes. She had called 911 for help after arriving home late at night and finding a stranger on her porch. Deanes, who responded to the call, allegedly asked her personal questions, commented on her body and touched her inappropriately, according to internal affairs records.

“I felt so violated,” the woman, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, told Invisible Institute and ProPublica. “I called you for help and I got harassed. That is not OK.”

The woman reported the incident to the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, the latest iteration of the review board. Launched in 2017 as part of a wider series of reforms, COPA and its new leaders hoped to bring an additional focus to investigating claims of domestic violence and sexual assault committed by officers.

Yet another woman filed a complaint against Deanes two weeks after the incident with the 911 call. This time, COPA identified a pattern. Andrea Kersten, then COPA’s head of investigations, notified the police department’s Bureau of Internal Affairs about the three incidents and pushed for a criminal investigation.

Deanes was arrested in May 2019 and charged with two misdemeanor counts of battery, one felony count of aggravated battery, and three felony counts of official misconduct for the three separate incidents. He pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of misdemeanor battery in 2020 and received two years probation. He was stripped of his Illinois state certification, preventing him from working as a cop.

A letter from the Chicago Police Department’s Bureau of Internal Affairs outlining the allegations against then-Officer Corey Deanes and suggesting his case be closed after he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery in 2020. (Obtained by Invisible Institute. ProPublica redacted identifying information for the sending, receiving and approving officers; other redactions original.)

The woman who encountered Deanes after the 911 call said she’s disappointed that it took so long for the department to take action. “Police will have each other’s backs no matter what heinous things they do,” she said.

Deanes declined to comment for this story.

COPA has taken steps to improve its handling of sexual misconduct cases to identify officers who repeatedly engage in misconduct. Under Kersten’s leadership, the agency created a Special Victims Squad of trained investigators in 2019 to pursue these cases, including those with limited evidence beyond the accuser’s word. COPA also entered into an agreement that allowed other agencies to conduct joint interviews with victims to enhance collaboration and to reduce the risk of retraumatizing victims by limiting retellings of their assault.

Kersten stepped down as the head of COPA in February after facing a possible no-confidence vote from an oversight board and ongoing lawsuits against Kersten and COPA. A lawsuit filed by the Fraternal Order of Police, the union representing Chicago police officers, alleged that COPA and Kersten have exhibited an anti-police bias that unfairly affects investigations and how officers are disciplined. A federal judge dismissed the suit in April.

Kersten declined to comment for this story, but in her resignation letter she disputed the claims against her. COPA’s interim chief administrator said the agency remains committed to pursuing investigations of sexual misconduct.

“We are working on growing our SVS section to a fuller unit with more staff who will receive specialized training to handle these investigations,” the administrator, LaKenya White, said in a statement.

While COPA participated in the investigation into Byrd-Maxey’s claims, internal affairs led the criminal investigation into the matter.

The Chicago Police Education and Training Academy (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica) “I’m Not Going Nowhere.”

Last fall, Alexus Byrd-Maxey had come to accept what she called God’s will — that she would not become a Chicago police officer.

Since being fired from the academy, she had struggled with depression and anxiety as she tried to rebuild her life. She went back to work as a waitress at a North Side restaurant. Yet every time she saw her police uniforms hanging in her closet, she grieved a life she would never have.

“I feel like I was stripped away from it,” she said.

She thought she was doing the right thing in reporting Tabb, whether he was disciplined or not.

Byrd-Maxey’s police equipment and uniform from her time as a police recruit (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica)

It wasn’t long after Byrd-Maxey tried to alert the academy about Tabb that a second incident occurred. At the end of August 2023, Tabb attended a birthday celebration at a Wrigleyville bar with other recruits. He joined a female recruit on the dance floor and, according to investigative reports and court records, touched her breast, buttock and crotch over her clothes and also grabbed her face and tried to kiss her. He was so aggressive, a witness told investigators, that a mutual friend had to intervene to get him away from the recruit.

A few days later, according to investigative files and court records, Tabb attended a “star party,” an unofficial celebration for graduating recruits receiving their badge number. Another recruit told investigators he saw Tabb grabbing a third female recruit’s genitals over her clothes. The recruit’s boyfriend confronted Tabb, according to a witness. That same night, Tabb touched a fourth recruit’s buttocks, according to interviews with police investigators and court records.

In the immediate aftermath, the three women said nothing, and soon Tabb was officially on the force.

After about three months, a fifth female officer accused Tabb of touching her crotch over her uniform several times when she stood up after roll call to adjust her duty belt.

The woman went to her supervisor despite her fears. “I was afraid that any type of confrontation or anything would not work out for me,” she later told investigators. “I felt powerless,” the woman said, crying.

She said Tabb grabbed her crotch a second time.

“He sat back in his chair and he had a slight smile on his face with his hand up to his chin,” she said in a recorded interview with investigators. “It looked to me like, I don’t know, like he was proud of what he did.”

During the investigation into that incident, officials uncovered the allegations against Tabb that involved his off-duty behavior toward recruits. Two of the three recruits stepped forward to report Tabb’s behavior because they said they wanted to support the final alleged victim.

An internal affairs report outlining the investigation into Tabb’s first alleged assault. (Obtained by Invisible Institute. ProPublica redacted identifying information for the sending and receiving officers and those who reported and received reports of the incident; other redactions original.)

Even though Byrd-Maxey had been the first to report his behavior, no one contacted her for 15 months about the criminal case against Tabb. When she learned about it, she decided to attend his next court hearing.

On a Tuesday morning in March, Byrd-Maxey entered the busy Cook County criminal courthouse with her mom, Jauntaunne Byrd-Horne. They walked past the black Doric columns and the tall golden lamps on their way to a courtroom, where a hearing was scheduled in Tabb’s case. For the first time in nearly two years, she was going to see him.

Her mom made herself a T-shirt to ensure her daughter’s pain was acknowledged. In bold white letters against a black background, the front of the shirt read: “What about Tabb’s first police academy victim 03/17/2023?”

Byrd-Maxey and her mother sat in the courtroom’s first row. A few minutes later, Tabb arrived with his parents and sat behind them.

At issue was a request from prosecutors asking to have the additional allegations related to off-duty incidents considered as evidence of a pattern of behavior: similar victims, similar assaults. Dan Herbert, Tabb’s defense attorney, said his client was innocent. He tried to blame Byrd-Maxey for the claims involving all the off-duty recruits, implying she had a grudge against Tabb.

Byrd-Horne, left, and Byrd-Maxey stand outside the George N. Leighton Criminal Courthouse after a March hearing in the case of former police Officer Eric Tabb. (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica)

Records show that before she was fired, Byrd-Maxey tried to report Tabb multiple times. She talked to her class leader — a fellow recruit who is put in a leadership position — on the Monday following the Friday incident. Records show the class leader discussed the incident with superiors and placed more emphasis on Tabb’s version, which was supported by other recruits. No one filed an official complaint.

Almost three weeks later, conflict erupted in class. Byrd-Maxey claimed Tabb verbally attacked her, and Tabb accused her of doing the same, records show. After class, Byrd-Maxey said, she went to her instructor to tell him about the incident in the computer lab.

Byrd-Maxey was fired the next day, accused of saying “shut your bitch ass up” in class and using gang-related language. Though their names were redacted, investigative files show seven recruits, including Tabb, filed complaints against Byrd-Maxey for engaging in this behavior. She denies the allegations.

The next day, Byrd-Maxey returned to the police academy to file the sexual misconduct complaint herself. She also accused two instructors of wrongful termination. During that investigation, several recruits sided with Tabb, including three who told investigators they were in the computer lab at the time.

By the time internal affairs cleared Tabb of Byrd-Maxey’s complaint on Sept. 20, 2023, he had allegedly assaulted three other women from his academy class.

During the court hearing, Tabb’s attorney attacked the credibility of those officers for not reporting the alleged abuse the moment it happened.

“They’re police officers. They have a duty to report misconduct,” Herbert said. “And they’re probationary police officers, which as the court well knows, they can be fired for any reason, unless it’s an illegal reason. They can be fired for not reporting misconduct. I think that’s what happened in this case.”

After the hearing, Byrd-Maxey spotted Tabb in the courthouse lobby. She locked eyes with him as their paths crossed.

“I’m here. I’m not going nowhere,” she said afterward.

Byrd-Maxey and her mother embraced outside the courthouse, an acknowledgment of the toll reporting Tabb had taken on them both.

Yet she doesn’t regret it.

“I wouldn’t change anything, even though it cost me mentally and financially,” she said. “I wouldn’t change it because, at the end of the day, I had the right motive to be heard and to avoid this from happening again.”

Methodology

Invisible Institute reporters spent over a year identifying allegations of sexual assault and sexual misconduct by Chicago police officers, then created a database from those allegations. We reviewed hundreds of complaints obtained through public records requests and a lawsuit.

Reporters obtained investigative files from the Chicago Police Department’s Bureau of Internal Affairs, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, and its predecessor agency, the Independent Police Review Authority. Reporters read the original investigative files, examined evidence and reviewed lawsuits, court records and media accounts.

The Invisible Institute and ProPublica compiled a dataset of more than 300 complaints after excluding dozens of cases where body camera footage contradicted the allegation, where non-police witnesses affirmed the police account, or where a secondhand allegation was not corroborated.

This investigation would not be possible without previous litigation that pushed for disciplinary records to be open to the public despite resistance from the city. Those lawsuits include Bond v. Utreras, Green v. Chicago Police Department and Kalven v. Chicago, which was brought by Jamie Kalven, founder of the Invisible Institute, and led to the publication of police misconduct complaints on the Civic Police Data Project site.

This story was published with the support of a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.

Andrew Fan, Maheen Khan and Isabelle Senechal of the Invisible Institute contributed reporting and data analysis. Mariam Elba of ProPublica contributed research and Agnel Philip of ProPublica contributed data analysis.

by Jennifer Berry Hawes and Mollie Simon, with additional reporting by Cassandra Garibay

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

When Hurricane Helene plowed over the Southeast last September, it caused more inland deaths than any hurricane in recorded history. The highest per capita death toll occurred in Yancey County, a rural expanse in the rugged Black Mountains of North Carolina devastated by flash flooding and landslides.

On Monday, we published a story recounting what happened in Yancey. Our intent was to show, through those horrific events, how highly accurate weather warnings did not reach many of those most in harm’s way — and that inland communities are not nearly as prepared for catastrophic storms as coastal ones. No one in Yancey received evacuation orders — and many, including those living in high-risk areas and caring for young children and frail older people, didn’t flee because they didn’t see clearer signs of urgency from the county.

Much has been written about Helene, but very little focused on evacuation orders. During four months of reporting, we found that the responses of local officials across western North Carolina’s mountain counties differed a great deal. We also found that the state lags behind others in terms of what it requires of its county-level emergency managers and that legislators paused for almost a decade an effort to map landslide hazards in the counties that were hardest hit by Helene.

Here are five key discoveries from our reporting:

1. Some counties in harm’s way issued evacuation orders. Others did not.

To determine which cities and counties communicated evacuation orders, we reviewed more than 500 social media posts and other types of messaging that more than three dozen North Carolina jurisdictions shared with their residents in the lead-up to the storm. We compared that with a letter Gov. Roy Cooper sent to then-President Joe Biden seeking expedited disaster relief.

We found that by nightfall on Sept. 26, the day before Helene hit, three counties near Yancey issued mandatory evacuations, targeted toward people living close to specific dams and rivers, and at least five counties issued voluntary evacuation orders.

McDowell County, just southeast of Yancey, took particularly robust actions to warn residents about the storm, including issuing both mandatory and voluntary evacuation orders in enough time for people to leave. Henderson County, southwest of Yancey, targeted a voluntary evacuation order at residents living in floodplains that have a 1 in 500 chance of flooding annually, and its directions were clear: “The time is now for residents to self-evacuate.”

Get in Touch

We are continuing to report on the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, and we want to know: Is there one thing the storm destroyed that you would have saved had you evacuated? To share, leave us a voicemail at 828-201-2738.

Yancey and at least four other nearby counties also did not issue evacuation orders. Yancey’s emergency manager, Jeff Howell, told us he doubted the county commissioners would support issuing orders or that local residents would heed them given the area’s culture of self-reliance and disdain for government mandates, especially regarding property rights. But some Yancey residents said they would have left or at least prepared better.

Although local officials received repeated warnings — including one that said the storm would be among the worst weather events “in the modern era” — some argued that they couldn’t have done more to prepare because the storm’s ferocity was so unprecedented.

We found that inland mountain communities too often lack the infrastructure or planning to use evacuations to get residents out of harm’s way in advance of a destructive storm like Helene. Some officials in Yancey, for instance, said that they weren’t sure where they would have directed people to go in the face of such an unprecedented onslaught of rain and wind.

In recent years, far more people died in the continental U.S. from hurricanes’ freshwater flooding than from their coastal storm surges — a dramatic reversal from a decade earlier. That’s largely due to improved evacuations along the coasts.

Several Eastern states — including Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia — have adopted plans called Know Your Zone to execute targeted evacuations when storms approach. But these plans don’t often extend very far inland, even though warming ocean temperatures create stronger storms. Powerful storms that are not hurricanes can also turn deadly. In February, storms killed at least 24 people in Kentucky. More have died since in other storms.

2. Disaster messaging varied considerably by county.

To understand how local officials communicated disaster warnings to their residents, we compiled a timeline of alerts and warnings sent out by the National Weather Service and then scoured contemporaneous social media posts that more than three dozen jurisdictions were sharing with their residents. We found big disparities.

For instance, in addition to issuing evacuation orders, McDowell County put out flyers in English and Spanish that warned of life-threatening flash floods and urged all people in vulnerable areas to “evacuate as soon as possible.” Many did.

And about 36 hours before Helene hit, Haywood County’s sheriff warned in a brief video message that a “catastrophic, life-threatening event is about to befall” the county, which has one of the larger populations in western North Carolina. The emergency services director, standing beside him, emphasized: “This message is urgent.” The sheriff then asked residents, starting that night, to “make plans or preparations to leave low-lying areas or areas that are threatened by flooding.” He ended with: “Please, seek safety — and do so now.”

Almost an entire day later, with Helene closing in, officials in rural Yancey were among those who used less-direct wording. In Facebook posts, they asked residents to “please prepare to move to higher ground as soon as you are able” and advised “now is the time to make plans” to go elsewhere as the final hours to leave before nightfall wound down. In one post, they softened the message, adding, “This information is not to frighten anyone.”

ProPublica interviewed dozens of survivors in Yancey, including many who told us that in retrospect they were looking for clearer directives from their leaders.

3. Unlike several nearby states, North Carolina does not require training for local emergency managers.

At the heart of evacuations are emergency managers, the often little-known public officials tasked with preparing their areas for potential disasters. Yet, education and training requirements for these posts vary considerably by state and community.

Get in Touch

We plan to continue reporting on Helene’s aftermath to understand what lessons could better prepare communities and local emergency managers for future storms, as well as how the rebuilding effort is unfolding. If you are a Helene survivor or a North Carolina emergency responder and would like to share tips with us, please email helenetips@propublica.org.

Yancey’s emergency manager had taken the job seven years before Helene hit after a long and robust Army career. He had no emergency management experience, however. In the years before Helene, he had been asking the county for more help — but by the time the storm arrived, it was still only him and a part-time employee.

Florida recently enacted a law mandating minimum training, experience and education for its counties’ emergency managers starting in 2026. Georgia requires its emergency managers to get the state’s emergency management certification within six months. But North Carolina doesn’t require any specific training for its local emergency managers.

4. North Carolina began examining landslide risks by county, but powerful interests stood in the way.

More than 20 years ago, North Carolina legislators passed a law requiring that landslide hazards be mapped across 19 mountain counties. They did so after two hurricanes drenched the mountains, dumping more than 27 inches of rain that caused at least 85 landslides and multiple deaths.

But a few years later, after only four of those counties were mapped, a majority of largely Republican lawmakers gave in to real estate agents and developers who said the work could harm property values and curb growth. They halted the program, cutting the funding and laying off the six geologists at work on it.

Almost a decade later, in 2018, lawmakers jump-started the program after still more landslide deaths. But it takes at least a year to map one county, so by the time Helene hit, Yancey and four others in the storm’s path of destruction weren’t yet mapped.

Without this detailed hazard mapping, emergency managers and residents in those areas lacked the detailed assessment of risk to specific areas to make plans before landslides clawed down the mountains, killing far more people. The U.S. Geological Survey has so far identified 2,015 Helene-induced landslides across western North Carolina.

The geologists back at work on the project are almost done mapping McDowell County. They would have finished it last year, but Helene derailed their work for a time.

5. We could find no comprehensive effort (yet) to examine lessons learned from Helene to determine how counties can prevent deaths from future inland storms.

Helene left many lessons to be learned among inland communities in the paths of increasingly virulent storms. But as North Carolina figures out how to direct millions of dollars in rebuilding aid, there has so far been no state inquiry into the preparedness of local areas — or what could better equip them for the next unprecedented storm.

Yancey County’s board chair said that he expects the county will do so later, but for now its officials are focused on rebuilding efforts.

A review commissioned by North Carolina Emergency Management examined its own actions and how its staff interacted with local officials. It found the agency severely understaffed. But it didn’t examine such preparedness issues as planning for evacuations or the training requirements for local emergency managers.