ProPublica

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.

When Belle got a call last September that her 10-year-old had been sent to the vice principal’s office, she rushed over to the school. Her son Lee looked on anxiously as the vice principal explained the situation: The fifth grader had angrily pointed his finger in the shape of a gun.

Belle scolded him for not thinking before he acted, agreeing with administrators at the East Tennessee public elementary school who felt that he had misbehaved.

While Lee sat at home for a few days serving a suspension, the principal called Belle. The school had conducted an investigation and determined that Lee would be kicked out for an entire calendar year. “I regret that it has come to this,” the principal wrote in a subsequent letter, which Belle provided to ProPublica. (At Belle’s request, ProPublica is identifying her and her son only by their middle names and leaving out the name of the district and school to prevent her child from being identifiable.) In the letter, the principal added that the district and the state of Tennessee “take such threats very seriously.”

Belle was horrified. Lee had never even been sent to school detention before. His grades sometimes flagged, but he had been working hard to improve them. The family didn’t own a gun and Lee would have no idea where to get one. Belle recalls the principal saying on the phone that she knew Lee was a good kid. His punishment, Belle thought, seemed like an extreme overreaction.

The assistant director of schools declined ProPublica’s request for comment, even though Belle signed a form giving school officials permission to speak about Lee’s case.

The principal’s action was the result of a new state law that had gone into effect just months earlier, heightening penalties for students who make threats at school. Passed after a former student shot and killed six people at The Covenant School in Nashville, the law requires students to be expelled for at least a year if they threaten mass violence on school property, making it a zero-tolerance offense.

Tennessee lawmakers claimed that ramping up punishments for threats would help prevent serious acts of violence. “What we’re really doing is sending a message that says ‘Hey, this is not a joke, this is not a joking matter, so don’t do this,’” state Sen. Jon Lundberg, a co-sponsor of the legislation, told a Chattanooga news station a week and a half after the law went into effect.

Over the last couple of years, Tennessee and several other states have been making it easier for schools to suspend or expel students. But study after study has shown that harsh disciplinary practices such as mandatory expulsions are ineffective at reducing violence in schools. What’s more, research shows that such practices often lead to Black students and students with disabilities being disproportionately suspended and expelled, making them more likely to end up in the criminal justice system.

Tennessee school officials have used the law to expel students for mildly disruptive behavior, according to advocates and lawyers across the state who spoke with ProPublica. (In Tennessee and a number of other states, expulsions aren’t necessarily permanent.) Some students have been expelled even when officials themselves determined that the threat was not credible. Lawmakers did put a new fix in place in May that limits expulsions to students who make “valid” threats of mass violence. But that still leaves it up to administrators to determine which threats are valid.

In some cases last school year, administrators handed off the responsibility of dealing with minor incidents to law enforcement. As a result, the type of misbehavior that would normally result in a scolding or brief suspension has led to children being not just expelled but also arrested, charged and placed in juvenile detention, according to juvenile defense lawyers and a recent lawsuit.

While they are expelled, some students have found it hard to get any kind of education. Tennessee allows school districts to decline to enroll students who have been suspended or expelled in another district. Some children expelled for making threats, like Lee, end up staying at home and muddling through online programs alone — or getting no education at all.

Lee’s mom worried that her son’s minor mistake could derail his future. “He’s kind of turned into a little bit of a recluse,” she said. “He doesn’t want to go back to school at all.”

Students like Lee who’ve been disciplined for making threats may have trouble finding another school they can attend. (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)

When he started fifth grade last fall, Lee was a new kid at his elementary school. His family had recently moved to the area from Middle Tennessee. Normally outgoing and sociable, he had a hard time making friends. In the second month of the school year, a girl in Lee’s class asked him if he had been vaccinated for COVID-19, Lee’s mom said. Lee told her he wasn’t sure. The following week, as students walked outside for recess, Lee realized his classmates were avoiding him and he had no one to play with, according to his mother. She said he assumed that the girl had spread a rumor that he hadn’t been vaccinated and discouraged others from talking with him.

As the fifth graders filed back into the school at the end of recess, Lee expressed his frustration to a classmate, Belle told ProPublica. Her son told her that he said, “I’m so angry, I could just —” and then folded his hand into a gun shape and mimicked a machine gun’s staccato. According to Belle, the classmate reported what Lee had said to a teacher, who told school administrators.

The principal’s letter, which offers scant details of the incident, gave Belle the option to appeal the expulsion, but Belle instead decided to homeschool Lee. She worried that teachers and other students at the school would consider Lee a bad kid, especially given the pervasive fear in the months after the Nashville school shooting. “I was like, ‘These people are going to totally overreact about this,’” she said. “There’s no way that they would be able to treat him fairly after this.”

Get in Touch

Do you have a tip about how officials in education, law enforcement or the courts are handling threats of mass violence in Tennessee schools? Contact reporter Aliyya Swaby at aliyya.swaby@propublica.org. She can also be reached by text or securely on Signal at 404-981-1190. If you’re concerned about confidentiality, check out our advice on the most secure ways to share tips.

Months later, when her concern for her son’s struggles with learning from home made her even angrier about the school’s actions, she consulted a lawyer. But the window to appeal had long passed, and the lawyer told her that the law seemed to allow the school’s actions. “There’s really no point in fighting this,” Belle recalled thinking.

Tennessee makes it difficult to determine how many students have been expelled for threats of mass violence; the state does not collect data on the reasons for expulsions. It asks school districts to inform the state of all incidents related to threats of mass violence, but some districts have reported accidentally sending inaccurate data.

ProPublica requested the number of expulsions for threats of mass violence from the state’s 20 largest school districts as well as five other smaller school districts where we received tips about specific cases. Ten school districts provided those numbers, reporting a total 66 expulsions last school year. Tennessee has nearly 150 school districts.

Several districts provided data showing they expelled students for making threats more often once the law was on the books. For example, Metro Nashville Public Schools reported 42 expulsions for making any type of threat in the 2023-2024 school year, including 16 threats of mass violence. The prior school year, before the law existed, the district expelled 22 students for making any type of threats, despite investigating roughly the same number of incidents. A spokesperson for Metro Nashville Public Schools attributed the increase to the creation of the zero-tolerance law, along with the seriousness of the offenses and “heightened sensitivity and awareness following the Covenant shooting.”

South of Nashville, Rutherford County Schools reported 33 expulsions for making threats last school year, including 27 expulsions specifically for threats of mass violence. The previous school year, it reported just six expulsions for any type of threat, despite investigating a larger number of incidents. When ProPublica asked officials to explain why the number had gone up so significantly, a spokesperson cited a change in state law “that required expulsions for mass threats.”

State law leaves it up to the school districts to decide whether students who have committed a zero-tolerance offense are required to attend alternative school while they are expelled. Some districts, like Metro Nashville, require it, while others, like Rutherford County, do not in most cases. Alternative schools in Tennessee primarily serve students with disciplinary issues who have been suspended or expelled from their traditional schools.

Several school districts told ProPublica that students who make threats of mass violence may be sent to alternative schools without officially being expelled. This past school year, Anderson County Schools, northwest of Knoxville, sent 17 students to its alternative school or offered them virtual education options. Robertson County Schools, just outside of Nashville, sent four students — two 8-year-olds, a 7-year-old and one 6-year-old — to the local alternative school. The 7-year-old and one of the 8-year-olds were removed from their regular schools for an entire calendar year.

A lawsuit filed in May on behalf of two families with children in Williamson County Schools, a suburban Nashville district, illuminates the way some officials hastily removed students from school in response to the new law. The lawsuit was first reported by Tennessee Lookout. It describes how a 14-year-old student was arrested, held in juvenile detention and kept out of school for weeks last August — and alleges that it all stemmed from an unsubstantiated rumor that he had joked about shooting up the school. The complaint said the middle schooler had been talking about another student who he heard bragging about the number of guns his grandfather owned.

The student was sent to the local alternative school, located in the juvenile justice center, where he received a “significantly inferior” education to that offered by his regular school, according to the lawsuit. He sat in a classroom trying to teach himself on a Chromebook while a teacher went over different material with other students in the room.

At first, the school principal told the family that the law required the school to suspend the 14-year-old for a full year. The family appealed the discipline at the school level. When the school denied the appeal, the family then went to the district superintendent. Under the law, only a superintendent can reduce the punishment of a student who makes a threat of mass violence. About a month after the student was suspended, the superintendent allowed him to return to school, saying he had served “an appropriate amount of time” at the alternative school.

After the teenager returned, the principal allegedly told him he never thought of him as a threat and that his suspension was a result of the zero-tolerance law. “You can blame Governor Bill Lee,” the principal told the family, according to the lawsuit.

The Williamson County school board filed a motion in August to dismiss the lawsuit, stating that the students “received all the process they were due under the law.” The 14-year-old was notified of the charges against him and given chances to defend himself, the board wrote in a separate filing, and “the process he was provided worked in his favor by significantly reducing his suspension.”

The school board also said in the filing that threats “made in jest” disrupt students’ learning and strike fear into parents, staff and other students, especially in the aftermath of recent school shootings. “While both threats may not have been serious,” the board wrote, “they nevertheless warranted punishment.”

The board also argued in the filing that school officials had to punish the students to the full extent of the law, noting that its policy “required that Plaintiffs be punished as zero-tolerance offenders regardless of the threat level because they made threats of mass violence.”

The school district did not respond to questions or to requests for its total number of suspensions or expulsions for threats of mass violence.

Tennessee has put in place a safeguard to prevent students from receiving overly harsh punishments for inconsequential threats.

Threat assessments — which bring together school officials and police officers to determine whether students pose a real danger to others — provide context before school officials finalize discipline. They also can help determine whether students need other resources, such as mental health services. Some Tennessee districts have been carrying out threat assessments for more than a decade, but the state only required all school districts to use them starting in 2023. A new state law that went into effect in May clarified that a threat assessment had to be complete and determine a threat was valid before school officials can proceed with expulsion.

But according to parents and juvenile defense lawyers who spoke with ProPublica, school officials often carry out threat assessments inconsistently, with districts using varying definitions for what makes a threat valid or credible. And some officials allow law enforcement to take the lead in incidents that would otherwise be handled at the school level.

“It just essentially delegates all of what should be handled as a relatively minor matter in the school,” said Larry Crain, the lawyer representing the families in the lawsuit against Williamson County’s school board. (A third family recently joined the lawsuit, which also now names the local district attorney as a defendant.) “There’s an almost automatic reaction to anything of this nature that’s referred to law enforcement, which is horrible for the child.”

The lawsuit states that school officials let law enforcement take charge of investigating the 14-year-old’s comments during the threat assessment process. After police arrested the teenager and took him into custody, the principal told parents there was nothing he could do, the lawsuit says.

In its legal response, Williamson County’s school board said state law “compelled” school administrators to report the “threat-related speech” to law enforcement and does not allow any discretion on that matter.

The district attorney for the 21st Judicial District did not respond to a request for comment.

The tenor of a disciplinary investigation or threat assessment often becomes more serious once law enforcement gets involved, lawyers and advocates told ProPublica. A recent analysis by the Government Accountability Office found that arrest rates more than doubled in schools with police compared to those without and that arrests were more common when police were involved in student discipline.

Cashauna Lattimore, an assistant public defender in East Tennessee, has represented several students in cases involving threats of mass violence over the last few years. All of them, she said, were expelled, and most were arrested.

Lattimore described the alleged details of one incident from last school year: In the Jefferson County School District, a high school student who was known as a class clown made an offhand joke about committing an act of violence. Rumors spread among the students about his comment, warping it in the process. He was called to the principal’s office, where a waiting police officer asked whether he had a gun in his backpack. He showed them that he didn’t and insisted that he had just been making a joke, encouraging them to search his house if they didn’t believe him. Law enforcement did not send anyone to his home. School officials initiated a threat assessment and gathered statements from the students who heard the joke, which were then used as evidence against him. He was expelled for a year.

The school’s investigation was not intended to protect the student from unfair discipline, Lattimore said. “That was to make their case against this young man. It was not to determine whether or not the threat was real.”

According to data that the Jefferson County School District provided to ProPublica, just two students were expelled for making threats last school year, even though in both cases the threats were labeled as “transient,” which the district describes as having “no sustained intent to harm.” In both cases, according to the district’s data, the students were also charged in juvenile court. Conversely, several students made what the district considered to be “substantive” threats, but none were charged or expelled.

School officials declined to answer questions from ProPublica about the disparities that the data revealed or the case Lattimore described.

Lattimore said schools should help keep students who don’t pose a threat from being arrested instead of referring the incidents to law enforcement. “They’re taking the easy way out so that they as the educational entity don’t have to deal with it,” she said. “Because once law enforcement gets involved, they can just expel the kid and wash their hands of it.”

After a student is disciplined for making a threat of mass violence, no matter the specifics of the incident, the punishment can function like a scarlet letter.

The 14-year-old boy whose family sued Williamson County Schools has transformed from a top student into a disengaged one, according to the lawsuit. He has struggled to make up assignments he missed during the weekslong appeals process. Once he returned, he noticed classmates gossipping behind his back, saying they were scared of him and falsely calling him a drug dealer. “He suffered a severe and serious emotional injury and was unable to adequately cope with the mental stress engendered by the circumstances of his case,” the lawsuit says.

Lee, who turned 11 during his expulsion, also struggled to adjust. Instead of sitting in a classroom in front of his teacher, he spent the rest of the school year and summer with his mother in her small home office, using an online program to finish fifth grade. He complained to Belle when her phone calls to her boss and colleagues distracted him from his lessons.

Lee struggled to finish the fifth grade online during his expulsion.

In some ways, Belle has watched her son drift backward, becoming less able to emotionally regulate without the structure of a school day or the opportunity to regularly socialize with kids his own age. Just before the expulsion, he had finally caught up to grade level in math after falling behind during pandemic remote learning. But while learning from home, he howled in frustration when he couldn’t understand a math problem. Belle took time to help him with his lessons, which sometimes meant relearning the subject herself — and falling behind on her own work. She sent him up to his room to play video games to give him a mental break between assignments. “It is pulling teeth every single day,” Belle said.

In late July, after school administrators declined to comment to ProPublica on Lee’s case, Belle emailed the director of schools and asked her to shorten the expulsion. Belle hoped he could start his first year of middle school on day one rather than weeks later. The director of schools responded that he could start middle school immediately. “Before any expulsion was put into place,” the email stated, “you chose to remove him … and homeschool him. Therefore, the expulsion was never activated.” (The original letter Belle received was clear about Lee’s expulsion, and a follow-up two days later explained that Lee was barred from re-enrolling regardless of whether he was withdrawn to be homeschooled. District officials did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the expulsion not being activated.)

Belle was overwhelmed by a mix of confusion, relief and apprehension at the news that her son would be returning to school. She wrote a long email to all of Lee’s teachers introducing herself and explaining that he might need a bit of extra help filling gaps in his knowledge after months of homeschooling. “I will do what I can to get him in a good place,” she wrote.

But Belle still worries that her son will struggle in school or make another mistake. She wonders if she should quit her job so she can homeschool him full time. It’s not an easy choice, but she wants to protect him from what might happen at school.

Paige Pfleger of WPLN contributed reporting.

by Jessica Priest

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

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

In 2004, a public junior college in North Texas abandoned plans to lease some of its land to a religious organization for $1 a month after the state attorney general warned that the effort could violate the law.

Nearly two decades later, the college went further. After publicly posting only that Weatherford College’s board would meet to discuss property, members emerged from behind closed doors in November 2022 and voted unanimously to give a 38-acre property to Community Christian School. The property was valued at more than $2 million, according to the county’s appraisal district.

“Faith and patience is the path,” Dan Curlee, then the college’s attorney, wrote in an email after the vote to Doug Jefferson, the administrator of the private religious school.

Jefferson, who had asked the college to donate its workforce development center in Mineral Wells, about 50 miles west of Fort Worth, replied: “Praise God. He has walked with me every step of the way on this miracle for our school. So appreciate you,” according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

About two years later, the property sits empty as Community Christian School raises the funds needed to make repairs that Jefferson estimates will cost $1.2 million. The donation also raises questions about government oversight at a time when state and local officials are increasingly blurring the lines between church and state, experts said.

Legal experts say the donation appears to have violated multiple state and federal laws, including a provision in the Texas Constitution that prohibits political subdivisions, including public junior colleges, from granting anything of value to aid an individual, association or corporation without return benefit. They also pointed to another provision in state law that prohibits public junior colleges from conveying, selling or exchanging their land for less than fair market value unless the land goes to an abutting property owner.

In 2004, then-state Attorney General Greg Abbott, now the governor, cited that provision when Weatherford College had planned to lease half an acre of land to the Wesley Foundation, a United Methodist campus ministry that planned to build a student center with a nondenominational chapel and church administrative offices. Abbott’s opinion said Texas law required the college to charge fair market value when selling or leasing land and to maintain control over the property, which the public school system had not done.

Retired Baylor University law professor Ron Beal said the same tenets apply to the more recent transaction. Had the college simply looked back on Abbott’s 2004 opinion, it would have known better, he said. “The junior college is absolutely prohibited from doing what they did,” he said. “It was a pure gratuitous transfer of public monies to solely benefit private persons at the expense of state taxpayers.”

Texas provides little oversight in such cases. Community college land transactions are not under the purview of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, which oversees public junior colleges, according to an agency spokesperson. The spokesperson said complaints about such transactions can be filed with the attorney general, who can choose whether to investigate. The Texas attorney general’s office, which did not respond to requests for comment, didn’t receive complaints related to the donation, according to records obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune.

College board members who voted in favor of the donation either did not reply to requests for comment or declined to speak with the news organizations.

The donation generally went under the radar even in the small, rural community. The local paper covered a ribbon-cutting ceremony but did not address the legality of the donation. John Kuhn, who served as superintendent for the Mineral Wells Independent School District at the time, said he had no idea the college was donating the land. Had Kuhn known, he said he would have asked that his district be considered. It is running out of space in its elementary schools and might have even contemplated buying the property, Kuhn said.

Community Christian School has yet to occupy the facility in Mineral Wells, Texas, as it raises the funds needed to make repairs that its leader estimates will cost $1.2 million. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Aside from the legal questions, the donation raises concerns in a state that increasingly blurs the line between church and state, said University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus. He pointed to examples including a new law that allows schools to hire unlicensed chaplains to work in mental health roles, Abbott’s hard push for a school voucher-like program that would allow taxpayer funding to support private and religious education, and the State Board of Education’s consideration of a measure that would require schools to teach the Bible.

“Over time, you’ve had so many of these issues that have battered the guardrails to the point now where it’s hard to have the guardrails be the divider of church and state as designed in some of these laws,” Rottinghaus said.

Curlee, the college’s attorney who has since retired, said the potential liability of owning the aging property outweighed its usefulness and that the college had already started moving classes to other buildings prior to the donation. He and the college’s current attorney, Jay Rutherford, maintain the donation did not violate any laws. Neither explained their reasoning or responded to questions about what legal experts told ProPublica and the Tribune.

Those experts also said the donation appears to violate the U.S. Constitution because, by Curlee’s own acknowledgment, the college never listed the property for sale and did not offer to donate it to any other organizations.

“If there’s evidence here that the college was not neutral, and that it was favoring this Christian school and left everyone else out of the process, that would violate the principle of Carson v. Makin,” said Steven Collis, a law professor and director of the Law and Religion Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin, referring to a case in which the Supreme Court ruled that Maine’s school voucher program could not exclude religious schools.

Jefferson, the administrator of Community Christian School, said he did not believe the donation violated any laws and that God gave him the property as a reward for taking care of it in the past. The private Christian school would at times use the property at no cost for one-act play competitions. When it did so, Jefferson said he cleaned, paid for utilities and provided liability insurance.

“And I did that because I believe God said that building belongs to us. I believed for years and years that was going to happen and then it did,” he said.

by Anna Clark

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.

With a conspicuous presence this week at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and a bestselling new memoir, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is celebrated as an ascending leader — someone who won over a decidedly purple state in 2018 by promoting commonsense solutions to issues affecting millions of people.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi effusively praised the governor at the Michigan delegation breakfast on Wednesday morning, saying: “She has been remarkable. Every time I hear her speak, I think sharp. Sharp in her message. Sharp in her effectiveness.”

But time is running out in Whitmer’s second and final term as governor to follow through on some key campaign promises.

Whitmer vowed as a candidate to “fix the damn roads,” bring transparency to state government, fight for a $15 minimum wage, repeal the emergency manager law and get a handle on companies that extract and sell large quantities of Michigan groundwater.

Six years later, those populist pledges are partially or entirely unfulfilled.

Advocates and even some allies are waiting for Whitmer to take up the causes she campaigned on during a critical period, when Democrats still have firm control over how the state is run. “Obviously, I would welcome the governor’s support,” said House Majority Floor Leader Abraham Aiyash, a Democrat who is working to replace the emergency manager law that has been so controversial in the state.

But it’s not clear if that support will come during a busy election season; nor is it clear what Whitmer will focus on once she leaves Chicago.

Whitmer’s office didn’t provide a response to questions from ProPublica for this story.

She’s heralded by some political observers for navigating both a divided state government and a pandemic in her first term, while still making progress on many priorities. When her gas tax proposal for road repairs fell flat, for example, she turned to bonds to help with immediate needs.

Heightened expectations from her supporters came in 2022 when Democrats won the governor’s office and both chambers of the Legislature for the first time in about 40 years. With a projected $9.2 billion budget surplus to boot, Whitmer and her party were virtually without obstacles for whatever they wanted to do.

Her supporters point to successes since then. She and the Legislature were able to codify abortion rights; repeal the “right-to-work” law that allowed workers in unionized jobs to opt out of union dues and fees; enact policies aimed at preventing gun violence; pass juvenile justice reforms; expand the earned income tax credit; and provide free breakfast and lunch to all public schoolchildren.

“Whitmer has overcome obstacles to keep many of her campaign promises. But there are more promises to keep,” Mark Brewer, former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, said in an email.

Figuring out how to fund ongoing road improvements, for example, fell off the radar. “Now she has a Democratic House and Senate, and still nothing’s getting done,” said Eric Lupher, president of the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, a nonpartisan policy organization that has studied road funding.

Whitmer has also not publicly advocated for pending bills that would open up the records of the governor’s office and the Legislature. And, to date, the minimum wage is just $10.33. A recent ruling by the Michigan Supreme Court puts the state on a path toward a higher wage, including for tipped workers, but business groups are pressuring lawmakers in the capital to intervene and Whitmer has been quiet about whether or not she supports a compromise.

“Her last two years have just been so consumed by the pent-up priorities of 40 years for Democrats that a lot of those like first-term promises took a back seat,” said Susan Demas, editor in chief of Michigan Advance and a longtime political columnist.

A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks said in an email that “we anticipate having a productive second half of the year and conversations about the fall agenda are ongoing.”

Demas sees a talented leader in Whitmer, one with a future on the national stage — in part because she governs as a pragmatist. And that same pragmatism helps explain Whitmer’s shifting agenda, she said.

“Making State Government More Open”

Whitmer delivers her State of the State address in January 2023. (Al Goldis/AP)

From misbehavior by legislators to the Flint water crisis, scandals revealed the cost of secrecy. Whitmer said she was committed to “making state government more open, transparent and accountable to Michigan taxpayers,” according to her 2018 Sunshine Plan.

Expanding the Freedom of Information Act was a key part of the strategy. Michigan is the rare state where both the governor’s office and Legislature are exempt from open records law.

In the plan Whitmer laid out while running for governor, she pledged that even if the Legislature didn’t act on the need for transparency, she’d voluntarily “extend FOIA to the lieutenant governor and governor’s offices. Michiganders should know when and what their governor is working on.”

She has yet to do so. And to some, the governor’s promises of transparency contrast with reports about her administration’s use of nondisclosure agreements with lawmakers regarding economic development deals and a memo asking to review record requests sent to other departments that include one or more communications with the executive office.

“To me, that is just an unforced error, the height of hypocrisy,” said Abby Mitch, executive director of Michigan Rising Action, a right-leaning watchdog group.

Whitmer has defended the use of confidentiality agreements for economic development projects, according to Bridge Michigan, a nonprofit news service, saying there is “a lot of proprietary information” shared as states compete for these investments.

Regarding the memo, Bridge reported that Whitmer’s spokesperson described the policy as a way to increase efficiency and said that the governor’s office never approves or denies the release of public records.

Sen. Ed McBroom, a Republican, and Sen. Jeremy Moss, a Democrat, have been trying to expand FOIA for nearly a decade, dating back to when they served as representatives during the administration of Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, who served from 2011 through 2018. Their latest bills passed the Senate for the first time in June.

If signed into law this year, the bills would take effect on Jan. 1, 2027, the day the next governor takes office, and retroactive requests could be excluded, according to an analyst with the Senate Fiscal Agency.

Lawmakers needed a start date that allows time to build capacity and protocols to meet new requirements, Moss said. McBroom noted that since there aren’t currently record retention rules, retroactive requests would “just be causing a lot of work to get a paper back that says there isn't anything to show you.”

After years of negotiation with diverse stakeholders, including the governor’s office, Moss said, “we feel we got it right.”

Lisa McGraw, the public affairs manager of the Michigan Press Association, said the bills aren’t perfect, but they’d be a huge step forward. Local government officials are subject to FOIA, she pointed out, as is the attorney general and secretary of state. “I don’t know why we don’t put the governor and the Legislature to the same level of accountability and transparency,” she said.

It’s now up to the House to take up the issue, and to do so during a crowded campaign season. “We’re down to the wire,” McGraw said.

Whitmer could accelerate the process and set an example by giving the go-ahead to pass the measure opening up her own office first, McBroom said. But he understands why she wants to take the leap together. “It’s always very difficult to unilaterally disarm in the political world,” he said.

“Fix the Damn Roads”

Whitmer fills a pothole during a campaign event in 2018. (Paul Sancya/AP)

Dangerously deteriorating roads are a perennial complaint of Michiganders. Leaders from both parties have struggled to maintain them. Pavement quality ranks 40th nationally and 10th in an 11-state peer group, according to the Citizens Research Council.

In 2019, after Whitmer’s proposal of a 45-cent gas tax increase died before the GOP-led Legislature, the governor opted for $3.5 billion in state bonds. That was later supplemented by Michigan’s cut of federal infrastructure money.

The result: State spending on road and bridge programs nearly doubled between 2015 and 2023, according to a recent CRC report. But with rising construction costs over that period, the purchasing power of Michigan’s road agencies only increased by about 50%. And the spending relies on short-term funds that will soon dry up. State officials have still not established a sufficient and sustainable revenue stream for roads.

Bonds are “pulling revenues from the future to pay for the fixes now,” said Lupher, CRC’s president.

Former Gov. John Engler, a Republican, made a similar move in the 1990s, Lupher said, and the state “paid the price in the years that followed” — literally. Paying the principal and interest left less money for upkeep, which then deteriorated the value of the investment, he said.

Subpar roads contribute to Michigan’s long-running struggle to retain and grow its population, according to a report last December from an advisory council appointed by Whitmer. “Instead of being an asset to Michigan residents, visitors and businesses,” the council said, “the current inadequate maintenance and funding of our roads, highways and bridges is a liability.”

The year Whitmer was elected, the Michigan section of the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the state’s roads a D- in its report card. Last year, it gave a D. The report said that within 10 years, without further action, the proportion of paved roads in poor condition will increase from 33% to 48%.

Even with the new state and federal investments, Michigan’s funding gap is $3.9 billion per year, according to researchers commissioned by an industry group to study the issue. Michigan’s complex and decentralized funding system also likely leads to inefficient spending. “The only thing more broken and busted than Michigan’s roads,” the CRC said in a 2022 report, “is the funding system that we’re using to try to fix them.”

Whitmer has indicated that she no longer supports a gas tax increase, according to news reports. But she and Democratic leaders have yet to develop another funding source.

“Once the Legislature said no to a gas tax increase and she introduced the bond idea,” Lupher said, “they washed their hands of it. So definitely, the next governor, two governors from now, is going to have to figure it out. But for this one: problem avoided.”

“Return Power Back to Local Governments”

Supporters at a Whitmer campaign event in Lansing, the capital, in 2018 as she was running for her first term. She is now in her second and final term. (Cory Morse/The Grand Rapids Press via AP)

Whitmer’s Sunshine Plan also promised to repeal Michigan’s emergency manager law, which gives state-appointed administrators unusual authority over distressed cities and school districts. Under Snyder, Whitmer’s predecessor, managers were dispatched to Detroit ahead of its bankruptcy and to Flint during a period that overlapped with a cataclysmic water crisis. Their takeover powers — which essentially replace local representative decision-making — are widely seen as contributing to the catastrophe in Flint.

“I fought against the ill-conceived Emergency Manager law when it was pushed through the Legislature — not once but twice — during the early days of Governor Snyder’s administration,” Whitmer said in the 2018 plan. “I will return power back to local governments and will provide meaningful investment, support and assistance to partner with local elected officials.”

Part of the controversy is that, in 2012, voters rejected lawmakers’ initial effort to expand the power of emergency managers in a statewide referendum. The following month, the Republican Legislature passed a similar version of the law — this time with an appropriation attached, making it immune from future referendums.

The Whitmer administration has never appointed an emergency manager, but the law remains active. Brewer, the former head of the Michigan Democratic Party, said in an email that one of the promises he’s looking to see Whitmer fulfill is “repealing the anti-democratic emergency manager law which led to the poisoning of Flint.” To date, though, efforts to do so have stalled.

A statement previously provided to ProPublica from Whitmer’s press secretary said that the governor will “work closely with the legislature if they take up legislation reforming the state’s emergency manager law.”

Some legislators have said that repealing the law must come alongside a new policy for the state to respond to struggling cities and schools. Aiyash, the House majority floor leader, told ProPublica that he’s collaborating with another lawmaker to propose such legislation this fall.

“It’s not like this is a hypothetical,” Aiyash said. “We saw what emergency management did to these communities and know that it can happen again at any moment. So we have to make sure that they’re not going to give folks the opportunity to utilize this archaic, punitive law anymore.”

Whitmer, as a candidate, centered Flint in her campaign — and not only in her opposition to the emergency manager law. She also criticized the state for allowing a bottled water company to dramatically increase how much groundwater it extracts in exchange for nominal fees while there were residents who struggled “to pay past-due bills for undrinkable water,” as her campaign’s water plan put it.

In her plan, Whitmer said her administration would “control the siphoning of water for water bottling,” but there’s been little change, as ProPublica reported this year.

“Focus on Raising Wages”

Whitmer speaks during a campaign rally at Michigan State University in 2022. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Whitmer made a $15 minimum wage part of her platform in 2018, phased in over three years, and promoted the Fight for $15 cause, which has since rebranded as Fight for a Union.

“To build an economy that works for everyone, we need to focus on raising wages for all working families,” she said in her campaign’s jobs plan.

Then things got complicated.

At the time, Michigan seemed headed for ballot initiatives where voters would decide whether to increase the minimum wage, phase out the lower wage for tipped workers and require employers to provide paid sick leave. But the Legislature, then led by Republicans, kept it off the ballot by adopting the petitions as law — and then, after the election, promptly watering them down. It increased the minimum wage by a smaller amount, retained the tipped wage and scaled back what is required for paid leave.

This summer, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that this “adopt-and-amend” tactic is unconstitutional. The court instructed the state to phase in the provisions in the original laws, with adjustments for inflation. The state has yet to determine what the increases would look like over time. The Michigan Restaurant & Lodging Association projected that the minimum wage would reach $13.50 by 2028.

While organizations representing workers are celebrating, business groups are pushing back.

The MRLA said on its website that it’s working with Lansing leaders on a legislative solution to offset the ruling’s impact on the hospitality industry. “This is an existential, all-hands-on-deck moment for our industry,” the MRLA notice said.

Justin Winslow, MRLA’s president and CEO, told ProPublica that his group has heard nothing from the governor since the ruling, which he interprets as a positive: “She’s going to let the Legislature do what it needs to do to correct this.” He said he’s encouraged by quotes in the Detroit Free Press in 2022, where, he said, the governor “stressed the need for a compromise.”

Some Democratic legislators have also been quiet on potential modifications to the laws.

Justin Onwenu, a point person in Michigan for the nonprofit One Fair Wage until recently, said that given their strong track record, he expects Whitmer and the Democratic-led Legislature “to continue to have the backs of workers.”

Whitmer has not publicly stated if she supports or opposes any change to the laws.

by Liz Moughon

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

In 1964, Samaria “Cookie” Mitcham Bailey was among the first Black students to desegregate public schools in Macon, Georgia. Sixty years later, her 13-year-old great-granddaughter, Zo’e Johnson, attends a private school that opened as white families fled desegregation. Researchers call schools like these “segregation academies.”

“So what touched you most about Grandma’s story?” asked Alyse Bailey, Zo’e’s great-aunt, as they sat at Cookie’s dining room table this year. Zo’e paused for a moment. “How she took people’s comments and racial things,” she said. “It didn’t stop her from what she wanted to do in life.”

Cookie still carries hurtful experiences from the year she desegregated a white high school. One instance happened during an English class. “This girl asked me if I had a tail,” Cookie recalled. She turned to the girl and demanded to know if she could see a tail.

“I’m a human being,” Cookie said.

Cookie hoped that her work desegregating schools would lead to more equal educational opportunities for future generations. Yet, when Zo’e began to have problems at her local public middle school, her family searched for options. Almost all were schools that remain largely segregated.

The family chose First Presbyterian Day, a predominantly white school known for its strong academics and Christian worldview. With the help of a state voucher-like tuition grant, Cookie has paid for Zo’e’s seventh grade year at the school. But she’s not sure she can continue to afford it.

Watch this 12-minute documentary to learn more about the challenge the family now faces.

by Jennifer Berry Hawes, photography by Sarahbeth Maney

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 spry 76-year-old woman finds her spot at the dining room table, prepared to discuss a problem her family has confronted, in one form or another, for half a century. Back when Samaria “Cookie” Mitcham Bailey was a teenager in 1964, she was among the first Black students to desegregate public schools here in Macon, Georgia. She endured the snubs and sacrifices with hope that future generations would know an equality that she had not.

All these years later, that equality remains elusive. Cookie’s hope now centers on the child across the table.

Her 13-year-old great-granddaughter, Zo’e Johnson, doesn’t say much at first. Last year, when she was in sixth grade, Zo’e struggled at the public middle school, which she felt was “chaotic.” Her family canvassed their options for another school in Macon, most of them still largely segregated by race. They chose First Presbyterian Day School, known for its rigorous academics and Christian worldview. It also has a strong tennis program, a draw for a family of tennis standouts.

But FPD isn’t just any private school. It was among the hundreds that opened during desegregation as white children fled the arrival of Black students. Black students like Cookie.

Researchers call these private schools “segregation academies.” Macon was — and is — especially saturated with them. Using archival research and an analysis of federal data, ProPublica identified five that still operate in the city. They include the three largest private schools in town. For generations, they have siphoned off swaths of white families who invested their more plentiful resources in college-sized tuition, fees and fundraisers. Today, most of Macon’s public schools are nearly all Black — and, because of the city’s persistent wealth gap, they grapple with concentrations of poverty.

At the dining room table on this March day, Zo’e’s family is torn over whether to keep her at FPD for another school year — whether they can afford it and whether the cost makes sense.

All of the schools founded as segregation academies in Macon, a majority-Black city, remain vastly white. FPD, with 11% Black enrollment as of the 2021-22 school year, has the highest proportion of Black students among them. Tuition at these schools can be insurmountable to many Black families. In Macon, the estimated median income of Black households is about half that of white ones.

Zo’e’s family makes it work largely because FPD helped them apply to get almost half of the roughly $17,000 seventh-grade tuition paid through a state voucher-style program — and because Cookie has been able to pay the difference. That’s about $900 a month.

But she isn’t sure she can keep paying. She recently cut her work hours as a medical laboratory supervisor with hopes of retiring in the next few years. At the table, her tone unusually subdued, she notes she’s had COVID-19 twice. Her memory sometimes falters.

“I’m older,” she says. “I’m getting old.”

Zo’e’s mother, Ashley Alexander, is a single parent who works part time and cannot foot the extra bill. She and Zo’e live with Cookie and her husband, a retiree who once worked as an attorney.

Ashley takes a seat between Zo’e and Cookie. “I feel like you get the better opportunity at the Caucasian school. The education is better,” Ashley says. “It’s just so expensive. We’ve been looking for some alternatives.”

But Zo’e doesn’t want to leave FPD. She likes the Christian emphasis. And she appreciates the structure and the calm, both important to a family that’s deeply protective of her.

Zo’e and her great-grandmother, Samaria “Cookie” Mitcham Bailey, after a game of tennis. A love of the sport runs deep in the family. Zo’e in her bedroom. Among the things that she likes about FPD is its tennis team. Her old school doesn’t have one.

When Zo’e was 6, her father was shot and killed a mile away from this house. A mural of his face stretches across a nearby building, where she sometimes goes to take pictures and to pray. Her father had supported sending his now-adult son, who plays in the NFL, to another private school in town. It’s one reason Zo’e thinks he would be proud of her succeeding at FPD.

She also has made good friends — Black and white. She likes the challenging academics, the orderly classes and, especially, its tennis team. Her old school doesn’t have one.

At the table, Zo’e speaks up: “I love FPD.”

Watch a Short Documentary This 12-minute documentary examines one family’s struggles with Georgia’s segregated schools.

Once sleepy, depressed even, downtown Macon is enjoying a rebirth in this city that is home to almost 157,000 people. Mercer University, Cookie’s alma mater, brings collegiate vibrance. Several grand churches, Catholic schools and a hospital add to the bustle, along with the gleaming Tubman African American Museum. In a first-floor exhibit, Cookie’s high school graduation photograph hangs on a long wall that pays tribute to students’ work desegregating Macon’s public schools.

Just beyond the downtown streets lined with coffee shops and restaurants, and the circles of poverty that surround them, Cookie’s brick home sits in a mostly white middle-class neighborhood. She has lived in this house for three decades, trodding its handsome wood floors and adorning it with family photographs.

A few weeks before the dining table discussion, she arrives home wearing a green tracksuit from Florida A&M University, where one of her three daughters played tennis. Cookie just left a tennis tournament. In a tight match, Zo’e beat a fellow FPD player who had bested her several times before. The other player smacked her racket on the court, then kicked it. Cookie was thrilled. She and her husband met playing tennis, and they have multiple collegiate tennis players in their family.

Ashley and Zo’e walk in later with diminished enthusiasm. Zo’e lost her final match, and she’s exhausted and grumpy. She heads to her bedroom where a brown teddy bear awaits along with a poster labeled “Vision Board.” She decorated it with words like “Forgive” and “College” and “God Only.”

“She did good!” Cookie calls down the hall.

Zo’e first dabbled in tennis when she was 6, around the time of her father’s murder. On the court, she could live in the moment, thinking only of the match at hand. It provided relief and focus, especially when anxiety crept in.

She keeps with her a newspaper clipping about her father’s death at 39. To some who read news coverage of his killing, he was a gang leader who spent time in prison. But she and many in the community knew the man who wanted his children and others in the neighborhood to dodge the traps of life — traps she’d begun to encounter at the public middle school.

After Zo’e enrolled at FPD, Ashley began driving her each morning in the opposite direction of the public middle school, which sits a mile away past a strip mall anchored by a Family Dollar.

Instead, they cruised for 15 minutes toward the leafy neighborhoods to the city’s north. At a stretch of white ranch fencing, they turned and drove over gentle hills and then veered onto the main drive into FPD’s campus. Red flags emblazoned with its crest hang on street lamps that line the road as it passes brick buildings, an athletic center, expansive ball fields and a tennis complex along its 248-acre campus.

Although she felt strange there at first, Zo’e made good friends and came to like FPD.

Zo’e isn’t the first in her family to attend private school. Her older half-brother on her father’s side who plays football went to Stratford, a similarly elite school in town that also was founded as a segregation academy. And a cousin who coaches her in tennis and is now playing on a scholarship at Tuskegee University went to FPD his junior and senior years. He had a mostly good experience, a big reason Cookie took a chance on the school.

Even so, Zo’e felt strange arriving on campus. At her old school, almost 90% of her classmates were Black. Classes were in one building, all near one another. FPD looked like a small college bustling with white students. She worried about what they would think of her.

Yet, she felt welcomed. Most of the kids seemed nice. And they weren’t all white. About 1 in 10 was Black.

She didn’t know it, but after George Floyd was killed in 2020, the head of school had issued a letter warning: “I will not allow racism or a lack of respect of any kind towards anyone.”

As Zo’e settled in with a diverse new group of friends, academics proved her toughest adjustment. So she focused on learning study skills and discipline — and set out to prove herself on the tennis court, which only made Cookie prouder.

Zo’e has lived with Cookie most of her life. She calls her great-grandmother sweet nicknames like Precious. “You are the cookie to my monster!” Zo’e wrote in Cookie’s birthday card.

Much as she respects Cookie, the history of school segregation wasn’t at the forefront of her daily concerns as she assimilated at FPD. But she did notice that she hadn’t seen a single Black teacher at the school. The only Black staff members she saw worked as janitors or in the cafeteria.

Cookie’s own journey into the world of white education began in 1964 with an announcement over the loudspeaker at her all-Black high school. The voice sought volunteers to transfer to a school for white girls. Cookie raised her hand.

Her mother, Annie Mae Mitcham, had grown up in a rural outpost called Cat Ridge. As a child in the 1930s and 1940s, Annie Mae walked from her segregated all-Black school with its hand-me-down books to go clean the white kids’ classrooms. She and her husband, who had a third-grade education, raised their 10 children to focus on school achievement.

Cookie holds a photograph of her nine siblings and parents. Scholastic achievement was at the heart of their upbringing.

By volunteering to enroll at the white school, Cookie wanted to see if she was as smart as everyone said she was. She also wanted to know what advantages the white kids were getting — and that Black students ought to have, too. She enrolled her senior year.

When she arrived at the white high school, Cookie didn’t suffer the violence that many Black children who desegregated schools across the South did. But there was one day in English class that still, 60 years later, hurts.

A white girl turned to ask: “Do you have a tail?”

At her old high school, Cookie was an A student. She’d been in the marching band and the concert band. She’d played piano and was a stellar singer. Yet this white girl was comparing her to a monkey? It cut deeply enough to scar.

Something similar happened to Zo’e a semester into her own experience at a mostly white school. She came home from school one day upset. She told Cookie and her mother that she had found a friend, who is Black, crying in a hallway saying that a white boy had just called her a “monkey.”

A month later at the dining room table, the family revisits the monkey comment. Zo’e says she has since heard the boy who said it was suspended. Her mother points out that one student’s comment doesn’t define a school.

“Let’s not make too big an issue of it,” Ashley says. But for Cookie, it rips open the old wound from English class. She grows furious. “They’re still calling Black folks monkeys!”

At the white high school, Cookie’s teachers and most students had treated her well enough. The headmistress did not. The guidance counselor was the worst, with her pursed lips, pearls and horn-rimmed glasses. When Cookie told the counselor she wanted to apply at Mercer University, the woman replied with a sneer and an insult.

“Go to your own school,” the woman said. In other words, a college for Black students.

Cookie stormed from the office and marched to Mercer with a friend. She enrolled on her own and ultimately graduated, among the first Black students to do so from the private university. Yet, even by then, only a smattering of Black students had been admitted to Macon’s white public schools. White Maconites were battling full integration at every turn, especially in the courts.

First image: Cookie looks through her 1966-67 yearbook from Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. She was among the first Black students to graduate from the private university. Second image: Cookie’s graduation regalia from Mercer.

More quietly, they were also busy forging another kind of resistance: They were organizing new private schools for their white children.

Macon sits 90 miles south of Atlanta in Georgia’s stretch of the Black Belt, a sickle-shaped swath of rich soil across the Southeast that once fueled cotton plantation riches. To preserve their control after emancipation, Georgia’s white leaders segregated every facet of life, including the classroom. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court upended that when the justices ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that state-mandated public school segregation is unconstitutional.

White residents responded with staunch resistance.

“Klan Urges State-Wide Private School System,” a Macon Telegraph headline announced in January 1960. Two months later, the newspaper reported that a local attorney was leading the charge to create an alternative to the county school system that served Macon. He planned a closed-door meeting with dozens of “persons interested in establishing a private school in case the public schools of Bibb County are closed by the desegregation crisis.”

That fall, Stratford Academy opened. Its leaders chose the name “because of the association of the name with Robert E. Lee and Shakespeare,” officials said at the time. The school — still among the city’s largest and most prestigious academies — was “besieged with applications.”

As white residents fought integration, Sylvia McGee was growing up in the segregated city. She had started her education at an all-Black public elementary school in Macon just a few years after the Brown ruling. She was about to start middle school in 1963 when Black parents sued the local school board in what became Bibb County’s key desegregation lawsuit. The case slogged on for almost seven years.

Finally, in February 1970, an appeals court forced local schools to desegregate — within days. McGee was a high school senior. Whites had fought integration for so long after the Brown decision that she had gone through her entire public school education during that resistance.

That fall, five private schools, including FPD, opened in Macon, doubling the number in town.

Their leaders rarely said publicly that the schools opened to preserve all-white education. Instead, they nodded to “quality” and “Christian” education.

Yet in fall 1970, leaders of the Southern network of the Presbyterian Church urged members to keep their children in public schools. In a statement, they called enforced racial segregation “contrary to the will of God” and warned against undermining public education by establishing and supporting private academies “whose deliberate purpose or practical effect is to maintain racial isolation.”

And even back then, some Southern newspapers called the new private schools “segregation academies.”

An article from The Macon Telegraph in January 1960. Two months later, the newspaper reported that a local attorney was leading the charge to create an alternative to the county school system that served Macon. (Newspapers.com)

“Only the very gullible could deny that race was a factor,” Andrew Manis, a local resident and history professor, wrote in his book “Macon Black and White.”

But FPD’s current spokesperson denied the school was founded as a segregation academy. She told ProPublica it “was established based on the desire of Macon families to provide their children with a strong education, grounded in biblical principles.” The school has a tuition assistance program and a nondiscrimination policy, she added. She did not answer additional questions.

Indeed, in 1975, several years after it opened, FPD’s headmaster likewise told a newspaper reporter that the school had a nondiscrimination policy. FPD was willing to admit a Black student, he said, “but we’ve never had one to apply.”

To Black residents like McGee, that felt disingenuous. “The climate and the culture of the time said you don’t apply to FPD,” she said. Black parents would have feared for their children’s safety at the academies. Private schools also had to adopt such policies or risk losing their tax-exempt status.

McGee graduated in 1970 with the final class before full desegregation. Because so many white students had fled to private schools, by fall 1973, the Bibb County public school system was predominantly Black for the first time.

McGee, who became a social worker and ultimately acting superintendent until 2011, watched the district’s infrastructure crumble. Gone were many of the white parents who had money to pour into PTA fundraisers and time to fill volunteer needs.

In the early 2000s, decades after they opened, FPD, Stratford and most of the other academies in Macon reported that about 1% to 2% of their students were Black each year.

Even in recent years, Black children have made up only about 6% of most academies’ students — in a county that is 57% Black.

“It holds everybody back,” McGee said. “I think people miss that point.”

One morning in May, with the end of seventh grade approaching, Zo’e arrives on FPD’s campus and heads to a hallway of art classrooms. It stretches quiet, the walls lined with impressive student artwork, classes not yet starting for the day. Several students sit on the hall floor, backs against the wall, engrossed in the papers or cellphones in front of them.

For weeks, Zo’e had been living in a tortuous state of uncertainty about whether she would return to FPD in the fall. She tried hard not to complain. She didn’t want to put extra financial pressure on Cookie, who is about to turn 77, or her mom, who has enough on her plate.

Ashley was doing her best to try to make things work for Zo’e. She was in the running for a full-time job at the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office that would give them more of a financial cushion — and enable her to pay FPD’s tuition.

Now, this morning, Zo’e is about to burst with joy. She spots a friend in the hallway and hurries over, stifling her smile. When they get close enough, she whispers, “You know how I told you if my mom doesn’t get the job, I’m not going to be able to stay?”

Her friend looks pensive. Zo’e wrings her hands in front of her.

“She got the job!”

Zo’e with classmates during lunchtime at FPD. She isn’t the first in her family to attend private school. Her older half-brother on her father’s side went to one in town and a cousin went to FPD his junior and senior years.

Her friend lets out a high-pitched squeal of joy, then glances down the hall.

Zo’e adds, “So I’m gonna be able to stay.”

But as the next few weeks pass, her hope fades. Delays creep in. Ashley’s starting date gets pushed back.

The multiple generations of women in Cookie’s family are quick to debate the bigger reasons why public schools struggle, including Miller Fine Arts Magnet Middle School, the one Zo’e went to.

“There’s a reason why the teachers at Miller are stressed out,” Cookie’s youngest daughter, Alyse Bailey, said after joining her family at the dining room table back in March. “There’s a reason why the kids are not acting how they’re supposed to act. What are those reasons? What are the root causes?”

“They’re a product of the environment,” Ashley responded.

“Right, but then, why?” Alyse asked. “It’s like you got to constantly be asking, why?”

Black children lack resources, Alyse argued, because of the wealth gap stemming from slavery and Jim Crow. “The more you go back, the more you see where it is rooted in systemic injustice.”

To many local families, Miller is the best option among public middle schools. While it functions as a regular neighborhood school, Miller also draws students from across the district who attend its fine arts magnet component. It often tops the district’s six middle schools on the state’s standardized tests. Almost three-quarters of its eighth graders read on grade level or above compared with the district average of 62%. (Private schools don’t have to release such data.)

Schools like Miller will soon find it even harder to retain top students, particularly those with more resources.

Starting next year, private schools will skim another layer of students from the public schools. In April, as part of a nationwide Republican push, Georgia adopted a new program that, similar to the existing one, uses taxpayer dollars to fund private school tuition. At least 21,000 more students could receive up to $6,500 each. Last year, almost 22,000 students tapped into the current program. The average tuition grant was about $4,600.

While it functions as a regular neighborhood school, Miller also draws students from across the district who attend its fine arts magnet component.

Supporters often tout these programs as means for students to escape low-performing public schools. But the reality is, the tuition grants don’t often cover even half of private school tuition bills, especially for college prep-style schools like FPD and Stratford. (Stratford was the only of the four other academies that responded to ProPublica. Its head of school noted it gives $1.5 million in financial assistance a year and is “contributing to moving middle Georgia and the Macon community toward a future that looks very different than the past.”)

But tuition assistance and voucher-style programs often don’t pay the whole bill. Families like Cookie’s must come up with the difference — and, if they can, decide if the financial hardship is worth it.

As they wrestle with this question, Zo’e’s family puts her on a waiting list for a charter school that performs well and, like many of the private schools, draws large numbers of white children. But 40 students are ahead of her.

By the time summer break arrives, Zo’e faces reality. Her mom almost certainly won’t start the new job in time to pay looming tuition bills. Zo’e will return to the public school her family felt had fallen short of her needs. And FPD will have one fewer Black student.

In late June, Cookie’s birthday approaches. When her oldest daughter arrives from Florida for a visit, they lay in bed watching tennis together. In dispirited tones, Cookie mentions that she cannot afford Zo’e’s tuition anymore.

But her daughter presses her to think beyond FPD’s benefits to what public school can provide, if Zo’e works hard and stays focused: “It’s nothing she can’t get somewhere else.”

Cookie concedes, “She can get it somewhere else.” Including Miller. She decides that the family must focus on reinforcing the academic and social self-discipline that Zo’e will need to succeed at Miller. They can help train her in tennis.

In the next room, Zo’e watches Disney Channel cartoons in her bedroom while making a poster for her mom, who shares a birthday with Cookie. She glues photographs onto it along with a message of love in sparkly lime green letters. Then she writes her mother a birthday note. “You’re not only a life-giver but you are a hard worker,” she writes. She thanks Ashley for so much love. “You were the one to step in when my father had to step out. You have been my best friend, a laughing buddy and a role model.”

Zo’e works on the floor below her vision board. It includes a cutout of a tiger’s eyes, intent and fixed. They remind her of focus. As she accepts the likelihood of returning to Miller, she becomes determined to take the discipline she learned at FPD with her. She also remembers that, at this time last year, she had wanted to stay at Miller.

A few weeks later, in mid-July, Ashley gets the formal job offer. She will become a sheriff’s deputy with a start date of July 29. She is overjoyed and relieved.

It comes too late to send Zo’e back to FPD. Public schools are about to begin the new year. So, the family firms up their plan for her. Zo’e will return to Miller for eighth grade to give Ashley time to save money for tuition. After that, when Zo’e begins high school, they plan to send her back to private school.

Zo’e will return to Miller for eighth grade to give her mother time to save money for tuition. After that, when Zo’e begins high school, her family plans to send her back to private school.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Heather Vogell

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

As U.S. parents struggled to find baby formula during a nationwide shortage in May of 2022, the Biden administration frantically sought ways to restock empty store shelves. Among the options was lifting steep tariffs on formula imported from other countries.

But as White House lawyers drafted a proclamation to remove the import tax, one federal agency resisted: the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

With supplies of baby formula falling precipitously across the country after a major production plant shut down, staffers from the USTR repeatedly argued against lifting the tariff on imports, citing, in part, a concern that it would raise “lots of questions from domestic dairy producers,” according to documents obtained by ProPublica. Cow’s milk is a primary ingredient for most baby formula, and the dairy industry has long supported protections for U.S. manufacturers.

“Situation at retail appears to be a combination of transportation/shipping and panic buying by consumers, not an issue of inadequate domestic production,” wrote Julie Callahan, an official with the USTR, in a May 11 email to an official with the National Security Council, which was helping coordinate the administration’s response.

The next day, she told colleagues, “I tried to convey to NSC in very strong terms yesterday that removing tariffs from infant formula will not result in increased access to infant formula for U.S. consumers.”

The White House never released the proclamation, and the tariffs stayed in place for 10 more weeks, until Congress suspended them temporarily on July 21.

That delay was too long, according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

“Such action should have happened more quickly,” the report said, a finding that raises questions about the assessment from the president’s chief trade advisers. A panel of experts found “suspending tariffs was helpful for bringing product into the United States during the shortage.”

In fact, the report recommended Congress create a “trigger rule” to automatically suspend import taxes again if the market is substantially disrupted. “Quick removal may be important to providing rapid response in the future,” said Katheryn Russ, a member of the expert panel that produced the report and an economics professor at the University of California, Davis.

It’s unclear why the White House did not issue its proclamation; it did not answer our written questions about the subject.

A spokesperson for the USTR, however, defended the administration’s response, saying in a statement that it “was committed to using all tools, including trade tools, to address the formula shortage and ensure American families were able to access infant formula.” Officials were in close contact with Congress, which ultimately voted to remove tariffs with the administration’s support, it said.

“To be clear, any implication that USTR stood in the way of addressing the crisis is completely false,” the statement said.

This year, ProPublica detailed how the U.S. government has repeatedly used its diplomatic and political power to advance the interests of formula manufacturers overseas, thwarting public health measures around the globe that posed financial threats to the companies’ business. But the documents from the height of the U.S. formula shortage show some of the same trade officials — at the USTR in particular — flexed that muscle to protect the formula industry and its allies at home, even during a national emergency that put children at risk.

The crisis escalated quickly in early 2022, after Abbott stopped formula production at its Sturgis, Michigan, plant, which had been making 20% of the formula sold in the U.S. Four infants had fallen ill or died after drinking formula made there, and federal inspectors later found bacterial contamination and lax safety protocols at the plant. By April, nearly a third of the normally available formula products were out of stock. By late May, that number was 70%.

The shortage caused widespread panic. Many infants who had to switch formula brands because of it developed symptoms such as fussiness, spitting up or diarrhea, and nearly half of parents in one survey said they’d resorted to at least one unsafe feeding practice, such as watering down formula.

Jennifer Smilowitz, a researcher at the University of California who studied the impact of the shortage, called those findings “alarming.”

“Parents were not offered many safe alternatives,” she said.

The U.S. struggled to replace the lost production with foreign imports in part because of strict regulations on nutrition and safety as well as high tariffs that rise at greater volumes.

The new report said those “extremely high trade barriers” leave the U.S. formula market “almost completely closed to imports” — a condition that endangers supply when a major domestic producer encounters trouble. The U.S. normally produces 98% of the baby formula that consumers here use.

To encourage more imports in 2022, the Biden administration — which was also flying in formula from Europe — readied a plan for tariff relief, records show.

“My understanding is that there is a trade proclamation that would temporarily suspend tariffs on baby formula imports,” an administration lawyer wrote in a May 15 email thread. The White House Counsel at the time, Stuart Delery, wrote five minutes later: “We were instructed to prepare a proclamation to be ready for tomorrow, which we have done.”

When Callahan, the USTR official, responded, her concern focused on the companies that would be affected by the measure. The biggest dairy industry groups, she said, should be given “a heads-up right before any press release goes out, so that they don’t feel blindsided.”

Trade officials were also unhappy with the Department of Health and Human Services, which, according to the records, appeared to be criticizing the formula tariffs in conversations with congressional leaders.

“We are hearing from the Speaker’s office that HHS is blaming a 17 percent tariff on formula as the reason for the shortage,” wrote USTR official Allison Smith to colleagues on May 16. “Obviously, that’s a problem.”

She added: “Definitely want to push back on messaging coming from HHS and generally fill the information void.”

Later that day, USTR staff circulated draft talking points saying the administration was “pursuing all avenues” to increase the availability of formula and that domestic companies had ramped up production. The document did not mention cutting tariffs as an option and suggested officials dodge questions on the topic.

“If asked on tariff reductions,” it instructed, say: “We are hoping that this additional action taken by the Biden Administration will result in easing of the current supply shortages.”

Callahan, Delery and Smith did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the Department of Health and Human Services.

As Congress began to consider acting, dairy and formula trade groups weighed in.

The National Milk Producers Federation signaled a willingness to embrace “time limited flexibility for imports during this specific crisis,” according to a USTR email, which quoted a message the dairy group had sent Capitol Hill. But the group warned: “We wouldn’t support a permanent or long term” lowering of tariffs.

That position appeared to align with the Infant Nutrition Council of America, a formula trade group, which dramatically ramped up its lobbying at the time, records show. “INCA members did not oppose the temporary lifting of tariffs during the 2022 shortage,” the group said in a statement.

Abbott said it also supported suspending import taxes “during times of shortage, so long as those products are held to the same stringent quality and testing standards as products manufactured in U.S. facilities.” In a statement, the company said that “no sealed, distributed product from our facilities have tested positive for the presence of Cronobacter sakazakii,” referring to the type of bacteria that made the four infants ill.

The bill to lift tariffs for imported baby formula was enacted in July 2022. Under the legislation, the exemptions would expire at the end of the year.

“The legislation’s time-limited nature was to make sure that the United States doesn’t create a permanent dependence on formula produced in foreign facilities,” Shawna Morris, an executive vice president for the National Milk Producers Federation, said in a statement.

The new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that formula’s availability remains at risk. Among the reasons: concentrated production among a handful of companies and a lack of understanding by federal officials and formula makers of both the risks the U.S. formula supply faces and the investment needed to prevent such disruptions.

The analysis urged federal officials to cut red tape during emergencies, develop risk management plans to address supply threats better and encourage the modernization of U.S. formula plants.

The report also advised studying removing formula tariffs or lowering them for U.S. manufacturers with plants in other countries. Russ, the panel member, said policymakers need more information on what would happen if trade barriers such as tariffs were removed long term. The U.S. industry might relocate overseas as a result, for instance, which she said might make it harder to address supply chain disruptions.

The panel said it intended its recommendations to help “ensure that the United States is better positioned to respond to any future shortage.”

The Infant Nutrition Council said its members are reviewing the report and will work with federal officials to ensure there’s an adequate supply of safe formula.

A bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation to eliminate the taxes on some foreign formula permanently last year, but it has not progressed. The National Milk Producers Federation opposed the bill, saying, “Congress should focus its efforts instead on better supporting the American companies, workers, and farmers who supply nearly all of this country’s formula and formula ingredient needs.”

The dairy group told ProPublica that it would also fight a proposal to create a “trigger rule,” as the report recommended, that automatically lifts tariffs in a crisis, saying, “Congress has shown it can act swiftly when needed.”

by Danielle Ohl, Spotlight PA; and Jessica Lussenhop, ProPublica; and Irina Bucur, Tracy Leturgey and Eddie Trizzino, Butler Eagle

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

He’d warned them.

Butler Township Police Officer Drew Blasko paced angrily along the AGR building, where just minutes before a gunman had clambered atop the roof, aimed an AR-15-style rifle at Donald Trump and fired, striking the former president.

As Blasko and other officers stood guard near a loading bay behind the building, he recounted a meeting earlier in the week with the Secret Service.

“I told them that fucking Tuesday,” he said. “I told them to post fucking guys over here.”

The Trump rally shooting that day, which killed one man and injured three others, including the former president, has been called the largest security failure in 40 years. It has led to the resignation of the Secret Service director, a congressional investigation and questions from lawmakers about how such a lapse could have occurred.

But an investigation by Spotlight PA, ProPublica and the Butler Eagle has revealed that the weaknesses that led to the assassination attempt were not unique to the July rally, but the inevitable breakdown of an already vulnerable system.

The newsrooms spoke to dozens of officials across all levels of law enforcement and in several states who have provided security for presidents and presidential candidates, as well as local party officials and academic experts in security.

The newsrooms did not speak directly with Blasko but obtained body-camera footage showing him and other Butler Township officers in the aftermath of the shooting. Efforts to reach Blasko were unsuccessful.

The reporting found the steps taken in the days leading up to the Butler rally largely mirrored the process the Secret Service has used for years to collaborate with local law enforcement before visits by presidents and other high-profile individuals under their protection — a process that the shooting revealed to be susceptible to attack.

“It’s pretty clear that it wasn’t just one screw-up here,” said Andrew Vitek, a professor who teaches about terrorism at Penn State University. “This is indicative of multiple systemic failures all coming down around their ears at once.”

The Secret Service did not respond to questions.

Large events involving presidential candidates are delicate, officials said, involving rapid coordination on little notice among federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.

Because the Secret Service is stretched thin, with 3,200 agents and another 1,300 uniformed officers to divide among more than 30 protectees, the agency relies on local law enforcement officers to help secure campaign events, though they do not have the same specialized training as federal agents.

The Secret Service holds a planning meeting with these partner agencies before an event, the same meeting Blasko described in released body-camera footage.

In Butler, attending officers described the meeting as informal and disorganized, said Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger, whose office oversees the county’s specialized emergency services unit that provided support on July 13. It left local officials to create their own operational plan for the day.

As a result, communications between multiple levels of law enforcement were a cobbled combination of radio command centers and cellphones.

Such difficulties are compounded when campaign rallies occur at open-air venues like the Butler Farm Show, where thousands of people gathered to hear Trump speak.

The newsrooms analyzed data from nine years of Trump rallies, which revealed that Trump’s signature campaign stops have evolved from largely indoor affairs in hard-to-penetrate arenas to include more public, outdoor spaces. This has shifted local law enforcement’s responsibilities from traffic control and intersection monitoring to guarding rooftops and anticipating potential shooters’ sightlines.

“If you’re not able to fully communicate that the guy with the gun is right there ... then all of a sudden everyone is looking around trying to figure out how the hell this guy got a couple of shots off,” Vitek said.

A perennial swing state, Pennsylvania is a favorite stop for presidential candidates vying for its 19 electoral votes. The former president is no different, holding his signature rallies in Pennsylvania at least 30 times since his first presidential campaign in 2016, more than any other state.

Initially, the Trump campaign had wanted to have the July rally somewhere more secure: the Pittsburgh-Butler Regional Airport, a tiny airstrip he’d used in 2020. The campaign reached out to the Butler County Airport Authority for permission.

But there was a conflict.

A local firehouse was slated to hold its annual Mega Car Cruise on the same day. The airport authority’s board knew how important the fundraiser was to the small volunteer department. So it rejected the Trump campaign’s request.

Instead of the easier-to-defend airport, with a single entrance and exit and fewer easily accessible buildings, the campaign picked the wide-open fields of the Butler Farm Show.

During his unsuccessful 2020 reelection campaign, Trump visited mostly airports, holding rallies either under cover of a hangar or on a tightly controlled airstrip directly after landing from a military plane or helicopter. But as his rally schedule became more crowded, it also became more varied.

In the years since he left office, nearly half of Trump’s rallies have been outdoors. Of these outdoor events, most have been in public spaces such as fairgrounds, downtown shopping districts or parks.

Indoor events pose their own complications, said Paul Eckloff, a former Secret Service agent who served under three presidents, including Trump. Arenas and convention centers are often in dense, urban areas near highways that could present a possible threat if someone wanted to turn a vehicle into an explosive device.

Outdoor events, though, are where your threat level “goes through the roof,” said a former officer with the Secret Service uniformed division who requested anonymity to discuss his service.

Outdoor locations are often built from scratch just for an event, making it more difficult for law enforcement agencies to control who gets in and out. Consequently, there’s a higher risk that a local law enforcement partner may encounter a threat they’re not prepared to meet.

As a former president and current candidate, Trump is entitled to some protection from the Secret Service. But it is not as extensive as that afforded to the sitting president and no longer includes access to the military.

This means as he has continued campaigning over the past three years, he has done so with less protection in more challenging environments.

While the Secret Service can raise security concerns about a venue, those warnings can go ignored by candidates and their campaigns, former employees of the agency said. It is unclear if Secret Service officials raised such concerns ahead of the Butler rally.

“We will remind them, ‘Respectfully, sir, ma’am, if you do this, you may not have a candidate, you may not have a leader, we may not have a leader, so please reconsider that,’” the former officer said.

Trump arrives for a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July. (Evan Vucci/AP)

It was 1 p.m.

The stage was set; the red, white and blue bunting hung; and the doors opened to Trump supporters eager to see the former president.

The local police, including SWAT teams from Butler Township and surrounding counties, had been in place for hours. But they still had not heard from the Secret Service, according to local police and Goldinger, the district attorney.

Initial security planning is often spearheaded through one of the Secret Service’s regional offices, which will reach out to state and local departments to request officers and assets, like a bomb unit or explosive-sniffing dogs. There is not typically a formalized, written agreement between them.

Local law enforcement officers are there to support the mission, said Ryan Windorff, president of the Wisconsin Fraternal Order of Police, but “it’s ultimately the Secret Service’s planning and decisions and experience that runs the day.”

In the days before an event, local, state and federal law enforcement will have a planning meeting to go over protocol, said Adam Reed, a spokesperson for Pennsylvania State Police. Officials described a similar sequence of events ahead of campaign outings over the past 12 years, regardless of the candidate or political party.

Close coordination is especially important in states such as Pennsylvania, home to more local police departments than any other state in the country.

But the pre-rally Butler meeting did little to assuage security concerns, according to local officials.

During the week leading up to the rally, representatives from all of the local police departments that had been asked to help secure the Trump event met in nearby Connoquenessing Township to coordinate.

The Butler County Emergency Services Unit, a special weapons and tactical squad, had toured the Butler Farm Show during the week and had identified the AGR building as a threat. In the meeting, Butler County officials raised the issue with the Secret Service, said Goldinger, the Butler County District Attorney, but ultimately, the agency did not post anyone on the roof.

“This was their ballgame,” Goldinger said of the Secret Service.

Local officers didn’t receive a written plan from the Secret Service until 1:30 p.m. on the day of the rally, according to Goldinger — 30 minutes after the doors opened. In the absence of such a plan, local supporting officers set up their own.

On the day of the event, local counter-snipers met with their counterparts in the Secret Service. But they had not been asked to secure or set up a perimeter, said Adams Township Sgt. Ed Lenz, who commands the Emergency Services Unit.

“I’m not sure that it was very clear to the overall Secret Service command what they had actually asked us to do,” Lenz said.

At 4:26 p.m. on July 13, a Beaver County Emergency Services Unit sniper leaving his shift texted the remaining county officers stationed inside the AGR building.

“Someone followed our lead and snuck in and parked by our cars just so you know,” the text reads.

In the days since the rally, news reports and testimony before Congress have revealed the communications gaps that allowed Thomas Crooks to evade law enforcement for more than 90 minutes after the text was sent.

But the chain-link communication structure used in Butler was not new.

Local law enforcement officials providing security for past campaign events involving presidents also relied on a relay system to communicate because the different agencies do not share radio frequencies with the Secret Service or one another.

“And that creates communications problems,” said John Kiel, assistant chief of the Superior Police Department in Wisconsin.

Kiel heads a 58-officer department that provided support for an event for President Joe Biden on Jan. 25 alongside agencies from different jurisdictions and states, all with different radio frequencies or even different wavelengths.

“So generally, what happens is we have to have somebody from our agency directly working with, meaning you’re working hip to hip, with Secret Service,” he said. “And then, you know, that’s where the technology, with use of cellphones, really plays a big part.”

To coordinate, officials said, the Secret Service establishes a command post at a site such as the airport where the president or candidate is landing. Typically, leadership from every involved agency is present so they can relay information immediately.

But at Butler, two command centers were set up, Lenz said, one for State Police and the Secret Service and one for local police. Lenz and his officers communicated to the State Police, which passed on information to the Secret Service.

When the local sniper spotted Crooks and texted his unit, Goldinger said, other officers stationed inside the AGR building had to relay that information back to the local command, who then told the State Police, who then told the Secret Service.

But testimony from the acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe has revealed that the information never made it to the people who could take action to stop Crooks.

“It appears that that information was stuck or siloed in that state and local channel,” Rowe told U.S. senators in July. “Nothing about man on the roof, nothing about man with a gun. None of that information ever made it over our net.”

Bodycam footage shows a police officer moving toward the AGR building after Thomas Crooks shot at Trump. (Obtained from the Butler Township Police Department by Spotlight PA)

Since the assassination attempt, Trump has held eight rallies, all indoors at the urging of the Secret Service.

Ahead of his scheduled rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the Secret Service approved a new security plan, including bulletproof glass to shield the former president at outdoor events, according to reporting in The Washington Post.

On Aug. 12, a month after Crooks shot him, Trump said he plans to return to Butler to finish his speech.

During a conversation with billionaire Elon Musk broadcast on X, the social media platform Musk owns, Trump said he would be back to the rural Pennsylvania county sometime in October.

If Trump does return, Butler officials would like better coordination from the Secret Service, including a unified command post, Lenz said.

But despite Trump’s announcement, local officials had little information. They have a lot of worries.

Butler County Commissioner Leslie Osche said in a statement that although many residents would be excited to see Trump return, the community may not have completely healed from the trauma of the shooting.

“While this county has overwhelmingly welcomed and supported former President Trump, a return visit will place additional stress on law enforcement and the community,” Osche said. “I am angry. I am sad. I am disappointed.

“And I am waiting for the results of an investigation by qualified institutions instead of endless finger pointing.”

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.

On a recent Saturday outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Fairview Heights, Illinois, a woman wearing a reflective orange vest and body camera flagged down a car pulling into the facility.

“Hi, can I talk to you a second?” the woman, Sheri King, said to the driver, reaching for a pamphlet in a pocket of her vest with information about alternatives to abortion and birth control. “I’m Sheri.”

A Planned Parenthood volunteer bolted toward the car, urging the driver to keep moving.

“They’re not with the clinic,” the volunteer yelled.

Instead, King and a partner were with Coalition Life, a nonprofit anti-abortion group that is based in Missouri and raises most of its money there. Almost every minute the abortion clinic in Illinois is open, Coalition Life representatives are out front, aiming to intercept people seeking abortions and persuade them to change their minds.

Since abortion became illegal in Missouri two years ago, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Coalition Life has fine-tuned its strategy. Because there are no abortion clinics in Missouri, Coalition Life operates largely outside clinics in other states where the procedure is still legal. The group’s website says it operates at one location in Kansas and five in Illinois including in Fairview Heights, about 13 miles east of St. Louis.

On its website, Coalition Life has called itself “America’s largest professional sidewalk counseling organization.” The group’s revenue has surged in recent years, thanks in part to a lucrative Missouri tax credit for pregnancy resource centers, of which it is one. Following a massive expansion of the tax credit program by the state legislature in 2019, donors to Coalition Life and similar nonprofits can receive tax credits worth 70% of their donation amount, significantly boosting the groups’ fundraising efforts across Missouri.

The tax credit has led to a growing financial cost to Missouri taxpayers, with over $11.2 million in tax credits authorized in the past year alone. Before the change, the tax credit had been capped at $3.5 million a year. When combined with the $8.6 million the state directly allocates to pregnancy centers, Missouri has become a leader in per capita investment in anti-abortion centers.

While Missouri does not contribute the most overall to anti-abortion groups — Texas, with its much larger population, leads the nation with a $140 million outlay over two years — it stands out for the investment relative to its size. Still, it pales in comparison with this year’s nearly $52 billion budget.

The money raised through tax credits is intended to support services for clients facing unwanted or unplanned pregnancies. Those services include pregnancy testing, counseling, emotional and material support and other related services.

Coalition Life has adapted to the post-Roe landscape by paying people to work outside abortion clinics in other states. The group claims that it refers many of the women it convinces not to have abortions to its pregnancy center in Missouri, just outside St. Louis. There, it provides ultrasounds and counseling and continues to see mothers until their babies are born — sometimes longer.

Because this center is more expensive to operate, and most clients are Missouri residents, the group said most of the money raised in Missouri is spent within the state. There was no independent way to confirm the claim.

Fighting abortion in Missouri’s border states is not how some lawmakers said they envisioned the subsidies for pregnancy centers would be used. Vic Allred, a Republican former House member from the Kansas City area who voted for the tax credit expansion, said he never anticipated Missouri tax dollars going to fight abortion in other states.

Allred said the state should exercise some oversight over how the money is spent. The tax credit, he said, was intended to be “a pat on the back for not getting an abortion, that you’ll have this support, you’ll have these people helping you, you’ll have these supplies, you’ll ease that burden on the new mother.” He said it was not meant to help fund “a political organization.”

Under the program, for every $1,000 in donations to one of dozens of state-approved anti-abortion nonprofits, a state taxpayer’s bill drops by $700. Donors can reduce their out-of-pocket costs even more by deducting the remaining $300 from their income when they file state and federal taxes.

At a fundraiser at the St. Louis airport two years ago, Brian Westbrook, Coalition Life’s founder and executive director, explained how donors could use the tax credit to make much larger gifts to support the group’s work in states where abortion is legal, according to a recording of the event obtained by ProPublica.

“A gift of $1,000 tonight could cost you only $141,” he said. Then he aimed higher, asking that donors consider a donation of more than $71,000 so they can take the maximum tax credit of $50,000.

Missouri does not disclose the recipients of its pregnancy resource tax credits or the amounts donated to individual nonprofits. Westbrook said in an interview that the tax credits have been important to his group’s fundraising efforts. Coalition Life had $800,000 in revenue in 2019, when the legislature voted to expand the tax credit; by 2022, that amount had more than doubled, to $1.7 million.

At the fundraiser, Westbrook told donors that Coalition Life expected its annual budget to grow in three years to more than $8 million.

Over the past two years, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska and North Dakota have introduced tax credits for donations to pregnancy centers. Legislators in a handful of other states have considered similar programs.

Groups that raise money using Missouri’s tax credit must certify they help people struggling with unplanned or unwanted pregnancies; the state law does not specify that the work must be done within Missouri. A state spokesperson did not respond when asked if approaching people outside abortion clinics in other states qualified for participation in the program.

The law also does not appear to prohibit groups that participate in the tax credit program from using donations as part of a broader campaign against abortion. Coalition Life placed radio ads urging residents to “think twice” before signing a petition for a statewide vote to amend the Missouri Constitution to restore some abortion rights, claiming it would permit late-term and partial-birth abortions.

The effort nonetheless qualified for the ballot and goes before voters in November.

Melissa Barreca, a spokesperson for Coalition Life, said the ads were “an effort to educate the public and encourage them to learn, read and investigate these issues for themselves” and were consistent with the group’s mission.

After Missouri’s abortion ban took effect, Planned Parenthood began to refer patients to its Fairview Heights location, which opened in 2019. Westbrook said at the fundraiser that God called his group to shift its focus to Illinois. “That abortion facility is run by the exactly the same people who run the St. Louis — or, former St. Louis — abortion facility,” Westbrook told donors. Coalition Life then opened an office next door.

The organization also deploys paid workers outside clinics in the Chicago area, southern Illinois and Kansas. Westbrook has said he wants the group to expand into other states where abortion is legal; he and his wife and their seven children recently completed a 20-day tour of the East Coast.

On its website, Coalition Life explains how it will use donations made under Missouri’s pregnancy resource tax credit. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Ingrid Burnett, a Democratic state legislator from Kansas City, voted against the tax credit expansion in 2019. She said the program was presented as providing support to mothers forced to carry babies to term who may need counseling as well as material aid to help them bring a child into the world.

“Seems to me that we’re crossing a line here, when we’re using this to send people across state lines to interfere with women who have made this decision who may or may not be from Missouri,” she said.

Abortion supporters said, too, that it was troubling that Missouri subsidizes anti-abortion groups while the state’s maternal mortality rate has been rising and the safety net, particularly in rural areas, is stretched thin.

“I can think of a million ways that they could spend funds to support Missourians, particularly women and families, and not one dollar would be going to this tax credit,” said Emily Wales, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which serves Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and western Missouri.

Barreca bristled at how Wales characterized Coalition Life’s presence outside abortion clinics.

“They are actually out there offering services to women,” she said in an email. “They are doing a job. They are not protesters. They are not picketers. Would the abortion providers prefer that women have no other options?”

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

by Doug Bock Clark

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.

Update, Aug. 20, 2024: On Monday, the day after ProPublica published this article, the Georgia State Election Board passed the rule 3-2. Roughly 850 people attended the virtual meeting at which the vote was held. Nationally prominent conservative activists spoke in support of it, including the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, who served on Donald Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, and Harry MacDougald, a lawyer defending Jeffrey Clark, a former top Justice Department official indicted for trying to help Trump overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. The leader of a liberal Washington-based watchdog organization spoke in opposition. During discussion of the rule, meeting administrators frequently had to mute the mics of angry participants who spoke out of turn against it.

The three board members whom Trump had praised by name passed the rule over the objections of the lone Democratic appointee and the chairman, who had been appointed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.

Georgia’s GOP-controlled State Election Board is poised to adopt a rule on Monday that would give county election board members an additional avenue to delay certification of election results, potentially allowing them to throw the state’s vote count into chaos this fall.

A former Fulton County election official who submitted an initial draft of the rule told ProPublica that she had done so at the behest of a regional leader of a right-wing organization involved in challenging the legitimacy of American election systems. That organization, the Election Integrity Network, is led by Cleta Mitchell, who helped orchestrate attempts to overturn the 2020 election and spoke on the call in which former President Donald Trump demanded that Georgia’s secretary of state “find” him 11,780 votes to undo Joe Biden’s victory.

The Election Integrity Network’s role in bringing forward the proposed rule has not been previously reported.

The State Election Board’s Monday meeting comes on the heels of a vote less than two weeks before that empowered county election board members to conduct “reasonable inquiry” into allegations of voting irregularities. That rule did not set deadlines for how long such inquiries might last or describe what they might entail, and critics worried that this omission could cause Georgia to miss the Dec. 11 deadline for sending its certified presidential election results to the federal government.

The new rule is even more concerning, election experts said, because it requires county boards to investigate discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of people who voted in a precinct, no matter how minor. It bars counties from certifying the election tallies until officials can review an investigation of every precinct with inconsistent totals. Such inconsistencies are commonplace, not evidence of malfeasance, and only in extremely rare circumstances affect the outcome of elections. The requirement to explain every one of them and litigation around investigations into them could take far longer than the time allowed by law to certify.

Get in Touch

Do you have any information that we should know about Georgia’s State Election Board or attempts to affect the outcome of the presidential election? Contact reporter Doug Bock Clark by email at doug.clark@propublica.org and by phone or Signal at 678-243-0784. If you’re concerned about confidentiality, check out our advice on the most secure ways to share tips.

“If this rule is adopted, any claims of fraud, any claims of discrepancies, could be the basis for a county board member — acting in bad faith — to say, ‘I’m not confident in the results,’ and hold up certification under the flimsiest of pretexts,” said Ben Berwick, who leads the election law and litigation team of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works to protect the integrity of American elections.

“The bottom line here,” Berwick said, is that “election deniers are intentionally creating a failure point in the process where they can interfere if they don’t like the results of an election.”

Until 2020, the certification of elections was a noncontroversial part of running them. After Trump made “stop the steal” a rallying cry in his attempt to overturn his loss to Biden, an increasing number of conservative election board members, especially at the county level, have attempted to block certification of subsequent elections. ProPublica has previously reported how these disruptions revealed weaknesses in the nation’s electoral system.

Among those who would have the ability to slow down the count in the fall is Julie Adams, who is a Republican member of the Fulton County elections board and a regional coordinator with Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. She was sworn in to the Fulton board in February, and one of her first official acts was to vote against the certification of the March presidential primary election, saying she needed more information to investigate discrepancies. She was overruled by her colleagues. She then sued the board and the county’s election director, asking for the court to find that her duties, such as certification, “are, in fact, discretionary, not ministerial.” The suit is ongoing.

The State Election Board received the proposed rule in April from Vernetta Nuriddin, a former member of the Fulton County elections board. In an interview on Friday, Nuriddin acknowledged that Adams “brought that particular concern” to her and was “instrumental” in bringing that rule and several others to the board.

In Nuriddin’s packet of paperwork asking for consideration of the rule, a cover letter said that the “Election Research Institute respectfully submits this petition for adoption.”

The Election Research Institute is led by Heather Honey, a conservative activist who also played a role in attempts to discredit the 2020 election results and has worked to advance election system overhauls supported by Mitchell, the head of the Election Integrity Network. Another organization Honey co-founded, Verity Vote, is listed as working on “joint projects and events” with the Election Integrity Network in its handbook. Mitchell has praised Honey as a “wonderful person” on her podcast.

Honey told ProPublica that her institute did not submit the proposed rule. “The Election Research Institute, like many, you know, nonprofits out there, have folks that have expertise in elections,” Honey said in a brief interview. “And so it is not uncommon for folks to seek our advice.” When asked about the language identifying the institute as submitting it, she said she would only answer further questions over email and then hung up. Honey did not respond to an emailed list of detailed questions.

Mitchell did not respond to requests for comment or a detailed list of questions.

Neither did Adams. In comments supporting the rule during a public meeting, Adams did not disclose her role originating it but explained that “it’s very hard to certify when you’re not following the law in knowing who voted, where they voted and how many ballots were cast.” She said that the purpose of the rule was to catch “problems beforehand” and that its goal was not “about throwing out precincts.”

Nuriddin eventually withdrew her submission. She would not say why.

An almost identical submission was provided to the board at about the same time by Bridget Thorne, a Fulton County commissioner and election denier. The primary difference was that Thorne’s version did not mention the Election Research Institute and said she was submitting it herself.

Thorne’s proposal was considered by the election board in its May meeting. “My hope is to reel in the blatant Fulton County not running their elections correctly,” Thorne told the board. She acknowledged that she had worked with Nuriddin on the rule, and that Nuriddin had withdrawn her name because “she wanted some tweaking of the language, last minute.”

In an interview, Thorne said she was encouraged to submit the rule by Honey, Adams and others.

She said that she did not know where all of the language in it came from because she had consulted with many lawyers and election experts while putting it together, but that some of it had come from herself and Honey. She said that Adams was not a writer but an organizer of the rule.

Thorne denied the rule was meant to be able to affect the outcome of the election. “The whole rule is to safeguard everybody’s vote,” she said, and to make sure that “nobody’s vote gets watered down by inadvertently double-scanning ballots.”

In a 45-minute discussion of the rule, a Republican member of the State Election Board warned that it ran “counter to both the federal and the state law” because it suggested counties could ignore the existing legal deadlines. The Republican chair of the board said that “this rule needs a little bit more work on it to make sure that it fully follows the statute” and that it was “not yet ready for prime time.” The board’s only Democratic member emphasized that it “is a criminal act to refuse to certify valid votes.”

Speaking alongside other conservative elections officials supportive of Thorne, Adams said that if an investigation was able to “find out why the numbers were wrong, a county might be late in certifying but they’d be a whole lot closer in returning accurate results.”

The five-person board, which has four Republicans on it, voted the proposal down unanimously, while offering to have two members work with supporters to refine the rule for future consideration.

That wasn’t the end of the proposal. In a matter of days, the Republican House speaker made a new appointment to the State Election Board, replacing a Republican lawyer who practices election law and who had said the rule was illegal and voted against it. In his place, the speaker appointed Janelle King. King is a conservative podcaster and panelist on a Georgia politics TV show, co-chairs a conservative political action committee, has no experience administering elections and has questioned the results of the 2020 election.

In June, a conservative activist resubmitted the rule with only minor updates, retaining a misspelling in its most important sentence.

In early August, during a rally in Atlanta, Trump praised by name the three members of the board’s new majority who are aligned with him, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory” and saying they were “doing a great job.”

Days later, the State Election Board adopted a rule by a 3-2 vote that allowed for county board members to delay certification of election results to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into them. The Republican chair sided with the lone Democratic appointee in opposition. Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger harshly criticized that rule in a statement that called it “new activist rulemaking.”

“Quick reporting of results and certification is paramount to voter confidence,” Raffensperger said. “Misguided attempts by the State Election Board will delay election results and undermine chain of custody safeguards. Georgia voters reject this 11th hour chaos, and so should the unelected members of the State Election Board.”

ProPublica interviewed six election experts about the potential impact of the rule that is scheduled to be considered by the election board on Monday. Five said it seemed more likely to affect urban Democratic counties than rural Republican ones because the former are more populated and have more ballots and voters.

“The statistical probability of a discrepancy is more likely to occur in counties with many voters,” said Paul Gronke, a professor at Reed College and the director of the Elections and Voting Information Center. “What’s unusual” about the proposed rule “is saying that any discrepancy is enough to refuse to certify a whole precinct’s worth of votes,” without considering the magnitude of the discrepancy or the votes it might disenfranchise.

The six experts listed off numerous scenarios in which small discrepancies that do not impact the outcome of the election regularly occur, including: ballots getting stuck in scanners and overlooked, citizens checking in to vote and then discontinuing the process before finalizing their vote, memory sticks failing to upload, election systems being slow to update that a provisional ballot has been corrected and so on.

According to the experts, election laws across America do not allow minor discrepancies to halt the certification process because legally mandated deadlines are tight. There are later opportunities to resolve the discrepancies, such as mandatory audits, investigations and litigation.

“There’s a process for investigating problems” with vote tallies in the courts, “and so if a candidate feels there’s something wrongly done, they can go to the courts,” said Gowri Ramachandran the director of elections and security in the Brennan Center’s Elections & Government program.

If the proposed rule were used to delay certification, the battle would shift to the courts, according to the experts. Georgia law is explicit that certification is mandatory and that attempts by county board members not to certify votes would prompt interested parties to seek a writ of mandamus, a type of court order forcing government officials to properly fulfill their official duties. This prescribed remedy goes all the way back to an 1899 decision by the state Supreme Court, arising from a situation in which a county board was overruled when it tried to refuse to certify a precinct to give victory to their preferred candidates.

What would happen after that is less clear. Numerous outside groups would likely attempt to join the litigation, including the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee. On appeal, cases could end up at Georgia’s Supreme Court. Or they could get moved to federal court. The closest precedent is the recount of the 2000 election in Florida, which only ended after the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the count and awarded the presidency to Republican George W. Bush by a 5-4 vote.

“The 100% definitive answer is that no one knows how such a crisis would play out,” said Marisa Pyle, the senior democracy defense manager for Georgia with All Voting is Local Action, a voting rights advocacy organization. “No one wants to find out.”

by Joshua Kaplan

This story discusses threats of violence and contains a racial slur.

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

Last February, some 20 men and their wives gathered for dinner at an upscale restaurant in Spokane, Washington, for their annual Valentine’s Day celebration. The men weren’t just friends; they did community service work together. They had been featured on local television, in khakis and baseball caps, delivering 1,200 pounds of food to an area veterans’ center; they were gearing up for their next food drive, which they called Operation Hunger Smash. A few days after the holiday, the men went camping in the snow-speckled mountains outside Spokane, where they grilled rib-eyes and bacon-wrapped asparagus over a bonfire.

They also engaged in more menacing activities. They assembled regularly — sometimes wearing night-vision goggles in the dark — to practice storming buildings together with semiautomatic rifles. Their drills included using sniper rifles to shoot targets from distances of half a mile. And they belonged to a shadowy organization whose members were debating, with ever more intensity, whether they should engage in mass-scale political violence.

They were among the thousands of members of American Patriots Three Percent, a militia that has long been one of the largest in the United States and has mostly managed to avoid scrutiny. Its ranks included cops and convicted criminals, active-duty U.S. soldiers and small-business owners, truck drivers and health care professionals. Like other militias, AP3 has a vague but militant right-wing ideology, a pronounced sense of grievance and a commitment to armed action. It has already sought to shape American life through vigilante operations: AP3 members have “rounded up” immigrants at the Texas border, assaulted Black Lives Matter protesters and attempted to crack down on people casting absentee ballots.

Now with the presidential election less than 100 days away, AP3 members see the fate of their country turning on a turbulent, charged campaign. They’re certain that Democrats will try to steal — not for the first time, in their view — the White House from Donald Trump. “The next election won’t be decided at a Ballot Box,” an AP3 leader wrote several months ago in a private Telegram chat. “It’ll be decided at the ammo box.” He has said he is ready to force his way into voting centers if need be, or “whatever it takes.”

The public’s impression of American militias is dominated by Jan. 6, 2021. Groups such as the Proud Boys had plotted to prevent the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden. They formed the vanguard of the mob that stormed the Capitol that day, according to the Department of Justice. Media coverage since has centered on the prosecutions of participants, with hundreds of rioters sent to prison.

But despite the riot and its fallout, militias are far from extinct. AP3 has expanded at a dramatic pace since Jan. 6, while keeping much of its activity out of view. This rise is documented in more than 100,000 internal messages obtained by ProPublica, spanning the run-up to Jan. 6 through early 2024. Along with extensive interviews with 22 current and former members of AP3, the records provide a uniquely detailed inside view of the militia movement at a crucial moment.

The messages reveal how AP3 leaders have forged alliances with law enforcement around the country and show the ways in which, despite an initial crackdown by social media, they have attracted a new wave of recruits. A change in the political climate has also helped: In a matter of months after Jan. 6, rioters went from pariahs to heroes in the rhetoric of prominent Republican politicians. By the summer of 2021, people were enlisting in AP3, saying that Jan. 6 inspired them to join.

A portrait emerges of a group alternating between focused action and self-destructive chaos and facing a schism over whether political engagement can still address our nation’s problems — or whether violence is the only option. It can be hard to discern the line between bluster and imminent threat in the messages, a perennial struggle for FBI agents who monitor paramilitary groups. But some senior AP3 members grew so alarmed that they quit, scared by the number of people, even high-level leaders, advocating acts of terror.

The materials also shed light on what former national security officials say is the most urgent question regarding militias: Will Jan. 6 prove the high water mark of the movement’s violence or merely a prelude to something more catastrophic? AP3 leaders have sometimes characterized the storming of the Capitol as a botched job, a failure of ill-formed plans that didn’t go far enough. “The Jan 6 event made the movement look weak and uncommitted,” one wrote a year and a half after the riot in a secret channel. “Had the house been taken for real and held we would all be in a different world.”

This is the story of a militia fighting for its survival, determined not to make the same mistake twice.

AP3 members train in Washington state. (Obtained by ProPublica) “Life Is Too Fucking Short”

On a Thursday afternoon in February 2021, Scot Seddon, national commander of AP3, sent an audio message to his deputies in a channel open only to the group’s leadership. A former Army reservist, Seddon had founded AP3 when he was in his 30s and shaped it into a national force. Now he was 50, with a receding hairline, his beard overtaken by gray. In videos from this time, typically recorded in his kitchen, Seddon favored baseball caps and tight shirts that revealed his bulky shoulders and trapezius muscles. He looked like an aging bro who had just returned from the gym. “I hate this movement more every day,” Seddon said that February day, “and I really don’t even want to be a part of it anymore.”

It had been a few weeks since the Capitol riot. The FBI was already arresting leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, two of AP3’s prominent counterparts. Another militia was about to dissolve. One of Seddon’s lieutenants had issued a dark forecast: The reaction to Jan. 6 could destroy our movement. Everyday Americans will recoil.

Seddon on the Capitol Riot AP3 national commander Scot Seddon, in a video posted on Jan. 6, 2021, claimed that left-wing antifa protesters infiltrated the crowd at the Capitol that day, an assertion dismissed by experts. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Watch video ➜

At least Seddon didn’t have to fear going to prison. AP3 had spent weeks preparing to go to Washington, D.C., for Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, with one of his top deputies promising to “mad max this shit.” Whether through luck, foresight or miscalculation, Seddon had decided to save his forces for that event rather than deploy them at the Jan. 6 rally. Plenty of his members went anyway; some fought with police officers on the Capitol steps. But they were under orders not to wear AP3 insignia, according to two former lieutenants to Seddon, and the organization was never publicly linked to the rioters.

That did not save AP3 from the fallout. Membership plummeted. AP3ers lost friends and business. Active-duty police officers quit out of fear of losing their jobs.

What’s more, AP3’s best recruiting tool was essentially gone: Facebook had cracked down on paramilitary organizing. “Facebook has been our greatest weapon. It’s gotten us where we are today,” Seddon told his troops. He later described those months as a period of personal “misery” and self-doubt. “I had a drinking problem,” he would confide to the group. “The bottle was consuming me.”

By the middle of 2021, some AP3 leaders were ready to give up. In July, the head of its Arizona chapter announced he was stepping down. “My life is too fucking short to beg people to do what’s right,” he said. He had hardly any members left in his state, and rebuilding was proving impossible. Still, he added, “It has been a great honor to me to have been here (and stayed here) through some of the most trying times this movement has seen since April 19, 1995.”

Seddon displays the hand signal of the Three Percenters, a loose confederation of right-wing groups that AP3 is affiliated with, in a photo posted in 2023. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Nobody needs to explain the significance of ​​that date to a militia member. It was the day a Gulf War veteran with militia ties named Timothy McVeigh blew up a government building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more. The modern militia movement — loosely speaking, a wide variety of groups whose shared traits are military-style training, an affinity for guns and a belief that they are the last line of defense against the excesses of the government and the left — started in the early 1990s and had been growing rapidly. But after the bombing, the movement crumbled. It didn’t recover until 2008, when a financial crisis and Barack Obama’s presidential election kindled a new generation of leaders like Seddon.

But the political climate after Jan. 6 would be very different from the period after McVeigh’s attack. Soon, Seddon’s group would have momentum back on its side.

Lions and Men

Seddon seems like an unlikely commander of a paramilitary organization. Raised in the suburbs of Long Island, he bounced between jobs through his early 40s, including stints as the manager for a small-time rapper and as a model. Seddon appeared on book jackets, including a vampire romance novel titled “Love’s Last Bite.” And there he was, in an awkward shirtless pose with a woman in lingerie, on the cover of “How to Handle a Younger Man: A Collection of Five Erotic Stories.”

It was in internet forums for models, during the latter years of the George W. Bush administration, where Seddon’s right-wing politics started to emerge publicly. He would engage in lengthy sparring with his peers, heckling them with insults: “we dominate you libs” and “you SOUND LIKE A FRENCHMEN need I say more?”

Seddon during his days as a model (Screenshot taken by ProPublica via Bookmate.com)

Seddon grew increasingly alienated — he would later say that he felt “very alone” after Obama was elected — and engaged. He became active on a Facebook page to support Iraq War veterans. And then, during Obama’s first term, he used that as a launchpad to create AP3. At the time, Seddon did not yet own a firearm, according to one of his first recruits.

Like many militias, AP3 was suffused with a military ethos. It adopted the hierarchy and nomenclature, with ranks such as “command sergeant major.” One credential most conferred authority: military service.

Seddon described himself as a veteran and, in a public resume, stated that he had served in Operation Desert Storm. He would tell Army stories to AP3 members and show them a photo of himself as a young soldier. Even his closest confidants in the group were left with the impression that he had substantial military experience.

But Seddon did not, in fact, serve in a combat zone. He joined the Army Reserve, without any prior stint in the military, more than a year after Desert Storm was over, according to his discharge papers and military personnel records. His active-duty tenure lasted for five months, the documents say, and ended when he finished his initial training.

Seddon’s Army discharge papers, along with military personnel records, show he was on active duty for five months. (Obtained by ProPublica. Redacted by ProPublica.)

Seddon declined to be interviewed for this article. Presented with an extensive list of written questions, he responded, “Lions do not concern themselves with the opinions of men.”

“J6 Made Me Want to Join”

Seddon’s vision for AP3 was novel for the time: a national organization, with chapters across the country operating under his command. After Obama announced a plan for tougher gun control in his second term, membership exploded, former leaders said. One told ProPublica that their local chapter grew from four or five people to over 200 in less than a year.

By 2016, AP3 had an active presence in 48 states, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center — larger than any other organization the anti-extremism watchdog was tracking. AP3 was part of the loose confederation known as the Three Percenters, a set of right-wing groups that take their name from the claim that only 3% of colonists fought in the American Revolution. At its peak, by Seddon’s likely exaggerated count, AP3 had 40,000 to 50,000 members. After the Jan. 6 riot, insiders and experts estimate the total was, at most, in the low thousands.

Seddon set about rebuilding the group in 2021. It was difficult initially and made even harder by his own struggles. When the pandemic started, he had a job as a doctor’s technician in New York City, but he refused to get vaccinated and left the medical field. He tried to get licensed as a realtor, then as a personal trainer, and found gig economy work near Scranton, Pennsylvania. He often recorded video directives to his troops from his car while driving between deliveries for Uber Eats.

He began reinvigorating the remnants of his command. His communications offered a mix of elements that his followers found compelling. There was lots of posturing: “Fuck the federal government,” he offered as an opener in one video. “These rats, these devils,” he said in another, “the only way they’re going to start listening is fear.” But Seddon also hailed his members as patriots, heroes, and praised their deeds with an “awesome job bro.” Seddon traveled the country. He would drop by at AP3’s training exercises, where veterans might teach close-quarters gun combat at an abandoned car dealership or lead sniper rifle practice at a suburban ranch.

“You Should Be a Monster” An excerpt from an AP3 recruiting video (Obtained by ProPublica)

Watch video ➜

Recruiting new members and unifying the old ones — a disparate roster that brought together men with white nationalist ties and Black military vets — demanded constant effort. Seddon avoided getting pinned down on one controversial question: what precisely his group’s purpose was. “Resisting all efforts to undermine our constitution and the American way of life,” AP3’s mission statement read, at once lofty and vague. “Together we will return our country to the glory it once was.” Many members were furious about COVID-19 restrictions and the “LGBTQ agenda.” Gun control, they thought, was an injustice that might be worth dying over. But Seddon imposed no litmus test. “We have some [members] that are fixated on Muslims,” as one leader put it. “Most are fixated on Antifa and BLM.”

Under Seddon, AP3 was both an armed right-wing resistance group and something akin to a Rotary Club; camaraderie was as important a draw as ideology. AP3 members patrolled city streets with AR-15-style rifles and baseball bats during Black Lives Matters protests. They practiced attacking dummies with knives. But they also taught each other how to save money on groceries through gardening and organized seminars where they wrote reports on each Constitutional amendment. One member said the group dispatched trucks filled with clothes and furniture to his family after a wildfire destroyed their house. AP3 had its own monthly magazine, with militia news in the front pages and word games for kids in the back.

AP3 is both an armed right-wing resistance group and something akin to a Rotary Club; camaraderie is as important a draw as ideology. In chats, members shared images of everything from their weapons to their gardening successes. (Obtained by ProPublica. The photo of a person with an American flag on his chest was cropped.)

By August 2021, Seddon’s lieutenants noticed that the backlash to the Capitol riot was starting to dissipate. A new type of member was signing up. “J6 made me want to join,” a recruit wrote that month in a Telegram channel. He hadn’t been part of a militia before, he explained, but seeing how “true Patriots” were being treated, “it was time to actually do something.”

Seddon sought ways to capitalize on the improving political climate. In Alabama, members fanned out to shops around the state, where they dropped off stacks of business cards encouraging patriots to “do your part.” “The APIII Alabama Recruitment line has rang non stop today,” a leader reported back afterward. “I honestly wasn’t expecting it to get this big.”

In Washington state, AP3 members in the military reserves touted the militia to fellow reservists during their units’ regular monthly drills. One chapter looked into purchasing billboard ads. In internal chats, many members agreed the “best place to recruit” is Veterans Affairs facilities.

By the fall, they had arrived at a more efficient method. Facebook’s public posture hadn’t wavered. AP3 was still on its list of banned “dangerous organizations.” Again and again in press releases, the company said its efforts to combat militias were stronger than ever.

Inside AP3, though, leaders were seeing something different: The social media giant was gradually loosening its controls.

A Meta spokesperson said Facebook was still actively working to keep AP3 off its platform. “This is an adversarial space,” she said, “and we often see instances of groups or individuals taking on new tactics to avoid detection and evade our policies and enforcement.”

Seddon would soon tell leaders there were “huge opportunities to recruit using Facebook” again. AP3 experienced such an influx of aspiring members that leaders struggled to keep up. “GUYS WE REALLY NEED SOME HELP,” one of Seddon’s deputies wrote in a typical appeal in an internal chat. “GOT 175 PEOPLE WAITING TO GET IN.”

It was a sorely needed shot of adrenaline.

“Our Force Multiplier”

The cover of the February 2022 issue of AP3’s magazine (Obtained by ProPublica)

In the view of many AP3 leaders, their chances of success hinged on building alliances with another heavily armed sector of society: police and sheriffs’ departments. If they couldn’t get the agencies to fight alongside them, they at least needed the cops to leave them alone. Many organizations like AP3 share this approach; a leaked FBI counterterrorism guide from 2015 noted that investigations of “militia extremists” often find “active links to law enforcement officers.” The details of those efforts rarely come into public view.

One test of that strategy occurred in Kenosha, Wisconsin, as the prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse was winding to a close in 2021. When Black Lives Matter protests and civil unrest overtook Kenosha the year before, Rittenhouse had ventured into the scrum with a semiautomatic rifle and killed two people. Prosecutors called it murder; Rittenhouse called it self-defense. Within AP3, he’d become a folk hero. “Kyle represents every one of us,” one leader said.

In September 2021, with Rittenhouse’s trial two months away, AP3 leaders were preparing for what would happen after the verdict. If he were acquitted, there might be riots in Kenosha. And if there were riots, the militia might deploy a team that could be in the same position as Rittenhouse had been in, walking armed into a volatile situation. They wanted local law enforcement on their side.

The head of AP3’s Wisconsin chapter, a truck driver, had already contacted the Kenosha County sheriff. He’d invited a couple of local officers over for beers, too. The sheriff wasn’t interested in help from a militia, the chapter head reported in an internal chat. (The sheriff did not respond to attempts to seek comment.) Seddon told him he wasn’t trying hard enough: “I hate these kind of excuses.”

A man wears an AP3 patch at a rally with the Proud Boys in Portland, Oregon, in 2020. (Maranie R. Staab/AFP/Getty Images)

On Sept. 20, Seddon recorded a speech with more full-throated instructions for courting law enforcement. He already had officers as members: One AP3 leader in Alabama would send video messages while driving in his police uniform. Seddon wanted to move up the chain of command. “We need to pick the good apples and we need to have them infiltrate the minds of those on the inside that stand on the fence,” he said. “It’s like building an army.”

He knew that was harder to achieve when you’re seen as anti-government extremists. So Seddon had created a playbook for presenting AP3 as a misunderstood club for good Samaritans. Leaders encouraged members to get local police departments involved in AP3’s food drives for homeless people. Seddon emphasized that these community service projects, a source of pride for many members, were invaluable public relations coups.

His members distributed brochures — “WE ARE NOT A MILITIA!!!!!” they declared — at rallies and to police officers. This was a branding decision to make people like cops feel comfortable supporting or joining AP3, Seddon said in internal messages, even though “we all know better.”

Seddon pushed members to contact sheriffs in their regions and had his deputies send Excel spreadsheets to the militia’s rank and file. The documents listed every sheriff in each member’s state, with columns to mark whether they were Republicans and “friendly.”

Sometimes it came easily. During the 2022 election, the county where Burley Ross, head of AP3’s North Carolina chapter, lived had an open seat for sheriff. In an interview with ProPublica, Ross said he approached both candidates and asked: If the federal government wanted you to take someone’s guns, what would you do?

“I’m 100% not taking someone’s guns,” Scott Hammonds, the Republican candidate, responded, according to Ross. When his Democratic opponent said he’d enforce the law, Ross suggested that if he tried that, someone would leave the encounter in a body bag.

Hammonds won. Then as sheriff, he became an “off the books” member of AP3, according to messages Ross sent in internal chats. Some of Hammonds’ deputies started training with the group, Ross wrote. “For us to train with the deputies, that’s a plus for us,” he told ProPublica, “because we understand how they work.” ProPublica could not independently confirm Hammonds’ relationship with the group. Hammonds did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Burley Ross was head of AP3’s North Carolina chapter. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Police officers weren’t the only ones quietly allying with AP3. Some lawmakers did, too. Among them was a North Carolina state legislator who was an off-the-books member, Ross wrote in an internal chat. It was Keith Kidwell, leader of the state House Freedom Caucus. (Ross asked ProPublica to make clear he did not name Kidwell or Hammonds in interviews and that ProPublica identified them using the AP3 messages it obtained. Kidwell did not respond to requests for comment.)

AP3’s “commanding officer” in Oklahoma, Ed Eubanks, took an especially calculated approach to cultivating ties with police. A competitive shooter who said he’d been a sniper in the Special Forces, Eubanks was older than most in the militia, in his 60s and retired. He was an “outcast” in his liberal family, he wrote to a group of about 100 militia members, echoing a common theme in the group. He had a lot of time to dedicate to AP3.

Eubanks announced in a 2021 internal chat that he was setting up “a PR team to start making inroads” with law enforcement across Oklahoma. He let officers use shooting ranges on his property. He built a barbecue smoker with “APIII” on the side to use for meet-and-greets with police departments. It was just the sort of creativity Seddon was hoping for.

The barbecue smoker (as it was being constructed) that Ed Eubanks built to use for meet-and-greets with police departments (Obtained by ProPublica)

Eubanks would claim success with multiple law enforcement agencies, particularly the Oklahoma City police force. Messages from 2020 show the courtship in its beginnings. Eubanks described his plans to stage a counterprotest at an upcoming “defund the police” rally in Oklahoma City in order to “build a better relationship with the OKCPD.” After the rally, Eubanks reported that he had made connections with city police officers who would be giving him intel (and barbecue — they’d invited AP3 members to a cookout at police union headquarters after the event).

In the years that followed, the invitations to functions at the union lodge continued, according to messages from Eubanks and another AP3 member. Eubanks said police notified him when rallies were happening and that the militia got “minute by minute updates” from officers at some events.

A spokesperson for the Oklahoma City police department said it was “going to pass” on a request for an interview and did not respond to detailed written questions. Mark Nelson, president of the local Fraternal Order of Police, said that AP3 was never invited to an official union event, but that officers can host private events at the union lodge and he would “have no idea” who was invited. In response to detailed questions, Eubanks declined to comment.

One of Eubanks’ members said he pretended to be a Black Lives Matter supporter at one protest in the city because police had asked AP3 to embed a member inside BLM and report back. “The demonic presence there when the leaders showed up,” the member wrote, “was downright oppressive.”

ProPublica could not determine the full extent of AP3’s ties to the Oklahoma City police, but Eubanks contended in a message that his efforts were “worth every second.” As he put it in another message, “This will be our force multiplier when the time arises.”

AP3 members, left, foreground, at a county GOP dinner in Washington state in late 2021 (Obtained by ProPublica) AP3 on Patrol

By mid-2022, Seddon was growing ebullient. He’d toned down his drinking, he told his comrades. In videos, he looked clean cut and slimmed down. Recruiting was booming, with as many as 50 people applying each day. His members were providing security details for county GOP events again. And the militia’s first major operation since the Capitol riot was well underway.

Seddon had sounded a call to arms in late 2021. Illegal border crossings were surging, and the Texas governor had declared that his state was “abandoned” by the federal government. “Our country is being invaded at the Southern border,” Seddon said. “Haitians, Middle Easterners, South American invaders that are coming in.” He had about 20 members preparing to deploy to Quemado, Texas, he said, and was seeking more volunteers.

Anyone interested would need to bring an AR-15-style carbine and a semiautomatic pistol. They would conduct vigilante patrols, a regular feature at the border since the 1970s. Another leader explained the rules. “It is a felony to detain these folks under Texas law,” he said. “We can only report to the authorities, but we are allowed to carry live rounds.”

Many members said they didn’t want to go if they couldn’t kill migrants. “​​The most heard comment I get” is “there is only one way to stop them,” one leader told Seddon. AP3 joined forces with another militia and soon had members in Quemado, sleeping at a Christian charity 1,000 feet from the Rio Grande.

The charity’s leaders, terrified of the Mexican cartels that helped transport some migrants, were initially grateful for the support. They put the militiamen up in twin bunk beds in little rooms that resembled a hospital ward. AP3 would keep a presence at the border for at least the next year and a half. Their members caught migrants and turned them over to the authorities. In time, messages claim, they were patrolling over 10,000 acres of land.

Eubanks helped lead the operation. At night, he’d split members up to cover more ground. Then he would don camouflage fatigues and venture alone into the pitch darkness, a shotgun in his hand.

First image: A room where AP3 members stayed in Quemado, Texas. Second image: Ed Eubanks near the border. Third image: A small vehicle used by AP3 members for their patrols. (Obtained by ProPublica)

In internal chats, Eubanks bragged about the allies they’d cultivated, including Brad Coe, a cowboy-hat-wearing local sheriff who had publicly praised border militias and regularly discussed immigration on Fox News. Coe shared intel with him and discussed the idea of Eubanks “running a bush team to track the cartel,” Eubanks told Seddon and others. Eubanks complained in the chats that the Texas Department of Public Safety was “refusing to work with us” but said AP3 was collaborating with the Border Patrol and the National Guard, who installed “observation pads for us to use along the river.”

The partnerships didn’t always go smoothly. Once, an AP3 member got into an argument with a National Guardsman that turned physical. “He kicked the shit out of the national guardsman,” Ross, who helped coordinate the operation, told ProPublica. “I called him and said, ‘You cannot beat up the national guardsmen any more.’” (Local law enforcement arrived but decided not to make any arrests, according to Ross.)

Coe did not respond to requests for comment. A Border Patrol spokesperson did not address ProPublica’s questions about its agents but said that civilians “involving themselves in border security related activities” is “unlawful” and “dangerous.” In response to detailed questions, the Texas Military Department, which oversees the Texas National Guard, issued a one-sentence statement: “The Texas Military Department does not provide support to or operate with local militias.”

As the operation expanded, Eubanks sent back pictures of hundreds of migrants the militias had “rounded up,” huddled on the ground, often surrounded by Border Patrol or what appear to be National Guard members. The militiamen would return excited after stopping a group at gunpoint, according to Lorraine Mercer, the charity’s ministry director, who got to know the men over many months as their host. They didn’t always wait for government agents to arrive, Mercer said. “Some of them were trying to run them back into Mexico,” she told ProPublica. They’d say, “We’ll handle them, the Border Patrol doesn’t know what they’re doing.”

Seddon wanted the operation to get even more ambitious. And he had a scheme he thought could make that possible. “The bottom line is we need to start making money,” he told state leaders in July 2022. His answer was to create a nonprofit called American Community Outreach Network.

ACON’s website gave no indication of its ties to AP3. It was advertised as a charity that provided services in disaster zones and to disadvantaged youth.

But in internal chats, Seddon was explicit that ACON was a way to fund the militia. “I want every single one of us to fucking get rich,” he said in one video. “I want to be sitting on a yacht in two years with every one of you,” he said in another. Members would receive a 20% cut of any donations they brought in, he promised.

This was more than a get-rich-quick ploy, in Seddon’s telling. It could help AP3 thrive in the post-Jan. 6 era. “I feel reborn,” he said as the plan moved ahead. Imagine if people didn’t need to juggle militia duties with their day jobs, “if every single one of us had the ability to do this full-time,” he said. It’d be so much easier to mobilize troops to the border or anywhere else.

“It’s Going to Be a Blood Bath”

“This election is do or die for us,” Seddon told his lieutenants in August 2022. The midterm elections were months away, and Democrats controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. If we can’t retake Congress now, Seddon said in a video, “we’re in real, real deep shit.” He had a plan to get involved.

Seddon wanted AP3 to fan out across the country, stake out ballot boxes and deter fraudulent voting, which he claimed was rampant during the 2020 election. “We’re trying to persuade these people maybe that’s not such a good idea,” Seddon said about supposed liberal ballot stuffers. “There’s a large group of what look like some pretty badass patriots outside.” The operation was shortly underway in Arizona, Colorado and Michigan, though it’s unclear how many members heeded Seddon’s call.

Absentee ballots had barely made it into voters’ mailboxes before it all went awry. Eubanks posted a handheld video of a television screen in an internal chat: “NBC Nightly News” was showing surveillance footage of a man in Maricopa County, Arizona. The man hadn’t been identified, but inside AP3, they knew who he was: a Marine veteran named Elias Humiston. Several years before, he had pleaded guilty to an illegal firearm discharge. Now he was at the center of a national news cycle.

Humiston was captured on camera outside a drop box for absentee ballots. His face was masked, and he had a handgun and wore a tactical vest. He had gotten into a confrontation with a woman who tried to record his license plate, prompting the sheriff’s department to arrive.

“Now the DOJ is involved,” Eubanks wrote four days after the incident. Government attorneys said such activities could constitute illegal voter intimidation. But the authorities didn’t appear to know that the anonymous vigilante was a part of AP3.

Humiston had held a leadership role in AP3 and had recently won an award from the militia for his work at the border. He promptly resigned “to protect” AP3, records show. He was never charged with a crime or publicly linked to the militia. (Humiston did not respond to requests for comment.)

Some leaders said that Humiston’s efforts “should be applauded.” Another camp saw the mission as a foolhardy mistake by Seddon. “Poorly planned and horribly executed,” one leader called it.

Seddon told everyone to stop acting like cowards. “If it’s not this, it’s the fact that we’re white, that we’re Christian,” he said. The DOJ is “going to come at us no matter what we do,” Seddon continued. “Communism — that’s where this country is leading if we don’t take a stand.”

Seddon had always had a short fuse. But he was becoming increasingly militant and inflammatory, according to several longtime members. In messages, he raged against “pedophilia” in schools and the “panels of blacks” “disrespecting white Americans” on MSNBC. When Congress increased the IRS’ budget, he declared that revenue agents were coming to “kill our kids.” Once, in a voice note he recorded while driving, he paused. “I almost ran over this nigger,” Seddon said. “I am not racist — just these dirty fucks walking these streets.”

Seven former leaders told ProPublica they became alarmed by how the rhetoric was shifting in AP3. In the days after Jan. 6, Seddon had suppressed calls for violence, telling members who wanted to assassinate politicians to stand down. But he had stopped acting as a voice of restraint, even as such talk increased.

One morning in August 2022, an ex-cop with at least 100 AP3 members under his command announced a mysterious initiative. He had previously said it was time to take a violent stand against Black Lives Matter: “We will have to suffer some and some will die,” he said, but he was “tired of waiting.” Now he said he planned to assemble a “Tac Team” of “those who will do what others won’t.”

A different afternoon, a different leader put forward his own proposal. “We havnt made any head way in the last 5 plus years,” he wrote. Let’s pick a date and descend on government buildings across the country, he suggested, and then kill the officials who’ve committed treason. “Time to stack body’s up.” (Two others told him to arrange a secret meeting offline.)

After the 2022 midterms, Ross made a plea in an internal chat. “APIII AND EVERY OTHER PATRIOT group seems to want a fight,” he wrote. “A war will leave no winners.” Ross, too, believed that civil war was inevitable, but he pushed for the group to focus on grassroots politics in the meantime. “There’s going to be a time to be violent,” he told ProPublica. “I’m the type of person who’s like, ‘Now is not the time.’” In AP3, that made him a moderate.

A growing faction had lost hope in the democratic process. Elections and activism are pointless, they maintained; even the midterms were rife with fraud. They felt out of alternatives. Their talk was now a steady drumbeat:

“Get it over with I’ll die with honor.”

“It’s going to be a blood bath.”

“When does AP3 as a whole say, that’s enough and stand up?”

First two images: AP3 members training in the light and in the dark. Third image: AP3 members with fellow militiamen from the Oath Keepers. (Obtained by ProPublica) “I Know Where You Live”

Seddon’s downfall started around the turn of this year. An AP3 member, increasingly suspicious, had obtained a copy of his military discharge papers. That was enough to cause an explosion. After years of touting his Army experience, Seddon’s secret was exposed.

He tried to suppress the uprising that ensued. He threatened a former leader who confronted him about the records in private. “I know where you live,” Seddon wrote on Facebook Messenger. “Tread careful.” Ross accused Seddon of stolen valor and was kicked out.

Seddon’s command quickly began to unravel. A rumor started to spread: Law enforcement was investigating the ACON scheme. The charity had never taken off. One of Seddon’s ex-deputies told ProPublica it raised less than $5,000. But its website falsely advertised it as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit authorized to accept tax-deductible donations, which the IRS said is not true.

Leaders who had spent months encouraging the initiative now condemned ACON as a scam to put money in Seddon’s pocket. “Not volunteering for a Rico trial,” one member wrote in a side chat, referring to the racketeering statute that prosecutors use to take down the mafia. In the spring, state chapters began to defect from AP3 in droves.

Soon Seddon had lost a significant majority of his organization. Former leaders estimate that about 10 state chapters stayed on, leaving him to try to rebuild the militia’s presence everywhere else.

Seddon appears undaunted. He’s lost a large chunk of his membership before and managed to recover. (Meanwhile, the instability in his career continues. Recently, he started a business that offers “fast cash” to cancer patients who sign over their life insurance policies.)

Seddon, left, at a 2024 training (via Gab)

His recent setbacks seem to have only made him more volatile. Toward the end of Trump’s criminal trial in May, Seddon wrote on Facebook that Judge Juan Merchan was treating the former president unfairly. “This guy needs to meet his maker,” Seddon said. He followed up by posting the judge’s home address.

Facebook shut down his account, which he’d long been using to promote the militia. The platform conducted a large enforcement action against AP3 in June, according to the Meta spokesperson, removing 40 pages, 15 groups and 600 accounts that “were mostly focusing on recruitment.” The spokesperson said Facebook strengthened its policies at the beginning of the year “to take an even stricter approach to enforcement against this group and other banned militia organizations.”

Seddon was back on social media, this time on TikTok, after the assassination attempt on Trump in July. “This was a direct attack on us,” he said. “We need to become fucking lions.”

AP3’s travails have not been unique. Since the Capitol riot, the militia movement has grown more fractured and decentralized. This may make it harder for one leader to spur mass action. It could also make it harder for one leader to prevent mass action and for law enforcement to track the groups and to intervene.

The presidential election could propel the militia movement in a darker direction. Experts worry that a Trump loss could spark violence from those who feel it’s their only option, especially if he once again refuses to accept the results. If Trump wins and then fulfills his promise to pardon Jan. 6 defendants, they fear the most radical wing of his party could take it as a license for more extreme action.

AP3 may have splintered, but its former members have mostly just moved to other militias. John Valle, Seddon’s former third in command, sees the movement’s future as consisting of state and local groups, operating independently but coordinating on secure messaging apps.

He said that the 286 members of his Washington chapter are now operating as their own independent group. They didn’t want to get caught up in AP3’s potential legal problems, but their mission remains the same. As Valle put it, “We’re just rebranding.”

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

by Nick Judin, Mississippi Free Press

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

Beneath the city of Jackson, Mississippi, is a Rube Goldberg-esque network of pipes that brings water to residents. The system, by one estimate, is twice as long as it should be for a city of this size. Much of it has been in disrepair for years; some parts are more than 100 years old.

Underground, broken pipes have spewed water into the surrounding earth or sent it bubbling up from cracked streets. For every gallon of water that reaches a customer’s tap, at least another gallon doesn’t, according to a June estimate from the manager of the water system.

Aboveground, the symptoms of those problems have been faucets that sputtered and toilet bowls that didn’t refill. Teenagers in the county’s juvenile-detention center were sent to other facilities to shower, one official said. Hospitals that regularly lost water built their own wells. Roughly every few days, people in one part of town or another have received notices telling them their water was unsafe to drink unless they boiled it first. At times, like for two weeks in the winter of 2021, many residents had no running water at all.

But for years, state employees inspecting Jackson’s primary water system noted few problems with the distribution system — the pipes that delivered water to its customers. In the 16 years before the system collapsed in 2022, leaving roughly 160,000 residents in and around Jackson dependent on bottled water for weeks, inspectors admonished the city just a couple times about the pipes underground. They identified issues with low water pressure just once and noted high water loss a few times. But they issued no formal reprimands or fines.

From 2006 through 2021, Jackson’s inspection score from the Mississippi State Department of Health, which oversees water systems in the state, averaged nearly 4 out of 5. The few times MSDH identified major problems in Jackson, all but one were tied to its water plants, not the distribution system.

This week, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General said the state’s failure to flag ongoing problems in Jackson’s water system, including those in the pipes, contributed to the Jackson water crisis in August 2022. Over several years, the state’s inspections “did not reflect the conditions of Jackson’s system,” the inspector general’s staff wrote. As a result, they wrote, problems “were left unresolved until the eventual catastrophic failure of the system,” when the city’s main water plant finally buckled. It took weeks until the city could reliably pump clean water to residents.

A Jackson, Mississippi, firefighter loads cases of bottled water into a resident’s car in August 2022. The collapse of the city’s water system that summer left roughly 160,000 people dependent on bottled water for weeks. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP) Portable toilets were parked on the grounds of the Mississippi Capitol during the 2022 failure of Jackson’s water system. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP)

The Office of Inspector General said the EPA, as the agency ultimately responsible for compliance with federal drinking water standards, shares some responsibility for the state’s failures because it didn’t make sure the state was properly enforcing its regulations. The agency said in a response included in the report that it agrees with the inspector general’s findings.

MSDH hasn’t responded to requests for comment on the report; its response to the Office of Inspector General wasn’t immediately available. But the findings aren’t exactly new to state regulators. The report, which covers inspections from 2015 through 2021, corroborates reporting by the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica that looked at state inspections dating back to 2006.

The news outlets told MSDH this year that their reporting showed that the states’ inspections had failed to identify problems in the distribution system and to require the city to act. MSDH officials disputed the claim as “patently false,” saying its inspections were based on information provided by the city. The agency said the city of Jackson failed to take on the responsibility “to respond to any potential pressure or water loss issues.”

In an interview late last year, State Health Officer Dan Edney defended MSDH’s oversight. Still, he said he expected the EPA to tighten its rules on how states oversee water systems. “The EPA probably, after studying this event, is going to change some things in terms of how they want inspections to be, and I welcome that,” he told the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica. Such changes, he said, would allow Mississippi “to intervene in a little bit more meaningful way, sooner.”

Such changes are indeed underway. In response to the inspector general’s report, the EPA plans to review how MSDH conducts federally required inspections. Beyond Mississippi, the EPA is checking other states’ oversight in the Southeast. And federal officials will update EPA guidance on how to perform federally required inspections to include a process for handling ongoing problems such as those that plagued Jackson’s distribution system.

Water Pressure Was Bad, but Still Passed the Test

MSDH’s inspections do include questions about the pipes underground. But time and again, the agency’s inspection records did not reflect what was going on beneath the surface in Jackson.

Every year when inspectors came, they checked water quality, reviewed records and policies and looked over equipment. They filled out a two-page questionnaire, awarded points based on the answers and wrote up pages of recommendations. On every inspection report from 2006 to 2020, inspectors answered no to a question about whether there was “any indication” of pressure problems. Only in 2021 did they answer yes, noting that a fire at a water plant had caused pressure to drop.

A completed questionnaire after a state inspection of the Jackson water system in 2018. As on every other inspection report from 2006 to 2020, state employees answered no to a question asking if there was “any indication” of pressure problems. (Obtained by Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Edney, who became the state’s chief health officer in 2022, admitted to the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica that this was “surprising.” As a practicing physician, he had experienced water pressure problems at Merit Health Central, a hospital located in a part of town that was often the first to lose water during an outage.

There was other evidence as well: the city’s own boil-water notices, which alerted people to problems in the system. Low pressure resulting from a line break can allow bacteria to seep into the pipes, which is why Jackson residents regularly received such notices. From August 2014 through July 2022, Jackson issued more than 1,500 boil-water notices, according to city records in the possession of MSDH, including at least nine notices that affected everyone in the city. Such notices aren’t normally reported to the EPA. But, inspector general staff wrote, “if state surveyors find an exorbitant number of boil water notices” during a federally required inspection, “the state could report the issue to the EPA.”

The Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica asked Edney how inspectors could have noted pressure problems just once even as Jackson regularly shared boil-water notices with MSDH. Edney said the state doesn’t consider water pressure to be a problem unless it’s “consistently” below 20 pounds per square inch, and Jackson often posted pressures of 21 to 30 psi. “If they’re consistently running 22 psi, then they pass,” Edney said. “That’s an acceptable low pressure.”

Though that figure might be acceptable to Mississippi, it is much lower than the standard pressure specified in a set of guidelines that the EPA recommends water systems follow. Those guidelines, produced by a consortium of state water regulators, say that a water system’s “normal working pressure” must be at least 35 psi and generally should be between 60 and 80 psi.

Both MSDH and the EPA pointed out that these are just guidelines. There are no federal requirements for how high water pressure must be; the EPA says most states set the minimum at 20 psi to ensure that firefighters have the water they need.

Ken Kopocis, who led the EPA’s Office of Water during the Obama administration, said a water system operating on a thin margin like Jackson’s did is just “one small hiccup” away from an interruption in water service or a widespread outage. “This is going to happen,” he said. “It’s only a matter of happenstance that it got delayed as long as it did.”

Massive Water Loss Wasn’t a Problem for Inspectors

When pressure in a water system drops unexpectedly, there are two likely causes: a decline in water production at plants or water loss due to broken pipes.

Estimates suggest that for years, Jackson has lost half or even more of its treated water. It was a well-known problem among the people who ran the utility. In 2012, an engineering firm warned that the rate of water loss was increasing. In 2016, a public works official estimated that Jackson was losing 40% of its water, according to a news story at the time.

Data from the city’s water plants indicates the situation may have been even worse. Between 2013 and 2022, Jackson’s water plants produced an average of about 45 million gallons of treated water a day. On a normal day, the city should require 18 to 20 million gallons, according to Ted Henifin, the head of JXN Water, the federally appointed management firm now running the city’s water system.

Because of widespread leaks underground, Jackson’s two water plants, including the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant, had to produce much more water than the city should have needed. (Steve Helber/AP)

It wasn’t until after Henifin’s team took over the water system in 2022 that Terence Byrd, who managed one of the utility’s two water treatment plants for about five years, realized how those leaks contributed to the constant cycle of breakdowns and repairs at the plants. “Our plants were running into the ground,” said Byrd, who is now working for JXN Water, “because they were trying to pump against so many leaks in the system.”

Bill Miley, who was responsible for fixing those leaks when he served as utilities manager for the city of Jackson, said that work kept his ever-shrinking crews and hired contractors running nonstop. “I had enough to keep three crews busy near seven days a week,” he said.

The city experienced more than 7,300 breaks over a five-year period, according to the EPA inspector general, far above the industry benchmark. A former city official told federal employees that a single line break leaked 4 million to 5 million gallons a day — a total of 10 billion to 13 billion gallons from 2016 to 2022, according to the inspector general’s report. State inspectors, however, never flagged the frequent line breaks as a serious problem that warranted official corrective action.

Nor did they evaluate Jackson based on how much water it was losing. Their questionnaire asked only whether the city was tracking water loss at all and whether “acceptable” records were available for review. For all but two of 16 years, inspectors said Jackson’s records were fine.

The exception was in 2008 and 2009. The first year, inspectors noted that Jackson hadn’t provided acceptable records, which was considered a “significant deficiency,” and they told the city to respond with a plan to fix it. In 2009, state inspectors again noted the lack of records on their report. From 2010 on, MSDH’s inspection records show, the agency considered Jackson’s records acceptable.

Three current and former officials with Jackson’s water system told the news organizations that the inspection reports were wrong in calling the city’s water records acceptable. They explained that tracking water loss requires functional meters to measure how much water customers use. But in Jackson, the city’s water meters have been in a state of constant failure for at least the last decade. The city had no way to accurately calculate how much water it was losing, and officials knew it at the time.

In a written statement sent before the inspector general report was published, MSDH said that, under state law, there was nothing further the agency could have done to mandate that the records reflected reality. “There is no established and enforceable consequence of providing inaccurate water loss information,” the agency said. And there’s little chance that state lawmakers would grant the agency the authority to set a limit. The Legislature “is unlikely to support changing the regulatory environment for every public water system in the state as a result of Jackson and its specific lack of system maintenance,” MSDH officials said.

Inspectors eventually made note of Jackson’s water loss in their 2019 report, saying that city records showed that water loss was “around 50%.” The following two years, inspectors put it at more than 40%. Even then, Edney said MSDH had no authority to intervene because the state doesn’t have a limit on how much water a local utility can lose. “Maybe there needs to be,” he said.

The state’s limited approach to enforcement comes up repeatedly in the inspector general’s report. State employees overlooked some problems, and they didn’t consistently document others or escalate those that continued from year to year, inspector general staff wrote. When state employees did identify serious problems, they didn’t always notify the city and sometimes didn’t record them in an EPA database. As a result, the EPA didn’t know just how bad things were in Jackson.

A City That Couldn’t Count on the Water

The water system portrayed in the state’s inspection reports contrasted sharply with the experience of residents of Windsor Forest, a majority-Black neighborhood located far from the water plants and pumping stations.

For most of the six years that Paidra Evans has lived in the South Jackson neighborhood, she’s had trouble getting enough water to wash dishes or hose down her car. When the 2022 crisis hit, she was caring for her husband, a truck driver, as his health slowly declined. “A lot of times, when I had to bathe him on the bed, the water would be brown,” she said. “He couldn’t brush his teeth or anything. He said: ‘Baby, what is going on? Just let the water run, run, run, and then maybe it’ll get clear.’”

Paidra Evans lives in Windsor Forest, a neighborhood across the city from the water plants. That part of town experienced persistently low water pressure up until last year. (Nick Judin/Mississippi Free Press)

Her neighborhood “had been a focal point even before the crisis started,” JXN Water’s Byrd said. (As of October, JXN Water said it had transitioned the neighborhood to the city’s well system, alleviating these long-standing issues; Evans said her water pressure has improved.)

Miley, the city’s former utilities manager, was well aware of those problems. He said he knew something was wrong whenever he got a call from Merit Health Central. When the pressure dipped in the system, Merit would lose water above the fifth floor — a warning that others in the city weren’t getting water either.

Merit, which by 2015 was the only hospital in the city without its own water supply, eventually decided to pay $11,000 a month to park water trucks outside in case of an outage. The bill goes up to $10,000 per day when the hospital needs the water.

At the Henley-Young-Patton Juvenile Justice Center in South Jackson, every two months or so the water pressure would decline so severely that staff needed bottled water to cook and flush toilets, said Eddie Burnside, the facility’s operations manager. That started in 2018 and continued until at least 2023, he said.

In 2020, Hinds County installed a pump at the facility to draw water from the city’s pipes, Burnside said. But problems continued; Burnside said detainees drank bottled water when pressure dropped too low to trust what came out of the pipes.

Jordan Rae Hillman, JXN Water’s chief operating officer, confirmed in a written statement that pressure at Henley-Young dropped whenever there were significant line breaks anywhere in the city. She said it was a consequence of the facility’s relatively high elevation and the water system’s challenges in keeping the system pressurized.

Now, with the intervention of the federal government, pressure across the city has begun to increase. Melanie McMillan, Merit Health’s spokesperson, said the hospital has seen “tremendous improvement.”

That’s due to a drastic reduction in water loss, said Henifin, head of JXN Water. The city’s two plants now produce just 38 million gallons a day to meet demand, down from 55 million gallons a day last summer. “Great progress,” Henifin said; still, half of that water doesn’t make it to customers.

JXN Water has periodically monitored pressure outside Henley-Young, part of a new network of sensors across the city. The most recent measurement in February showed street-level pressure of 38 psi, just above what the guidelines recommended by the EPA say is the lower limit for normal pressure. Soon, a new jail nearby will provide well water, permanently freeing the juvenile facility from the city’s water service.

Though Mississippi regulators defended their oversight of the city’s water system, Edney acknowledged in two interviews that MSDH could do more to make sure communities have reliable, safe drinking water. When systems are out of compliance, the state will use the threat of fines to force water systems to make repairs, he said.

Kopocis, who headed the EPA’s Office of Water during the Obama years, echoed water regulators in a few other states in saying that the gaps exposed by the Jackson water crisis extend beyond Mississippi. Most states do not have water quality laws that are stricter than the federal government’s. And regulators in several states said inspectors there focus on water plants, not pipes.

That means problems like Jackson’s may go undetected before a major failure. Robert Brownwood, who works for California’s water regulator, said Jackson is like Flint, Michigan — another struggling, majority-Black city that made headlines for a water crisis beginning in 2014. “As Flint was for lead,” he said, “Jackson is the poster child for distribution infrastructure and repair.”

by Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica, and Garrett Yalch and Clifton Adcock, The Frontier

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article was produced in partnership with The Frontier. Additional funding for this story was provided by The Pulitzer Center.

Lin’s most vivid memory of the marijuana farm is the moment he found himself staring into the barrel of an AK-47.

He was one of several dozen Chinese immigrants who had spent months working without pay at the farm in Oklahoma. None of them had spoken up because they were intimidated by the bosses and their armed guards. But Lin and his wife, who also worked on the farm, were desperate for money to send to their kids back in China.

Seething with anger and frustration, he gathered his courage, confronted the manager and demanded his unpaid wages. As Lin’s wife looked on, aghast, the manager reached for an assault rifle and raised it to Lin’s face, he said.

“The gun was against my forehead,” Lin recalled in an interview. “I believe he was capable of pulling the trigger.”

The terrifying incident caused the couple to flee to New York. Three years later, Lin still lives in fear. He has received menacing calls from the farm’s owner and anonymous men, he said. His former bosses blame him for inciting labor conflicts at the farm and for a drug raid that shut it down in 2022, he said.

Lin’s story is a rare firsthand account of the harsh conditions and violent atmosphere endured by Chinese workers on many marijuana farms in Oklahoma and other states. ProPublica and The Frontier have reported that Chinese criminal groups, some with suspected ties to the Chinese state, have become a dominant force in the illicit U.S. marijuana trade and subjected thousands of Chinese immigrant laborers to abuse and exploitation.

Until now, though, much of that information about illegal activity in the cannabis industry has come from law enforcement officials, court and police records, community leaders and advocates. Lin gave a frightening front-line look inside the underworld.

Lin, a youthful 44-year-old, asked to be identified by his surname for his safety. He said he decided to recount his experience to seek justice. Interviewed through an interpreter, he spoke in a soft, strained voice as he described threats, stolen wages and employees confined to the farm against their will.

Reporters corroborated many aspects of Lin’s story with law enforcement and labor officials, court files, other government documents, interviews with another former worker, Chinese-language media reports, communications records and other sources.

Lin’s skills as a plumber and electrician made him a kind of leader among the employees at the farm, he said. (Alan Chin, special to ProPublica)

The owner of the now-defunct farm, Lamkam Ho, pleaded guilty last year to a charge of marijuana trafficking. She and her companion, Zhixuan Hai, who was the manager, are awaiting trial for allegedly robbing a business associate in Oklahoma City last year. Ho, 58, and Hai, 48, have not yet entered a plea in that case.

In addition, Ho has had contact with a suspected Chinese organized crime group involved in illicit activity in several states, according to a U.S. law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of ongoing investigations.

A lawyer representing the couple, Tyler Box, said he and his clients had no comment about the allegations against them. Ho and Hai did not respond to requests for comment.

Like many laborers and entrepreneurs in the U.S. marijuana industry, Lin is from the tough coastal province of Fujian. He says he left in 2016 because the government persecuted him for his Christian faith. He paid $50,000 to smugglers who bribed Chinese officials to issue him a passport and then sent him by plane to Tijuana, Mexico, where he climbed over the border fence into the United States and applied for political asylum.

He settled in New York. But when the pandemic disrupted the economy in 2020, he became one of many Chinese immigrants who found marijuana jobs in the West. He went to New Mexico and then Oklahoma.

In September 2020, Lin and his wife got hired at a former cattle farm in Maramec, about 45 miles west of Tulsa. His skills as a plumber and electrician made him a kind of leader among the employees, he said. At first, he won the trust of Ho, the owner, and Hai, the manager, who had both recently relocated from the Los Angeles area to set up a new operation, Lin said.

“I didn’t dislike the boss, because I’m technical personnel,” he said. “The boss wouldn’t mess with [me]. He knew that I just did my work.”

Lin laid pipes and did electrical work at the Maramec farm and at others nearby owned by the couple’s associates, he said. He did errands between the couple’s farm and their house in an upscale suburb of Oklahoma City. As one of the few employees at the remote compound who owned a vehicle, Lin took road trips to New Mexico to bring back heavy equipment, sleeping in his car rather than hotels to save money.

Hai even sent him on a mission to New York to pick up a kitchen stove — and $50,000 in cash hidden in appliance boxes, Lin said. In text messages about that October trip, Hai wrote “Thank you, brother” and told Lin “safety first,” according to a screenshot of the conversation.

But the mood at the farm darkened when planting began in dozens of greenhouses and sheds spread across 30 acres. The management hired three guards who patrolled the locked and fenced compound around the clock, Lin said. At least one of the guards has an arrest record, public records and media reports show. The armed men in civilian clothes intimidated the employees and kept them confined to the grounds unless they had permission to go out, Lin said.

The farm in Maramec, Oklahoma (Apple Maps)

“Their mere presence posed a threat,” he said. “They made the farmworkers feel threatened and afraid of the bosses. … There was no shortage of verbal violence.”

Lin and his wife, who worked in the greenhouses and as a cook, lived with other employees who were crowded into bunkhouses and trailers, he said.

“We slept with 20 or 30 people in one room,” he said. “There was only one bathroom and no air conditioner.”

As co-workers confided in him, he became alarmed at what he heard.

Two men and a woman from Guangxi province told him that smugglers, known by Chinese immigrants as “snakeheads,” had brought them across the Mexican border directly to the farm. The owner had paid their smuggling fees of about $20,000 each, Lin said the workers told him.

“The snakeheads sold them to the farm boss,” he said. “The farm boss paid the fee.”

The immigrants would have to remain at the site and work two years to pay off the debts, Lin said.

“They were not allowed to leave the farm,” he said. “We were given specific instructions not to take any of these people out on our once-a-week trips to buy daily necessities.”

A month into the job, Lin said, Hai told him the management could not pay his $4,000 monthly salary until after the harvest. The manager suggested Lin could make money instead by subcontracting a greenhouse from him to grow his own crop — a frequent tactic used against vulnerable marijuana workers to delay or avoid paying wages. Fellow employees who had moved with the bosses from a New Mexico farm to Oklahoma told Lin they were still owed many months of wages, he said.

“They only want you to work for them for free,” Lin said.

Lin said he and his wife discussed the workers’ plight with one of the few outsiders at the farm, a local contractor who drove a bulldozer and befriended them because he was a fellow Christian.

Despite Hai’s claims of financial difficulty, he drove a Mercedes and the couple owned homes in gated communities in Oklahoma and Southern California, records show. Ho incorporated a second marijuana-related business in Oklahoma with a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur who is a leader of diaspora organizations affiliated with the United Front, the Chinese Communist Party’s influence arm, according to business records and media reports. (The entrepreneur did not respond to requests for comment.)

By December, Lin had had enough. One day, he and his wife went to a room in the main house that Hai used as an office and sleeping quarters, he said. Lin declared that he wanted his pay. The Lins watched in disbelief as the manager pulled an AK-47 from beneath his bed and aimed it at Lin’s forehead, backing him against the wall, he said.

“I was scared when he took out the gun,” Lin said. He said Hai was furious because “the rest of the people wouldn’t ask for payment. I’m the only one who dared to ask.”

He said the manager told him: “After the harvest, I can give you the salary. If you continue like this, I will not be this courteous to you.”

Lin still lives in fear years after what happened on the farm. (Alan Chin, special to ProPublica)

Later that day, as word of the incident spread, Hai told other workers to urge Lin to stop complaining, Lin recalled. Lin said he didn’t report the incident to the police out of fears about his immigration status.

ProPublica and The Frontier were not able to corroborate the allegation about the gun. But another former worker, who asked to be identified only by his English first name, Chris, described a similar dispute in which Hai threatened him and his friend with a gun after they demanded their first month of wages while filming him with cellphones.

“He really liked to pull out the gun and threaten people — I experienced that firsthand,” Chris, a 35-year-old from Jiangsu province, told ProPublica and The Frontier. “We quickly snuck away and called the police.”

The Pawnee County sheriff, Darrin Varnell, confirmed in an interview that one of his deputies went to the farm in the summer of 2021 in response to that dispute and kept the peace as the terrified workers gathered their belongings and left. Sheriff’s deputies also received periodic calls from passing drivers about men patrolling the farm carrying AK-47s, but they were not able to confirm the reports, Varnell said.

After the confrontation at gunpoint, Lin said, the manager ordered him to stay in the compound.

“The boss wouldn’t let me leave the farm,” he said. “The attitude toward me changed.”

Along with two co-workers from the same village in Fujian, the Lins decided to escape. But they worried about retaliation if they got caught, he said. They spent tense and furtive days making plans and tracking the activities of the guards, he said.

“We kind of learned the patterns of when they would be there,” he said. “I stayed up at night watching to see if they would leave.”

One night shortly before New Year’s Eve, there were no guards in sight. Using a bolt cutter from the tool supplies, Lin broke through the lock on the front gate and the four of them sped off in his car, he said. They drove all the way back to New York.

On Jan. 3, 2021, Lin sent a complaint about unpaid wages by email to the Oklahoma Department of Labor. Emails show that a state official referred him to a Chinese-speaking employee of the U.S. Department of Labor, but Lin said he did not hear from that agency. An official at the federal agency declined to comment.

The Lins also called their friend the bulldozer contractor and told him what had happened, Lin said.

About a week after the escape, the owner of the farm called Lin’s wife, complaining angrily because the contractor had urged her to pay her workers, Lin said.

“She was telling us to keep our mouths shut,” he said. “My wife got really scared.”

Former co-workers told Lin by phone that the employers were looking for him and had even called a farm at which he’d worked in New Mexico asking about his whereabouts, he said. The workers also told him that others had followed his lead and complained about their unpaid wages to the owners and a reporter for Chinese-language media, he said.

The reporter relayed their accounts to federal labor officials, who advised the Oklahoma Department of Labor, according to Daniel Mares, the state agency’s assistant general counsel. State labor officials interviewed employees about the wage problems and alleged threats by the owners and alerted the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics because “concerns of potential human trafficking arose,” according to department emails provided by Mares.

The state narcotics bureau opened an investigation and, in September 2022, agents raided the Maramec farm backed by National Guard troops and sheriff’s deputies. Their search turned up 700 pounds of processed marijuana, 2,074 plants, two pistols and a small-caliber rifle, court documents say. Agents arrested four Mexican laborers and turned them over to immigration authorities.

National Guard troops raided the farm two years ago. (Oklahoma National Guard)

Ho had hired an Oklahoma resident, a known “straw owner” used by criminals to elude laws requiring local ownership, to pose as her majority partner, court documents say. Prosecutors charged Ho with illegal cultivation and trafficking and she was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport before she could board a flight to Hong Kong. In June of last year, Ho pleaded guilty to trafficking and received a deferred sentence to be imposed after a three-year probation period, court documents say.

A few weeks before that court appearance, she and Hai were arrested in Oklahoma City and charged with attacking and beating a Chinese American real estate agent in a parking lot and stealing $3,000 and two iPhones from him. The couple accused the victim, who has also been a target of drug investigations, of owing them $700,000, according to court documents. They were released on bond and neither has entered a plea in the case.

Lin, who has become a legal U.S. resident and embarked on a new life, says he has received several anonymous phone calls from Mandarin-speaking men warning him not to cause trouble and threatening to hurt his family. He believes his former bosses are behind the threats, though he cannot prove it. Friends have warned him to stay away from New York’s Chinatowns and other places with large Chinese populations.

“These people are still searching for me,” he said. “We are afraid.”

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

by Lisa Song

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

Is there anything more pathetic than a used plastic bag?

They rip and tear. They float away in the slightest breeze. Left in the wild, their mangled remains entangle birds and choke sea turtles that mistake them for edible jellyfish. It takes 1,000 years for the bags to disintegrate, shedding hormone-disrupting chemicals as they do. And that outcome is all but inevitable, because no system exists to routinely recycle them. It’s no wonder some states have banned them and stores give discounts to customers with reusable bags.

But the plastics industry is working to make the public feel OK about using them again.

Companies whose futures depend on plastic production, including oil and gas giant ExxonMobil, are trying to persuade the federal government to allow them to put the label “recyclable” on bags and other plastic items virtually guaranteed to end up in landfills and incinerators.

They argue that “recyclable” should apply to anything that’s capable of being recycled. And they point to newer technologies that have been able to remake plastic bags into new products.

I spent months investigating one of those technologies, a form of chemical recycling called pyrolysis, only to find that it is largely a mirage. It’s inefficient, dirty and so limited in capacity that no one expects it to process meaningful amounts of plastic waste any time soon.

That shouldn’t matter, say proponents of the industry’s argument. If it’s physically capable of being recycled — even in extremely limited scenarios — it should be labeled “recyclable.”

They are laying out their case in comments to the Federal Trade Commission as it revises its Green Guides, documents that define how companies can use marketing labels like “recyclable” or “compostable.” The guides are meant to curb greenwashing — deceptive advertising that exaggerates the sustainability of products. They were last updated in 2012, before the explosion of social media advertising and green influencers; the agency declined to answer questions about the revision or give an idea of when it will be done.

The push for a looser definition of “recyclable” highlights a conundrum faced not just by companies represented by the Plastics Industry Association, but by members of the Consumer Brands Association, whose plastic-packaged products fill grocery shelves across the world. (Neither trade group, nor ExxonMobil, wanted to elaborate on their positions advocating for a more liberal use of the word “recyclable.”)

Under increasing pressure to reckon with the global plastics crisis, companies want to rely on recycling as the answer. But turning old plastic into new plastic is really, really hard.

Products made with dyes, flame retardants and other toxic chemicals create a health hazard when they’re heated for recycling. That severely limits the types of products you can make from recycled plastic. And most items are too small for companies in the recycling business to bother sorting and processing, or they are assembled in a way that would make it far more costly to strip them down to their useful elements than to just make new plastic. Plastic forks? Straws? Toys given out in fast food meals and party favor bags? Never actually recycled. In fact, only 5% of Americans’ plastic finds new life.

Environmental experts worry that if the FTC sides with the industry, companies could slap the “recyclable” label on virtually anything.

Though the agency only pursues a few greenwashing cases a year, its guides — which are guidelines instead of laws — are the only national benchmark for evaluating recycling claims.

They’re used by companies that want to market their products in an honest way. They also serve as a reference for state officials who are drafting laws to try to reduce plastic waste.

By 2032, for example, most single-use packaging sold in California will need to be recyclable or compostable.

What good will such laws be, environmental experts worry, if those words mean nothing?

For at least three decades, the industry has misled the public about what really is recyclable.

Take a close look at any plastic product and you’ll likely see a little number stamped on it called a resin identification code; it distinguishes what kind of plastic it’s made of. Plastic bags, for example, are labeled No. 4. Only some No. 1 and No. 2 plastics are widely recyclable. In each case, the number is surrounded by the iconic “chasing arrows” symbol, which has come to denote recyclability, regardless of whether that product can actually be recycled.

The design was created in the 1980s by a group of chemical companies working with Exxon and BP; Grist recently published a fascinating story about the effort.

Around that time, the plastic industry was contending with the nation’s growing awareness that its products were the root of an intractable pollution problem. States were weighing legislation to deal with it. And the American Plastics Council was convening meetings to head off threats. The council discussed the arrows, which they described as “consumer tested,” according to meeting notes obtained by the Center for Climate Integrity, an advocacy group that works to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable.

The industry persuaded 39 states to require the use of the symbols. Their purpose, the notes said: “to prevent bans.” They pursued the strategy despite warnings from state regulators who predicted the arrows would lead consumers to overestimate the recyclability of plastic packaging.

By 1995, state attorneys general were telling the FTC that’s exactly what was happening.

The agency ruled in 1998 that brands could continue using the codes with the recycling symbol, but could only display them prominently — by printing them next to the brand name, for example — if the product was recyclable for a “substantial majority” of consumers. If not, the symbols could be stamped in a less obvious place, like the bottom of containers.

These mandates did little to ease consumers’ confusion. “You mean we’re not supposed to throw plastic bags in recycling bins?” a colleague recently asked me.

During a tour of the New York facility that sorts the city’s recyclables, I saw the result of a million well-intentioned mistakes — countless bags sloshing over conveyor belts like the unwanted dregs at the bottom of a cereal bowl.

A conveyor belt at the Brooklyn facility that sorts most of the material collected via curbside recycling in New York City (Sharon Lerner/ProPublica)

They’re notorious for clogging equipment. Sometimes, they start fires. And when they get stuck between layers of paper, the bags end up contaminating bales of paper that are actually recyclable, condemning much of it to the landfill.

If companies started printing the word “recyclable” on them, I wondered, how much worse could this get?

When you see something labeled as “recyclable,” it’s reasonable to expect it will be made into something new after you toss it in the nearest recycling bin.

You would be wrong.

The current Green Guides allow companies to make blanket “recyclable” claims if 60% of consumers or communities have access to recycling facilities that will take the product. The guides don’t specify whether facilities can just accept the item, or if there needs to be a reasonable assurance that the item will be made into a new product.

When the agency invited the public to comment in late 2022 on how the guides should be revised, FTC Chair Lina M. Khan predicted that one of the main issues would be “whether claims that a product is recyclable should reflect where a product ultimately ends up, not just whether it gets picked up from the curb.”

Strangely, that statement ignored the agency’s own guidance. An FTC supplement to the 2012 Green Guides stated that “recyclable” items must go to facilities “that will actually recycle” them, “not accept and ultimately discard” them.

The industry disagrees with the position.

“Recent case law confirms that the term ‘recyclable’ means ‘capable of being recycled,’ and that it is an attribute, not a guarantee,” said a comment from the Plastics Industry Association. Forcing the material to be “actually recovered” is “unnecessarily burdensome.”

Citing a consumer survey, ExxonMobil told the FTC that the majority of respondents “agreed that it was appropriate to label an item as recyclable if a product can be recycled, even if access to recycling facilities across the country varies.” The company’s comments argued against “arbitrary minimum” thresholds like the 60% rule.

The FTC also received comments urging the agency to tighten the rules. A letter from the attorneys general of 15 states and the District of Columbia suggested increasing the 60% minimum to 90%. And the Environmental Protection Agency told the FTC that “recyclable” is only valid if the facilities that collect those products can reliably make more money by selling them for recycling than by throwing them away in a landfill.

The industry argues that recycling is never guaranteed. Market changes like the pandemic could force facilities to discard material that is technically recyclable, wrote the Consumer Brands Association. There is “simply no consumer deception in a claim that clearly identifies that a product is capable of being recycled,” the group wrote, despite the fact that “an external factor several times removed from the manufacturer results in it ultimately not being recycled.”

And what if consumers stopped seeing as many products marketed as recyclable? That could “dramatically” lower recycling rates, the group wrote, because consumers would get confused, seeming to imply people wouldn’t know if they could recycle anything at all.

“Wow, that’s some weird acrobatics,” Lynn Hoffman, strategic adviser at the Alliance for Mission-Based Recycling, said of the industry’s uncertainty argument. The group is a network of nonprofit recyclers that supports a zero-waste future.

Hoffman acknowledged the inefficiencies in the system. The solution, she said, is to improve the true recyclability of products that can be reliably processed, like soda bottles, by tracking them as they pass through the supply chain, being transparent about where they end up and removing toxic chemicals from products.

Calling everything “recyclable” would be a huge mistake, she said. “We have to be realistic about the role that recycling plays,” she added.

No matter how well done, it doesn’t fix the bigger crisis. Not the microplastics infiltrating our bodies or “plastic smog” in the oceans or poisoned families living in the shadow of the chemical plants that produce it.

In fact, research has shown people can produce more waste when they think it will be recycled. When North Carolina began rolling out curbside recycling in different towns, researchers analyzed data on household waste before and after the change. They found that overall waste — the total amount of trash plus stuff in the recycling bin — rose by up to 10% after recycling became available, possibly because consumers felt less guilty.

“They get their blue bins, and they worry less about the amount of trash they generate,” said one of the researchers, Roland Geyer, a professor of industrial ecology at the University of California-Santa Barbara. “I’m probably guilty of that too.”

Do You Have Experience in or With the Plastics Industry? Tell Us About It.

by Abe Streep for ProPublica

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

On July 18, federal wildfire managers placed the nation under a designation known as Preparedness Level 5 — bureaucratic code for all hands on deck or, as one veteran wildland firefighter called it, “fire DEFCON.” In layman’s terms, Preparedness Level 5 means that the country’s wildland firefighting resources are spread thin, more blazes are imminent, and supervisors of local crews are reluctant to allow them to travel far from home to help elsewhere. This marks only the fourth time in the past two decades that the country has reached such a state so early in the calendar year. So far, more than 5 million acres have burned nationwide, tripling last year’s total, and there are still months to go in fire season.

Nine days after the country entered Preparedness Level 5, the U.S. Forest Service — the largest of the five federal agencies responsible for fighting wildfires, with more than 11,000 firefighters — said that it had reached 101% of its hiring goal for 2024. However, firefighters on the ground say that the agency is understating how badly depleted their ranks are.

Overall numbers are hard to obtain, but according to data provided by a dispatcher who works for the Bureau of Land Management, 2,417 nationwide requests for crucial fire resources — everything from radio operators to task force leaders — had gone unfilled through July 26. Those requests were delivered to all five federal agencies as well as to state and private organizations. What was especially alarming, the dispatcher said, was the lack of experienced firefighters: “It tells us we have critical shortages in certain particular middle- and upper-level operational qualifications.”

Eric Franta, who works at a Forest Service helicopter air base in Oregon, told me his unit was staffed at only 75%. (In a profession where fears of workplace retaliation are widespread, the only wildland firefighters willing to share their names are those that have roles with the National Federation of Federal Employees, the union representing wildland firefighters. Franta is a union steward.) Another Forest Service wildland firefighter in Oregon said, “We’re not able to fill any crews.” Firefighters in California are reporting similar issues. According to interagency data obtained by ProPublica, 90 of the approximately 270 Forest Service fire engines in the state were unavailable for service on Aug. 12. Engines may be unavailable for a variety of reasons, such as mechanical maintenance or crews on mandatory leave, but firefighters say this number is unusually high. On the same day, according to the data, at least a third of the statewide Hotshot crews — elite teams that fight large wilderness fires — were not staffed sufficiently to operate as intended.

Why the U.S. Is Losing Wildland Firefighters

In March, ProPublica reported that the nation’s wildland firefighting force was experiencing an exodus, especially among its most highly qualified firefighters. In the past three years, the Forest Service lost 45% of its permanent employees, forcing it to fill its ranks with inexperienced firefighters. Those inside and outside the service cite numerous reasons for the departures. Wildland firefighters are compensated poorly; base pay is $15 an hour, roughly what a fast-food server makes. (In 2021, Congress passed a measure that added a temporary retention bonus for firefighters, which is still in effect but has not been made permanent.) The federal civil service structure makes it difficult for wildland firefighters to maintain a career. And the Forest Service especially has been slow to address the health risks involved with suppressing wildland fires. Although the Department of Labor now considers cancer a work-related illness for wildland firefighters, the multiagency preparedness guide for incoming recruits still doesn’t mention the word.

When asked about the disparity between its 101% staffing figure and the dire assessments of firefighters on the ground, a Forest Service spokesperson wrote, “We have some gaps in critical leadership roles due to departure of experienced leaders and managers with years of knowledge and expertise.” The spokesperson added, “If those roles are not able to be filled by qualified and experienced individuals, it can result in operational inefficiencies.”

During one day last week, the federal government reported 123 newly started fires. A number of them were in and around Idaho’s Boise National Forest, where Morgan Thomsen, a union steward and a Forest Service firefighter on a Wyoming helicopter crew, was working. There were not enough firefighters to fill the crews to catch them all, he told me. “The new fires are all big now too, but hardly anyone is on them,” he texted. “The system is being stressed and can’t deal with it. Now, it depends on the weather and site conditions whether these fires will be put out before they burn down houses and so on. We’ve effectively lost our asses and are triaging.”

by Zach Despart, The Texas Tribune, and Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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

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

Officials in Uvalde, Texas, revealed on Wednesday that they failed to release some officer body camera and dashboard footage related to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting as required by a settlement agreement with news organizations that sued for access.

After the city released hundreds of records on Saturday to news organizations, including ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, an officer informed the Uvalde Police Department that some of his body camera footage from the May 24, 2022, shooting was missing, according to a news release from the city.

In response, police Chief Homer Delgado ordered an audit of the department’s servers, which turned up “several additional videos.” The city did not say which officers or cruisers the missing footage belonged to.

According to information that Uvalde police initially provided to Texas Department of Public Safety investigators, seven of the 25 responding officers had their body cameras turned on the day of the shooting. Records released on Saturday only included footage from five of the officers’ body cameras. Whether the city’s discovery of additional materials is limited to the two remaining body cameras or includes additional footage from more officers is unknown.

The department shared the newly discovered footage with District Attorney Christina Mitchell for review. Delgado also ordered an internal affairs investigation into how the error occurred. That probe will determine which department employees are responsible and what disciplinary actions may be warranted, according to the news release.

“I have ordered an immediate review of all footage collection and storage protocols within UPD and will institute a new process to ensure our department lives up to the highest standards,” Delgado, who joined the department last year, said in a statement. “The Uvalde community and the public deserve nothing less.”

It’s unclear whether Mitchell, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, had access to the footage as she evaluated whether officers should be criminally charged for the flawed response to the shooting in which 19 children and two teachers died.

A grand jury in June indicted former Uvalde school district police Chief Pete Arredondo and officer Adrian Gonzales on felony child endangerment charges. Both men pleaded not guilty. No Uvalde Police Department officers have been charged.

News organizations, including the Tribune and ProPublica, sued several local and state governmental bodies more than two years ago for access to records related to the shooting. The city settled with the new organizations, agreeing to provide records that had been requested under the state’s Public Information Act, including body camera footage from all responding officers. Three other government agencies — the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District and the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office — continue fighting not to release any records.

City officials did not respond to requests for comment but said in a statement that they would evaluate the judge’s order governing the release of documents to ensure that they comply with the settlement terms reached with the news organizations.

Reid Pillifant, an associate attorney with Haynes Boone, a law firm that represents the news organizations, said he appreciated the Police Department’s “quick response in conducting an audit to ensure all relevant materials are shared with the public as soon as possible.”

The Tribune, ProPublica and FRONTLINE independently obtained a trove of investigative materials through a confidential source. That trove includes the body camera footage of two Uvalde police officers — Jesus Mendoza and Joe Zamora — that was not released on Saturday. The newsrooms analyzed Mendoza’s 25-minute-long body camera footage and his interview with state investigators as part of an investigation into law enforcement’s botched response that included a documentary and revealed that while the children knew what to do when confronted with a mass shooter, many officers did not.

Zamora’s body camera footage, which is only about eight minutes long, appears to show him at the house belonging to the gunman’s grandmother, whom the teen shot in the face before going to the school.

In the footage, a crying woman can be heard saying, “I knew it was my nephew.” She adds, “he didn’t want to live anymore.”

by Nick Grube, Honolulu Civil Beat

People on Maui have heard the stories: neighbors forced from their homes not by last year’s wildfires, but by property owners seeking to take advantage of the housing shortage. In some cases, tenants have said property owners have rented to government aid programs that offered top dollar to shelter wildfire survivors. In others, landlords have rented to others who will pay more.

Civil Beat has teamed up with ProPublica to more deeply examine what many say is a secondary housing crisis stemming from the loss of thousands of homes in the wildfires. We want to know how widespread these issues are, who’s responsible, who’s been harmed and what can be done about it.

To do this right, we need to hear from anyone who has been touched by this issue. You can help us ensure our stories are comprehensive and nuanced and that they reflect what is happening in your life. If you’re a property owner or landlord, we want to hear your thoughts on the governor’s emergency order barring most evictions and rent increases. If you are a property manager, real estate agent or someone else with expertise in Maui’s housing market, we’d like to hear from you. If you work for a government agency, contractor or nonprofit aid group, we’d like to hear from you, too. And, of course, we want to hear from renters: people who had to leave their homes so wildfire survivors could move in, those who faced rent increases, those who have been told their leases will not be renewed and those who have left Maui.

by Nick Grube, Honolulu Civil Beat

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

A year ago, after a deadly wildfire displaced thousands of residents of Lahaina, Hawaii’s governor and lieutenant governor invoked a state law blocking most evictions and prohibiting price gouging. The emergency order soon became a tool to prevent widespread displacement of all Maui residents, including people struggling to pay rent because they had lost work due to the fire.

Despite that order, some Maui property owners have capitalized on the crisis by pushing out tenants and housing wildfire survivors for more money. Among those displaced: a couple and their two young children who, according to court records, were evicted so their landlord’s son could move in while renting his own home to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s housing program for $8,000 a month.

Some property owners have brought in more than twice the going rate for a long-term rental by signing up with FEMA or another aid program. They have received lucrative property tax breaks for housing wildfire survivors, in some cases worth more than $10,000 a year.

Other landlords have forced out tenants and sought people who will pay more. Over the course of several months, one landlord tried to evict his tenants for different reasons, even claiming that Maui’s mayor needed to use the house as a “command center to rebuild Lahaina.” (A spokesperson for the mayor said that claim was false.) After the tenants moved out, two of them saw their ocean-view apartment listed online for $6,800 a month rather than the $4,200 they had paid. Asked about the higher price, the landlord told Civil Beat and ProPublica that the apartment has been cleaned up and is now furnished.

Complaints about evictions and rent increases have circulated for months. Housing advocates say Gov. Josh Green’s administration hasn’t moved aggressively enough to tighten the rules and that the Hawaii attorney general has overlooked abuses.

Even before the fires swept across Maui, rental housing on the island was among the most expensive in the country. The loss of so many homes was bound to increase prices. But tenants, housing advocates, government officials and even landlords say high prices offered by FEMA, the state and private aid organizations have encouraged property owners to chase the money. State Sen. Angus McKelvey, who lost his own home in Lahaina, called it “FEMA fever.”

Jo Wessel, a Colorado landlord, said she tried to sign up with FEMA after her tenants fell behind on their rent and electricity bills. She said a property management company working for FEMA offered her $6,500 a month, which according to court records was more than twice what she charged for the two-bedroom condominium in Kahului. Although the governor’s order bars evictions for nonpayment of rent or utilities, Wessel told Lea and David Vitello and their two children on Jan. 6 that they had five days to pay up or leave, according to documents reviewed by Civil Beat and ProPublica. Two weeks later, FEMA inspectors knocked on the Vitellos’ door to see if their home was suitable for wildfire survivors. “We didn’t see it coming,” Lea Vitello said.

The Vitellos refused to leave when their lease expired at the end of January, and Wessel eventually took them to court. It took until April for the Vitellos to find a new place and move out. Wessel said the delay caused her to miss out on the FEMA contract, but she was able to sign up with a nonprofit housing program willing to pay about $400 more per month than what she was charging the Vitellos. Wessel said she thought the Vitellos had taken advantage of the governor’s order and that they still owe her money. Although the Vitellos left a few months ago, Wessel’s court case against them continued until this week, when a judge dismissed it.

Those who have been forced out are contending with a housing market where the median rent has jumped 44% since before the fires, according to an Argonne National Laboratory study released last week. Some people who’ve been pushed out since the fires told Civil Beat and ProPublica that they haven’t yet found a permanent home.

Peter Sunday, whose family was evicted so their landlord’s son could move in, said he paid just $1,900 a month for their three-bedroom cottage and that the cheapest place he has found since is twice as much. He, his wife and their two young children have moved from place to place while they search for something stable.

Adrienne Sunday and her husband, Peter Sunday, move a container in the storage unit that holds most of their belongings in Kula, Hawaii, in July. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat)

Malcolm Vincent, the landlord’s son, said in a court filing that he lived in a garage on family property after he rented his home to FEMA and while he was waiting for the Sundays to leave. When called by Civil Beat and ProPublica, Vincent said he was busy and hung up. In response to a text message, he wrote, “Stop.” Ann Siciak, the Sundays’ former landlord, did not respond to interview requests.

State and federal officials said they didn’t intend for their housing programs to encourage landlords to kick people out to make room for wildfire survivors, but they had to offer lucrative rates in order to secure housing quickly. “We’re not incentivizing,” FEMA Region 9 Administrator Bob Fenton said in an interview. “What we’re doing is being competitive.”

The Green administration acknowledged that “some bad actors have not complied” with the governor’s order. Officials urged tenants to report unscrupulous landlords to the state attorney general.

Green said in an interview that he, too, has heard about landlords who have kicked out tenants to make more money, but he said they “represent the extreme minority.” Much more common, he said, are stories of people who did the right thing and provided shelter to thousands of people.

“I was very clear that we didn’t want to displace anybody, but there are a million different forces at play here,” Green said. “Every moment, every week, you just had to try to prevent predatory behavior. There’s a lot of that. That’s one of the lessons I learned from this crisis.”

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, left, and Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen speak during a tour of wildfire damage in Lahaina a few days after the fire. (Rick Bowmer/AP)

State officials pointed to a sharp drop in eviction cases filed in court since the fire as evidence that the governor’s order is “doing what it was designed to do: stop unlawful evictions and keep families and survivors housed.”

But tenants’ rights groups and lawyers said court cases, the only public paper trail of evictions, don’t show the complete picture. It’s time-consuming and risky for a tenant to fight an eviction in court; if they lose, they’ll have a record that could make it harder to rent another place. Many tenants simply move out after getting a notice to vacate the property, even when they think their landlord is breaking the law.

“We know this is happening,” said Jade Moreno, a researcher and policy analyst for the Maui Housing Hui, a tenants’ rights organization. “We hear the stories all the time.”

“The Greed Is Sickening”

Although most people refer to FEMA when they complain that emergency housing programs have skewed the market, the state of Hawaii pays similar rates for its own program. And in November, in an effort to entice property owners, the governor revealed just how much money could be made housing people who were homeless after the fire.

Thousands of wildfire survivors were living in hotel rooms at the time, costing the state at least $1 million a day; meanwhile, vacation rental homes that would have been cheaper sat vacant. So Green announced that the state would pay a premium to anyone who housed survivors.

For landlords who typically rented to locals, the numbers offered by the state were stunning: $5,000 a month for a studio or one-bedroom home; $7,000 for a two-bedroom; $9,000 for a three-bedroom; and $11,000 for a four-bedroom.

Early on, FEMA also concluded that it would have to pay vacation rental rates. FEMA won’t publicize what it pays, saying it varies by property. But contracts reviewed by Civil Beat and ProPublica show the agency has paid $5,000 to $9,050 for a one- or two-bedroom unit. For three- and four-bedroom homes, it has paid $9,000 to $11,400, according to two landlords who spoke to Civil Beat and ProPublica.

Contracts for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s housing program obtained by Civil Beat and ProPublica show that landlords have brought in prices well above the market rate for long-term rentals on Maui. State and federal officials have said they had to offer high prices in order to convince property owners to shelter wildfire survivors. (Obtained by Civil Beat and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Once people knew what they could get, Maui-based property manager Claudia Garcia started getting calls. Property owners, many of whom lived on the mainland, asked if Garcia could help them lease to FEMA or raise their rents to keep pace. She said she refused because she didn't want to help them take advantage of the crisis. “The greed is sickening,” said Garcia, whose firm manages more than 100 rentals on the island. “It’s just not right what they’re doing.”

The Legal Aid Society of Hawaii got calls, too, but from tenants. In the first seven months after the fire, the number of Maui residents who sought help with evictions grew by 50% compared with the seven months before the fire, according to the organization.

The high prices offered by the state and FEMA forced at least one nonprofit that was sheltering victims of the fire to bump up its offers to property owners. “Short-term rental owners did shop us,” said Skye Kolealani Razon-Olds, who oversees the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement’s emergency housing and recovery programs. “They provided us with FEMA rental rates and asked if we could match it.”

Razon-Olds said the nonprofit has received 19 complaints from tenants who said they were being forced out of their homes so their landlords could rent to FEMA. She said her organization convinced FEMA to stop dealing with those owners.

In February, six months after the fire, FEMA announced that it would reject properties if it learned tenants had been illegally forced out “so landlords could gain higher rents from the FEMA program.” Officials told Civil Beat and ProPublica that FEMA has found fewer than 10 cases in which a landlord wrongfully ended a lease in order to participate in the housing program. In all those cases, FEMA removed the properties from the program.

State and federal officials characterized their rates as a compromise between vacation rental and long-term rates. The rates publicized by the state are maximums, state officials said; in practice, Hawaii is paying significantly less — about $228 per night rather than $267. That works out to about $6,800 per month rather than $8,000.

After state and local officials raised concerns, FEMA asked the Argonne National Laboratory to study whether housing programs had caused property owners to increase rents or displace residents.

Researchers concluded that the loss of housing in the fires was the biggest factor in the rapid increase in rental prices and that there wasn’t enough data to know how much housing programs had contributed. However, they noted that the Hawaii Office of Consumer Protection received about 700 housing-related complaints from August 2023 to April, most related to lease terminations or rent increases. Those complaints and subsequent investigations, researchers wrote, indicate that the “behavior of some landlords may have changed leading to secondary displacement or increased costs for some renter households outside of the burn area.”

One landlord, however, said it wasn’t until she was approached by a property management company working for FEMA that she decided to house wildfire survivors. The company offered Mara Lockwood $7,000 a month — about $2,300 more than what she had collected for her two-bedroom condo overlooking Maalaea Bay.

Lockwood took the deal, not just for the extra income, but because she would be exempt from property taxes for at least a year, which she said will save her about $12,000 annually. But she was conflicted. As the owner of a Maui real estate company, she saw the asking prices for rentals rise, and she kept hearing stories of people getting pushed out of their homes so that their landlords could earn more money.

“Kicking somebody out to rent to FEMA to make more money is a horrible thing to do to people,” Lockwood said. “But when you’re given an opportunity and money is involved — and you have to follow the money — then some people are going to do that.”

“That’s What The Law Allowed”

For every case in which it’s clear a tenant is being kicked out so their landlord can make more money, there are many more that aren’t as obvious, said Nick Severson, the lead housing attorney for the Legal Aid Society of Hawaii. “Sometimes we’ll have emails or texts or statements from the landlord that say, ‘I need you out of here so I can rent this for $8,000 a month to FEMA,’” he said. “But usually it’s not that lucky. It’s a little bit more covert, which makes it hard to push back on.”

Screenshots of text messages show that four days after Christmas, a landlord informed her tenant that he had to give up his rental unit so her family could rent it to FEMA. The landlord, who gave the tenant more time to move after he objected, told Civil Beat and ProPublica that she didn’t end up renting to the agency. (Obtained by Civil Beat and ProPublica)

That’s partly because the state law prohibiting price gouging during an emergency provides landlords with some wiggle room. Renters can be evicted if a landlord or family member is moving in or if the renter has violated the terms of their lease, as long as it’s not related to nonpayment of rent, utilities or similar charges. And landlords can push people out at the end of a fixed-term lease without providing any reason. In several cases reviewed by Civil Beat and ProPublica, landlords have cited those exceptions in evicting tenants and have gone on to rent their properties to wildfire survivors for more money.

Property owners acknowledge that they’re bringing in more money through housing programs than they did before the fire. According to the Hawaii attorney general, the governor’s emergency proclamation prevents landlords from raising their rent unless it was agreed to before Aug. 9 or the landlord can show their costs have increased.

And yet the attorney general has held property owners accountable in relatively few cases. The office has concluded that landlords violated the governor’s order in just 28 of the 200 complaints of illegal evictions and rent increases it had received as of June 3. (Another 30 were still under investigation.) Fenton, the FEMA regional administrator, said the attorney general’s office concluded that just one of the cases FEMA referred had violated the proclamation. The attorney general’s office can levy civil penalties of up to $10,000 a day, but it hasn’t.

“We have the emergency proclamation, but it doesn’t prevent anyone from evicting tenants and raising rent,” said Anne Barber, a Maui real estate broker who works with Garcia in her property management firm. “There is no accountability.”

In February, a tenant complained to the Hawaii attorney general that he was being forced out of his home by a landlord whom he said was planning to rent his home to FEMA. An official with the attorney general’s office told the tenant that the landlord wasn’t obligated to renew the lease and that merely participating in FEMA’s housing program wasn’t a problem. (Obtained by Honolulu Civil Beat and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

The attorney general’s office said in a written statement that it “provides people with opportunities to do the right thing and correct their actions. If individuals continue to choose not to comply, then the Attorney General can and will seek legal remedies.”

The Green administration said it has revised the emergency proclamation to address the needs of the community; at one point, the governor added language barring unsolicited offers to buy property in areas affected by the fires. But, administration officials said, the governor’s power is limited. For example, they said he has no authority to force landlords to extend leases. Green’s staff said lawmakers must look at the price-gouging law and make needed changes.

In one case, Maui landlord Gregory Lussier filed an eviction case against six people living in a four-bedroom home in Kahului. He told Civil Beat and ProPublica that he wanted the tenants out because some of them had left and the remaining ones had stopped paying the full rent, which was about $4,000, but he knew the governor’s order prohibited him from evicting them for not paying. In his Jan. 5 notice to the tenants and the eviction case he filed in court against them a week and a half later, he cited several violations of the lease, including prohibitions on pets, smoking, illegal activity, expired vehicle registrations, and obscene or loud language. Before the case went to trial, the tenants moved out.

Although Lussier rented the property to FEMA’s housing program for $11,000 a month, he said that’s not why he filed eviction proceedings. “There was no premeditated scheme to force the tenant to leave so we could get a FEMA rental agency lease,” he said in an email. However, court records call into question his version of events. Lussier said the lease with FEMA’s outside property manager started Feb. 1 and he believes he signed the rental agreement the day before. He said he didn’t explore renting to the housing program until after the property was vacant and that the process of signing up took “several weeks.” But video of a hearing shows that Lussier and three of his tenants appeared in court on Jan. 29, where the tenants denied his allegations that they had violated the lease. Lussier declined to explain the discrepancy to Civil Beat and ProPublica.

Maui attorney Jack Naiditch said he’s gotten several phone calls from property owners who want to exploit loopholes in the emergency proclamation so they can take advantage of FEMA’s prices. He said he’s turned them away: “I’m not going to put my name on the line for somebody who’s fibbing.”

But he has represented a number of property owners in court, including Sunday’s landlord; some of them have later rented their homes to house wildfire survivors. He declined to discuss specifics of their cases.

When Sunday appeared in court in April, he pleaded with the judge to let his family stay in their home. “Frankly, this is cold, your honor,” Sunday said. “A single man wants to evict a family of four to move into a home which he has admitted is for his own financial benefit and gain.”

“There’s nothing I can do about that,” the judge said. “That is what the law allows. So that needs to be taken on with the governor, our mayor or Legislature, because there are people who very likely take advantage of that.”

Four days after the Sundays received their eviction order, Green responded to residents’ complaints and made it harder to claim the exception that Sunday’s landlord had cited. Now, a landlord or family member who claims they need to move into a property must provide a sworn statement saying they’re not accepting money from an aid program to house survivors.

That same day, Sunday said, his family packed the last of their belongings as a process server threatened to call the sheriff if they lingered too long. They put most of their belongings in a storage unit and gave away all of their pets and backyard farm animals — 18 chickens, nine ducks, two dogs and a pair of cats. They have to relocate again this week.

Sunday doesn’t know what to tell his kids about the constant shuffling and when they’ll see their pets again. “I can’t give them any kind of peace,” he said, “without lying to them.”

Opal Sunday carries a box of crafts from the Sunday family’s storage unit in Kula, Hawaii, in July. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat)

Struggling to Keep or Find Housing After Maui’s Wildfires? Tell Us Your Story.

Clarification, Aug. 16, 2024: This story has been updated to clarify, in a subsequent reference, that Bob Fenton is a regional administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

by Vernal Coleman

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.

Republicans in Indiana’s legislature passed a bill this year intended as the final blow to a long-running lawsuit filed by the city of Gary against gun manufacturers seeking to hold them accountable for local illegal gun sales.

The lawmakers even included language making the bill retroactive to ensure that it would apply to the Gary suit, which was filed nearly a quarter century ago.

On Monday, that effort failed.

Indiana Superior Court Judge John Sedia ruled that while the law barring cities from pursuing lawsuits against the gun industry is constitutional, applying it retroactively would “violate years of vested rights and constitutional guarantees.” It was a rare courtroom setback for makers of firearms in the U.S.

On Tuesday, Gary Mayor Eddie Melton applauded the judge. “This ruling reinforces the importance of the independence of each branch of government,” he said in a written statement. The ruling, he added, ensures that the city’s rights are “protected and upheld.”

State Rep. Ragen Hatcher, whose father served as Gary’s first Black mayor, was similarly pleased. “This is a major win that our community deserves,” the Democratic legislator said in a statement.

Gary’s case is the last of a generation of civil suits that made similar claims against the gun industry. Attorneys for gun manufacturers and retailers filed for the case to be dismissed based on the new Indiana law, which placed the power to sue solely with the state’s attorney general.

The bill’s backers made no secret that the Gary case was the bill’s target. It included language to make it retroactive to Aug. 27, 1999 — three days before the city filed its lawsuit. But that decision appears to have doomed the industry’s challenge.

The defendants, which include Glock, Smith & Wesson and several other of the nation’s largest gunmakers, argued in a hearing before Sedia last week that the city no longer has the authority to pursue its claims that gunmakers have failed to address an epidemic of illegal gun sales associated with violence in and around Gary.

Philip Bangle, arguing for Gary, countered that, in practical terms, the bill was “special” — specifically aiming at Gary’s suit — and not allowed under the state constitution.

Bangle, an attorney from the Brady center, a nonprofit centered on gun violence prevention, told the judge that similar suits from other towns were not an issue. “There’s none being contemplated; there’s none being threatened; and frankly, looking at what Gary has had to endure these last 25 years, I doubt that any of these bodies would want to,” he added.

In siding with Gary, Sedia cited a 2003 Indiana Supreme Court decision that says a state law cannot be applied retroactively if it violates constitutionally protected rights.

Judge John Sedia begins proceedings for the Gary hearing on Thursday. (Taylor Glascock for ProPublica)

The General Assembly can bar cities from bringing lawsuits against gun manufacturers, but it cannot end this lawsuit, Sedia wrote. “To avoid manifest injustice, the substance of this lawsuit must be taken to its conclusion.”

A representative for the gunmakers said an appeal is coming. “Respectfully, the Superior Court got it wrong,” said Lawrence Keane, senior vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association representing several of the defendant gunmakers. “The defendants will immediately appeal to the appellate court to correct this error.”

State Rep. Chris Jeter, author of the bill aimed at disrupting the lawsuit, disagreed with Sedia’s assertion that applying the law retroactively would violate the state constitution. “Municipalities are a creature of state law,” he said. “They aren’t people; they have no rights.”

But Jody Madeira, a law professor at Indiana University and critic of legislators’ efforts to kill the lawsuit, was thrilled by the judge’s ruling. The main takeaway is clear, she said: State lawmakers “cannot use legislative hoodwinking” to disrupt the lawsuit and Gary will get its day in court.

For now, the ruling thwarts the latest attempt by the gun industry and its allies to disrupt the case. Filed in 1999, the suit was one of several that decade from major cities against the nation’s most successful gunmakers.

Recognizing the threat the flood of lawsuits posed, the gun industry gathered its political influence to lobby federal lawmakers. They supported federal legislation strong enough to effectively immunize the industry from civil suits. Once passed, the suits fell one by one. All except Gary’s.

The case had notably approached a significant milestone that similar lawsuits had not. As the year began, it was nearing the end of the discovery phase, where the two sides would continue an exchange of thousands of records, providing plaintiffs a chance to glimpse inside the internal decisions and policies of gun manufacturers. It is unclear when or if that process will resume.

by Rob Davis, Agnel Philip and Alex Mierjeski, ProPublica, and Matthew Kish, The Oregonian/OregonLive

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

On dozens of occasions since 2020, a private Gulfstream jet belonging to Nike has touched down at Moffett Field, a federally owned airfield on the banks of San Francisco Bay.

The Silicon Valley site’s most notable feature is a hulking building known as Hangar One, which in the 1930s housed a U.S. Navy airship and today is a conspicuous landmark along U.S. 101.

It also happens to sit about a 30-minute drive from one of Nike CEO John Donahoe’s homes. He became the Oregon-based company’s top executive in January 2020, bought a condo in Portland and registered as an Oregon voter. But he also maintained a home in the Bay Area community of Portola Valley. His previous job was leading a tech company in Santa Clara, and his wife worked at Stanford University until September.

Nike’s jets landed at Moffett more than 100 times in the first three and a half years of Donahoe’s tenure, flight-tracking records show. Landings at Moffett stopped in July 2023 but became more frequent at a nearby airport with a similar drive time to Portola Valley.

Donahoe and Nike executive chairperson Mark Parker have made clear that climate change is a crisis demanding urgent action. “It’s about leading with actions, not words,” Parker said in Nike’s 2019 corporate responsibility report. “We are more committed than ever to help save the planet,” Donahoe said in a 2022 company video.

Yet Nike has failed to shrink one aspect of its carbon footprint that the two men directly influence: travel on the private jets, which emit far more carbon per passenger than commercial airliners.

One of Nike’s private jets takes off from the airport where the company has a hangar in Hillsboro, Oregon, in July. (Dave Killen/The Oregonian)

Nike’s jet travel is up. Company disclosures show that its private planes last year emitted almost 20% more carbon dioxide than they did in 2015, which the company uses as a baseline for its climate goals. The flights are one small reason Nike and its supply chain produced roughly as much carbon dioxide in 2023 as in 2015, despite the company’s commitment to sharply reduce emissions.

The company owns two Gulfstream G650ERs. Flight-tracking records show that their destinations include New York City, where the company has a corporate office, and Paris during the Olympics and in April, when Nike unveiled its Olympic uniforms.

In July, a Nike jet flew down to San Jose, California, and back to its base in Hillsboro, Oregon; it then took off two days later for Idaho, where Donahoe and his wife were photographed at the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, an annual gathering dubbed “summer camp for billionaires.”

Vacation spots Nike jets have traveled to include Cape Cod, where Parker owns a home. Since 2020, the planes have landed there at least 15 times. They’ve touched down in the Cayman Islands at least six times since 2021.

But the Bay Area has been a magnet. It was an out-of-the-way pit stop for an Oregon-bound flight after Donahoe delivered the spring commencement keynote at West Virginia’s Marshall University in 2023. It has been a weekend destination with Friday landings and Sunday returns to Oregon. (The jets averaged about 10 flights a year to Moffett Field in the two years before Donahoe’s hiring, when he was a Nike board member and lived in California, versus an average of about 30 a year from 2020 through mid-2023, while he was Nike’s CEO.)

More than 30 times, one of the company’s private jets flew down to Moffett and back to Oregon in the same day, sometimes spending as little as 25 minutes on the ground.

If those flights ferried a single person in one direction, turning what would be one commercial flight into two by private jet, it would release 160 times as much carbon per passenger as if the person flew commercial, said Phillip Ansell, director of the Center for Sustainable Aviation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He called this arrangement “completely inexcusable.”

“In the current climate where aviation does not yet have a viable route to fully decarbonize, we need to see these types of flights come to a halt,” Ansell said.

Nike did not make Donahoe and Parker available for interviews and declined to say why the jets frequented Moffett Field and, more recently, San Jose Mineta International Airport.

The company said in a statement that its jet passengers comprise a variety of people who are essential to its business objectives, including executives, employees, athletes, entertainers and others. The jets improve productivity and address security concerns for executives, Nike said, calling private flights a standard practice among large global companies.

As for curbing carbon pollution, the company said that “we focus on Nike’s areas of greatest impact,” noting that the bulk of its emissions come from the production of materials for its sneakers and apparel.

Nike CEO John Donahoe in front of a Nike jet. In an Instagram post by the University of North Carolina’s head women’s basketball coach, Courtney Banghart, she thanks him for a “lift.” (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Celebrities including Taylor Swift, Drake and Kylie Jenner have drawn scrutiny for their profligate jet-setting in the face of the planet’s record-breaking temperatures. And in the business world, CEOs are increasingly being allowed to use corporate jets for personal use, according to Equilar, a data firm that studies executive compensation. In 2018, 36% of S&P 500 companies included the perk in CEO pay packages. By last year, that had grown to 45%.

But Nike, the world’s largest athletic apparel company, stands apart: It has staked a claim as a corporate leader on the environment, joining thousands of companies pledging to voluntarily slash carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Nike also stands out for disclosing more about its private jet travel than its peers. A review by ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive of the disclosures of 30 companies, including 18 of Nike’s self-identified peers, found no others that publicly report emissions from corporate jets. Roughly half report emissions from business travel, which can include jet use.

Get in Touch

ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive plan to continue reporting on Nike and its sustainability work, including its overseas operations. Do you have information that we should know? Rob Davis can be reached by email at rob.davis@propublica.org and by phone, Signal or WhatsApp at 503-770-0665. Matthew Kish can be reached by email at mkish@oregonian.com, by phone at 503-221-4386, and on Signal at 971-319-3830.

In addition to reporting rising emissions from its jets, Nike’s disclosures show that it is behind on its ambitions for reducing its overall contribution to climate change. The company said in 2016 that it would halve its total emissions; instead they have grown slightly since 2015.

Meanwhile, since December, Nike has laid off 20% of its dedicated sustainability staff, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica have reported, and lost another 10% through internal transfers or voluntary departures.

Nike’s growing private jet use sets the wrong tone from the top, said Charles Elson, founding director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.

“It’s, ‘Do what I say, not as I do,’” Elson said. “Flying private aircraft all over the place certainly isn’t a bold action in support of climate responsibility. That’s the problem. Your actions and your words seem to diverge in unflattering ways. It is not a good look.”

Private jet use represents less than a tenth of a percent of all Nike’s emissions. The overwhelming majority come from production and shipping by the company’s overseas suppliers. But the jets generate 6% of the carbon coming from assets that Nike owns, a share that has grown as Nike has powered its buildings around the world with renewable energy.

Donahoe, whose $29.2 million compensation last year made him one of America’s highest-paid executives, has an arrangement with Nike that allows him to use the jets for more than business. He can fly in them for personal travel at his own expense. He has reimbursed Nike more than $700,000 for such trips in the last two years, securities filings show.

In addition, the company has given the chief executive $293,000 in free personal travel since 2020 as part of his compensation. Parker, the executive chairperson, has received $494,000 in free personal use of the jets in that time.

The jets’ flight paths can be found on the website of ADS-B Exchange, which crowdsources location readings from airplane transponders. The flight records don’t show who is on board, but in some cases flights coincided with news coverage and social media posts indicating their purpose.

Nike’s jets have landed at golf destinations around the country. They visited Augusta, Georgia, ahead of the Masters Tournament in 2022 and again in 2023. A Nike jet has joined the roughly 1,500 other private jets that crowd the small airport during the tournament, making it so busy that Golf Digest has described it as a “bonafide Heathrow.”

In 2022, Donahoe golfed in a morning pro-am event before the Memorial Tournament at Muirfield Village Golf Club, outside Columbus, Ohio. Social media photos show Donahoe playing with Rory McIlroy, a golf star Nike sponsors.

One of Nike’s corporate jets landed in Columbus the day before the golf event; it returned to Oregon after the pro-am ended, flight records show.

Photographs posted to Instagram from a Nike fan account show Donahoe golfing at an event outside Columbus, Ohio. At right in the second image is Rory McIlroy, a Nike-sponsored golf star. Flight records show one of Nike’s corporate jets landed in Columbus the day before the event and returned to Oregon after it ended. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Traveling by private jet is far more polluting than flying commercial.

Ansell, the sustainable aviation expert, said a fully loaded Gulfstream G650ER flight releases about 4.5 times as much carbon dioxide per passenger as a Boeing 737, the workhorse commercial airplane. If the Gulfstream is carrying only a single passenger, it’s about 80 times as polluting, he said, because the private aircraft’s weight and fuel consumption stay roughly the same.

Nike’s Gulfstream models can be configured to carry as many as 19 passengers. It’s unknown how many people typically travel on them.

“It is patently irresponsible to be using luxury G650s for flights that carry only a few passengers,” Ansell said.

The pollution from Nike’s jets adds up. Last year, they generated roughly the same amount of carbon dioxide as a passenger car driving 10.9 million miles, company disclosures and an Environmental Protection Agency emissions calculator show. (Imagine driving a car around the equator 438 times.) It was roughly equal to the amount of carbon pollution that would be released by burning 4.7 million pounds of coal.

While Nike’s corporate jets have been generating more carbon, the company last year recorded a 65% decline compared to 2015 in emissions from another source: commercial air travel by rank-and-file employees.

Four former employees said the company has restricted worker travel in recent years. They said their managers didn’t cite the need to reduce emissions but instead the need to save money. Nike, in a statement, said its employees also had embraced remote meeting tools since the pandemic, allowing them to “operate effectively without extensive travel.”

By contrast, the company’s jets are used for transportation to “specific high-level meetings and events that require executive presence,” Nike said, “and cannot be conducted remotely.”

Ryanne Mena and Jeff Frankl of ProPublica contributed research.

by Megan O’Matz and Joel Jacobs

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

In bankruptcy filings and consumer complaints, thousands of people across the country make pleas for relief from high-interest loans with punishing annual rates that often exceed 600%.

Although they borrowed small sums online from a slew of businesses with catchy names — such as Loan at Last or Sky Trail Cash — their loans stemmed from the same massive operation owned by a small Native American tribe in a remote part of Wisconsin.

Over the past decade, the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians has grown to become a prominent player in the tribal lending industry, generating far-reaching impact and leaving a legacy of economic despair. A ProPublica analysis found companies owned by the LDF tribe showed up as a creditor in roughly 1 out of every 100 bankruptcy cases sampled nationwide.

That’s the highest frequency associated with any of the tribes doing business in this sector of the payday loan industry. And it translates to an estimated 4,800 bankruptcy cases, on average, per year.

ProPublica also found that LDF’s various companies have racked up more than 2,200 consumer complaints that were routed to the Federal Trade Commission since 2019 — more than any other tribe in recent years.

“THIS IS THE TEXTBOOK DEFINITION ON LOANSHARKING,” one Californian with an LDF loan complained in all caps in June 2023 to federal regulators. The person, whose name is redacted, argued that “no one should be expected to pay over $11,000 for a $1,200 loan,” calling the 790% rate “beyond predatory.”

In a separate complaint, a Massachusetts customer wrote, “I thought this kind of predatory lending was against the law.”

Such confusion is understandable. Loans like these are illegal under most state statutes. But tribal-related businesses, including LDF, claim that their sovereign rights exempt them from state usury laws and licensing requirements aimed at protecting consumers. And so these businesses operate widely, facing little pushback from regulators and relying on the small print in their loan agreements.

As LDF climbed in the industry, it kept a low profile, garnering little publicity. For years it operated from a call center above a smoke shop in the community’s small downtown, before moving to a sprawling vocational training building, built in part with federal money, off a less visible, two-lane road.

But staying under the radar just got harder. Court filings show that LDF tribal leaders and some of their nontribal business partners have come to an agreement with consumers in a 2020 federal class-action lawsuit filed in Virginia. Nearly 1 million borrowers could finally get relief.

The deal calls for the cancellation of $1.4 billion in outstanding loans. Tribal officials and their associates would also pay $37.4 million to consumers and the lawyers who brought the suit. Although they settled, LDF leaders have denied wrongdoing in the case, and its president told ProPublica it adheres to high industry standards in its lending operations.

A final resolution of the case will take months. If approved, the total settlement would be the largest ever secured against participants in the tribal lending industry, lawyers told the court.

“This is a big one,” said Irv Ackelsberg, a Philadelphia attorney who has faced off in court against other tribal lenders and followed this suit closely. “Is it going to stop tribal lending? Probably not because it’s just a fraction of what’s out there.”

The LDF tribe is central to the suit but is not named. Nor is LDF Holdings, the corporate umbrella over the various lending subsidiaries.

A sign along the road at the entrance to the Lac du Flambeau reservation (Tim Gruber for ProPublica)

Knowing that both those entities likely would have been entitled to sovereign immunity, lawyers for the borrowers chose a different approach. Instead, they brought the case against members of the tribe’s governing council; high-level employees of LDF’s lending operations; and a nontribal business partner, Skytrail Servicing Group, and its owner, William Cheney Pruett.

Pruett also denied wrongdoing in the case. He did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica.

The proposed settlement notes that the tribal leaders and their partners understood that continuing to defend the case “would require them to expend significant time and money.” LDF, under the settlement, can continue its loan operations.

In emails to ProPublica, LDF President John Johnson Sr. defended the tribe’s lending business as legal and beneficial to both borrowers and the tribal members. He said the loans help people “without access to traditional financial services,” such as those with bad credit histories and people facing financial crises. Many borrowers, he said, have had positive experiences.

He also emphasized the economic benefits to the tribe, including jobs and revenue for vital services. “Please make no mistake: the programs and infrastructure developed through LDF Holdings’ revenue contributions have saved lives in our community and are helping preserve our culture and way of life,” he wrote in an email.

Johnson, who is a named defendant in the suit, and other tribal leaders declined requests to be interviewed.

John Johnson Sr., tribal president of Lac du Flambeau, helps set up a tribal flag during a youth spearfishing event earlier this year. (AP Photo/John Locher) Partnerships Fuel Lending

Historically, some financial services firms formed alliances with tribes, gaining an advantage from the tribes’ sovereign immunity. For years, consumer lawyers and even federal prosecutors have raised questions about whether some tribal lending operations were just fronts for outsiders that received most of the profits and conducted all the key operations — from running call centers to underwriting and collecting.

The LDF tribe is one of only a few dozen of the nation’s 574 federally recognized tribes that have turned to the lending business as an economic lifeline. Typically those tribes are in isolated areas far from large population centers needed to support major industries or hugely profitable casinos. Online lending, or e-commerce, opened opportunities.

“If you look at the tribes who do it, they tend to be rural and they tend to be poor,” said Lance Morgan, CEO of a tribal economic development corporation owned by the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. “Because they don’t really have any other options to pursue from an economic development standpoint. They just don’t. That’s why this appeals to some tribes.”

He said his tribe considered getting into the lending industry but decided against it.

Tribes in the U.S. still suffer from the legacy of racism and betrayal that saw the U.S. government steal land from Native Americans and destroy cultures. Now, with limited economic resources and taxing options, tribal governments draw upon federal grants and subsidies to help fund essential community services — support promised in long-ago treaties, laws and policies in exchange for land. But these programs have proven to be “chronically underfunded and sometimes inefficiently structured,” according to a 2018 report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

On the LDF reservation, which is home to about 3,600 people, the median household income is under $52,000, and 20% of the population lives below the federal poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. On lands that are chock-full of lakes, streams and wetlands, the LDF people operate a fish hatchery, hunt deer and cultivate wild rice. The tribe also has a casino, hotel and convention center.

LDF says its lending revenue helps fund essential tribal services, including preserving the natural environment. (Tim Gruber for ProPublica)

LDF entered the loan business in 2012 and has set up at least two dozen lending companies and websites on its way to massive expansion, a ProPublica examination found. LDF owns the companies and works with outside firms to operate its businesses, which offer short-term installment loans.

Unlike traditional payday loans, these are not due by the next pay period but have longer terms. Borrowers show proof of income and typically authorize the company to make automatic withdrawals from their bank accounts.

Get in Touch

To do the best, most comprehensive reporting on this opaque industry, we want to hear from more of the people who know it best. Do you work for a tribal lending operation, either on a reservation or for an outside business partner? Do you belong to a tribe that participates in this lending, or one that has rejected the industry? Are you a regulator or lawyer dealing with these issues? Have you borrowed from a tribal lender? All perspectives matter to us. Please get in touch with Megan O’Matz at megan.omatz@propublica.org or 954-873-7576, or Joel Jacobs at joel.jacobs@propublica.org or 917-512-0297. Visit propublica.org/tips for information on secure communication channels.

Details of the tribe’s business operations are not public. A July 2014 tribal newsletter reported that LDF had three lending companies employing four tribal members. By 2022, an LDF attorney told the Virginia judge that LDF Holdings, the lending parent company, employed about 50 people on the reservation. Johnson told ProPublica it currently employs 170 people “who live on or near the reservation,” of which 70% are tribally enrolled.

Each year, on reservation land, LDF now hosts the Tribal Lending Summit, a gathering of staff, vendors and prospective partners. Attendee lists posted online show dozens of representatives of software companies, call centers, marketing firms, customer acquisition businesses and debt collection agencies.

After this year’s event, in June, the LDF business hosts posted a congratulation message on social media: ”Here’s to another year of growth, learning, and collaboration! We look forward to continuing this journey together and seeing you all at next year’s summit."

Business Practices Under Fire

Like many operators in this corner of the lending industry, LDF has been forced to defend its business practices in court. It has been subject to at least 40 civil suits filed by consumers since 2019, ProPublica found.

The suits typically allege violations of state usury laws and federal racketeering or fair credit reporting statutes. Johnson, in his statements to ProPublica, said LDF follows tribal and federal regulations, and he cited LDF’s sovereign status as the primary reason state laws on lending don’t apply to its business practices.

“Expecting a Tribe to opine on and/or submit to State regulatory oversight is akin to expecting Canada to submit to or speak on the laws of France,” he wrote.

Most suits against LDF’s lending companies settle quickly with the terms kept confidential. Consumers can be at a disadvantage because of the arbitration agreements in the fine print of their loan contracts, which attempt to restrict their ability to sue.

Karen Brostek, a registered nurse in Florida, borrowed $550 in 2017 from LDF’s Loan at Last at an annual percentage rate of 682%. The contract required her to pay back $2,783 over nine months.

Karen Brostek Received a Loan from LDF with a 682% Annual Percentage Rate

The agreement with LDF required her to pay $2,233 in finance charges on a $550 loan.

Source: Karen Brostek’s loan agreement (Lucas Waldron, ProPublica)

It wasn’t her first foray into short-term borrowing. She said her salary did not cover her expenses and she had “to borrow from Peter to pay Paul.”

Karen Brostek outside her home in Brooksville, Florida (Bob Croslin for ProPublica)

Loan at Last tried numerous times to collect the debt, even threatening in one phone call to have her jailed, she said. Finally, in August 2019, she satisfied the obligation.

Brostek sued LDF Holdings in small claims court in Pasco County in 2021. The suit cited Florida laws that make it a third-degree felony to issue loans with APRs over 45%.

The parties settled within weeks. Brostek recalls receiving about $750. LDF’s Johnson did not comment on Brostek’s case in his response to ProPublica.

She said she does not begrudge the tribe making money but said, “We need to find another way to help them so they don’t feel they’re backed into a corner and this is their only alternative.”

A Groundbreaking Settlement

The Virginia class-action suit claimed that LDF’s governing council delegated the daily operations of the lending businesses “to non-tribal members.” Mirroring allegations in other civil actions, the suit claims that LDF’s partnerships were exploiting sovereign immunity to make loans that otherwise would be illegal.

According to the plaintiffs, LDF Holdings entered into agreements that allow nontribal outsiders to handle and control most aspects of the lending businesses. That includes “marketing, underwriting, risk assessment, compliance, accounting, lead generation, collections, and website management for the businesses,” the suit said. For years, the president of LDF Holdings was a woman who lived in Tampa, Florida. She is a named defendant in the suit, which says she is not a member of the tribe.

Johnson told ProPublica that early on the tribe lacked expertise in the industry and that its partnerships were simply an example of outsourcing, “a standard practice in many American business sectors.”

His statement added, “Recruiting outside talent and capital to Indian country is a mission-critical skill in Tribal economic development.”

The amount of revenue that comes to the tribe is undisclosed, but the class-action suit says the contract with one of its partners, Skytrail Servicing, resulted in only “a nominal flat fee” for LDF.

The 2014 servicing agreement between Skytrail Servicing and LDF is sealed in the court record, and details about the arrangement are largely redacted. In one filing, Skytrail Servicing denies an allegation from the plaintiffs that the tribe received only $3.50 per originated loan.

In a separate filing in the suit, Johnson, the tribal president, said LDF’s lending profits are distributed to the tribe’s general fund, which helps pay for the tribal government, including essential services such as police, education and health care.

The legal strategy crafted by the Virginia consumer protection firm Kelly Guzzo PLC relied heavily on a 2021 federal appeals court decision that concluded that tribal lending was off-reservation conduct to which state law applied. The court found that while a tribe itself cannot be sued for its commercial activities, its members and officers can be.

The class-action suit alleges that tribal officials and their associates conspired to violate state lending laws, collecting millions of dollars in unlawful debts. “In sum, we allege that they are the upper level management of a purely unlawful business that makes illegal loans in Virginia, Georgia, and elsewhere throughout the country,” lawyer Andrew Guzzo said in a September 2022 hearing, referring to LDF officials.

“What I’m trying to say, in other words, is this isn’t a case that involves a lawful business, such as a real estate brokerage firm, that happens to have a secret side scheme involving a few rogue employees,” he said. “The people that are overseeing this are overseeing a business that makes unlawful loans and nothing else.”

The most consequential aspect of the settlement plan is the debt relief it would offer an estimated 980,000 people who were LDF customers over seven years — from July 24, 2016, through Oct. 1, 2023. Those who had obtained loans during that period and still owed money would not be subject to any further collection efforts, canceling an estimated $1.4 billion in outstanding debt.

Eligibility for cash awards is dependent on the state where borrowers live and how much they paid in interest. Nevada and Utah have no interest rate restrictions, so borrowers there aren’t entitled to any money back.

The tribal officials who are listed as defendants have agreed to pay $2 million of the $37.4 million cash settlement. The remaining amount would come from nontribal partners involved in five of the tribe’s lending subsidiaries.

That includes $6.5 million from Skytrail Servicing Group and Pruett, a Texas businessman who has been involved in the payday loan industry for more than two decades.

The largest portion of the settlement — $20 million — would come from unnamed “non-tribal individuals and entities” involved with LDF’s Loan at Last, the company that gave Brostek her loan.

The consumer attorneys are not done. They noted in a memorandum in the case that other LDF affiliates who did not settle in this instance “will be sued in a new case.”

How We Estimated the Size and Impact of the Tribal Lending Industry

Because tribal lenders are not licensed by states, there is very little public information about the size of the industry.

Bankruptcies give a rare window into the prevalence of the industry because when people file for bankruptcy, they must list all the creditors they owe money to. Bankruptcies are filed in federal court and are tracked in PACER, the federal courts’ electronic records system. But PACER charges a fee for every document viewed and cannot be comprehensively searched by creditor list, making it impractical to identify every bankruptcy case with a tribal lender.

Instead, we selected a random sample of 10,000 bankruptcy cases using the Federal Judicial Center’s bankruptcy database, which lists every case filed nationwide (but does not include creditor information). We looked at Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 cases — the types used by individuals — filed from October 2020 to September 2023. We then scraped the creditor list for each of these cases from PACER and identified which cases involved tribal lenders.

We ultimately identified 119 cases with LDF companies as creditors — 1.19% of our total sample, the most of any tribe. Extrapolating these figures across all 1.2 million Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy cases during these three years gave an estimated 15,000 cases involving LDF loans during this period (with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 2,600). That comes out to an estimated 4,800 cases per year, on average. Many factors can contribute to bankruptcy, and LDF loans were not the only debts these bankruptcy filers faced. Still, these figures showed that LDF stood out among other tribal lenders and had a substantial presence across bankruptcies nationwide.

We also looked at consumer complaint data that we acquired through public records requests to the Federal Trade Commission, which collects complaints made to various sources including the Better Business Bureau, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the FTC itself. We focused our requests on several categories we found to be related to lending products, such as payday loans and finance company lending. Our tallies are likely an undercount: Complaints against tribal lenders may have fallen under other categories, such as debt collection, though our explorations found this to be less common. We found more than 2,200 complaints about LDF companies since 2019, the most of any tribal lending operation.

We compiled hundreds of tribal lending company and website names that we used to search through the creditor and complaint data. However, due to the ever-shifting industry landscape in which websites often go offline while new ones pop up, it is possible that we did not identify every complaint and bankruptcy involving tribal lenders.

Mariam Elba contributed research.