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by Seth Freed Wessler, photography by Zaydee Sanchez and Kathleen Flynn, with additional reporting by Zaydee Sanchez

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Rick Roth is a staunch Republican and a conservative member of the Florida Legislature, but he’s quick to point out that he’s first and foremost a farmer. Roth grows vegetables, rice and sugar cane on the thousands of acres passed down to him from his father, in Palm Beach County south of Lake Okeechobee. And because the farm relies on a steady stream of laborers, most of them from Mexico, Roth spent substantial time over the last three decades, before and after he became a politician, trying to stop lawmakers from messing with his workforce.

A big part of that fight was against legislation that would make employers verify their workers’ immigration status. Such laws, Roth once said, would bankrupt farmers like him.

But by 2023, when Florida was once again considering such a bill, Roth’s convictions had grown shaky. In May of that year, he sat and listened as his Democratic colleagues voiced their opposition: “This bill will tank our state’s economy by directly harming Florida's agriculture, hospitality and construction industries,” one of them warned. Had this debate been unfolding even a few years earlier, Roth — who has acknowledged relying heavily on labor by undocumented immigrants in the past — likely would have nodded along.

This time, he didn’t. Several minutes later, Roth, his gray hair cut short and a cross pinned to his lapel, rose from his seat on the House floor, peered through reading glasses and delivered a statement antithetical to what the 70-year-old had long stood for: “I rise in support of SB 1718,” he announced. First among his reasons, he said, was an “invasion” of immigrants at the border. He called it a “ticking time bomb.”

The bill not only required all but the smallest employers to check the legal status of any new hires against a federal database, it also ordered hospitals to ask patients about their status. The measure added new funds to Gov. Ron DeSantis' program to transport newly arrived immigrants out of the state, while making it a felony for individuals to bring undocumented workers in. DeSantis called it “the strongest anti-illegal-immigration legislation in the country.”

Roth knew that the legislation might hurt many farmers — not to mention landscapers and contractors and hotels and a slew of other employers in Florida. But it was good politics. Across the country, Republican politicians like himself have almost universally fallen in line with what amounts to a requirement for party membership. Even business-focused Republicans, who for many years had turned a blind eye to undocumented immigrants because they provided cheap, reliable labor, had given in to a mandate from a party whose leader has spent three presidential campaigns portraying immigration as an existential threat to the United States. In Roth’s case, the transformation from a decades-long advocate for expanding legal immigration to a Trump-style hardliner was so swift and so complete that he barely tries to explain it, other than to repeat what sound like Republican talking points about how the border has become a crisis.

The measure passed easily out of the Republican-controlled House the same day Roth stood to support it. Relieved it was over, he left Tallahassee to return to his fields outside the town of Belle Glade, where the motto is “her soil is her fortune.” He drove his Toyota Prius, a Trump 2020 sticker on the bumper, down the dirt lanes that run along his tracts of land. Birds darted around the fallow farmland. Roth felt at ease.

A tractor crossing sign near Roth Farms (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)

The calm didn’t last. Among Roth’s business owner constituents, there was a rising panic about the fate of their workers. A manager of a vegetable packing house stood by as dozens of his workers left. “We had a mass exodus here,” he later said. Undocumented immigrants and their families were loading up trucks with years of belongings and decamping to Georgia or North Carolina. “Everyone was afraid,” said a resident of a Belle Glade mobile home park. She’d watched as at least five of her neighbors, all undocumented immigrants, sold their trailers and moved. A daycare worker in the next town said several children of immigrants in her classroom were there one week, gone the next.

As workers were scrambling to protect themselves from what they saw as a coming crackdown, phone calls were flooding into Roth’s legislative office. The farmers and contractors and landscapers were complaining that this law Roth had supported was going to wreck their businesses. It was exactly the kind of fallout Roth had long warned of when he’d fought measures like the one he’d just helped to pass.

As one nursery owner who called into Roth’s office asked: “What have you done?”

Around the time of the flurry of calls, 26-year-old Salvador Garcia Espitia and his wife, Nohemí Enriquez Fonseca, were trying to figure out how they’d deal with their own crisis. The couple, who’d grown up near each other in the small ranchos of the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, had become parents two years before. Their son, Isaac, had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy and autism. Garcia’s work in a vegetable packing facility and in the corn fields around their town barely covered his son’s therapy and medication. Enriquez hadn’t worked since the baby was born, since his care took all her time.

The family lived in Cerritos, with Garcia’s parents. It wasn’t much of a town, just a cluster of homes behind a locked gate. The gate went up after a local woman was kidnapped, presumably by gang or cartel members, though no one knows for sure. Each night, after 9:30, residents communicated by group chat if someone needed to leave for an emergency, so that whoever had the key could let them out and back in.

After a long day at school, Issac falls asleep in Nohemí Enriquez Fonseca’s arms on the way back home. (Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica) First image: The main road that runs through the small community of Cerritos in Guanajuato, Mexico, is lined with sunflower fields. Second image: Residents of Cerritos installed a blue gate following the kidnapping of a young woman. (Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica)

Whenever Garcia worked overtime, which was almost always once Isaac’s medical bills stacked up, his mother would sit and wait for him to come home, even until 2 a.m. She feared for her youngest child, her only son. He was so full of promise, capable of so much with his serious disposition and vast intelligence. She worried not just about his safety, but that she hadn’t done enough for him. The best job she could find was cleaning houses, which she did for many years. Her husband was frequently out of work after a head injury he’d suffered back when Garcia was a toddler.

Since Garcia was a child, he had watched countless relatives and friends make the decision for their own families’ futures to go find work in the north. The men departed, crossing into the United States without papers. To have a home, to afford a car, to provide for a child who would struggle to walk or speak, going north was the only way.

But Garcia was clear: He would not cross the border that way. He could not risk being harmed or killed and leaving his wife and son with nothing.

Not long after the severity of Isaac’s condition came to light, Garcia began to listen more closely to other young men in the towns near his: There was a way to travel back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico for work, a way to do it that seemed safe.

The solution for Garcia was a visa program that promised to benefit both migrating workers in desperate need of livable wages and U.S. farms in desperate need of affordable labor. But in many ways, the benefits to workers have remained a gamble while for farmers they're guaranteed.

Roth is a special case, a farmer and also a politician. For him, the program has served a dual purpose. It’s ensured the success of his business by providing a steady stream of workers. And it’s made it easier for him to adopt a harsher political stance on immigration at a time when he feels his party demands it.

Roth didn’t mention it on the House floor or broadcast it to his constituents, but the visa program made his farm mostly impervious to the provisions he’d rallied against in the past. As anxiety gripped communities of undocumented people and many of their employers, Roth Farms was going to be just fine.

The visa program turned out to be a lifeline for Roth. When Garcia reached for that same lifeline, it failed him.

Roth stands in front of a portrait of his father, Ray R. Roth, at his office in Belle Glade, Florida. (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)

Roth Farms dates back four generations to the late 1940s, but Rick Roth didn’t grow up thinking the family business would be his future. When he went off to Emory University in 1970 to study math, he figured he’d find himself working an office job, somewhere far from any fields.

“I thought, ‘Man, I'm too smart to be a farmer.’” But Roth said a mix of marijuana and malaise sent him off track. After he was placed on academic probation, he came home and asked his father to put him to work on the farm. To Roth’s surprise, he liked it. He was assigned easy jobs, like driving truckloads of radishes to the packing house. Though he’d often mess up basic tasks or show up late and hungover, his father’s workers knew that he could be the boss someday, and they treated him accordingly. Roth knew it, too. He also knew that if he went to work at some company, he’d start at the bottom, and there was no guarantee how far up he’d make it. Here, he had a clear path to the top.

Roth returned to Emory, finished his degree, and then came back to Roth Farms. His father gave him more responsibility, and within a few years he was overseeing harvest operations. With his crew leaders’ guidance, he’d earned his father’s respect and sensed that this might be permanent, that the farm could actually be his.

Sooner than he expected, it was. In 1984, his father had a heart attack. Two years later, he died. Roth still tears up, 40 years later, recalling his loss.

First image: A photo of Roth’s father and one of his workers. Second image: Roth outside his office. (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)

For a decade, the farm grew and prospered. Then, Roth faced his first major challenge. Back then, almost all of the farm’s workers were Black. But as the workers began aging out of farm labor, it was becoming harder to find new people to take their place. Though Roth had found reason to continue his father’s lucrative profession, he realized with some consternation that the people he employed in low-wage field jobs didn’t raise their own children to follow them: “No farmworker raises their kids to be farmworkers.”

Other Belle Glade farms were responding to the worker shortage by hiring newly arrived Mexican immigrants. Roth Farms hired a new Latino crew leader to help bring them in. By the end of the 1990s, “half of our employees working in seasonal jobs probably were illegal,” Roth said. “Everybody knew that.”

The immigrant workers Roth hired were young, strong and plentiful, and they were willing, he has said, to work for less money than Americans. That assumption brought trouble. By the late 1990s, nearly all of his workers were Latino, and in 1999, a group of nine of them filed a class action lawsuit against Roth for racial and national origin discrimination. They alleged that they earned up to $1.50 less per hour than the small remaining Black crew of a dozen or so workers. Roth at the time denied that any wage disparities were based on race.

The two sides reached a settlement, with Roth Farms agreeing to pay $124,000 to cover the additional wages the workers alleged they were owed. Roth declined to comment on the lawsuit.

As the farm continued to benefit from a fairly steady stream of workers from Mexico, Roth became convinced that those workers should be entitled to legal status. He felt that farms like his couldn’t just keep on hiring undocumented immigrants forever, or at least they shouldn’t have to. He began making treks to Washington, D.C., to advocate for an easier path for undocumented workers to become legal ones.

The bills that would have done that didn’t pass. But Roth kept up his advocacy efforts, reiterating that U.S. citizens would never return to farm work, even with higher wages, and that without immigrant workers, the U.S. would need to begin importing more food.

In 2011, Florida lawmakers began deliberating a series of bills modeled after a recent Arizona law that would make it a crime to be undocumented in Florida, allow police to check people’s immigration status and crack down on the hiring of undocumented workers. The Arizona law, and similar ones in Alabama and Georgia, played out as anticipated. Workers left. Fields of vegetables rotted.

One of the Florida bills also would have required private employers to run all hires through E-Verify, the system for checking legal work status, and imposed fines on companies that employ undocumented immigrants. In response, Roth intensified his public opposition. Those bills failed.

When Congress later that year considered the Legal Workforce Act, including an E-Verify requirement, Roth again spoke against it, telling the Palm Beach Post: “This is a repetitive job for people who don't speak the language. These people pick the crops for other people who have air-conditioned jobs.”

Sorghum fields surround the rural town of Cerritos, where Salvador Garcia Espitia grew up. (Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica)

Generations of Garcia’s family members had worked on farms, but he didn’t grow up thinking it was an inevitability. He wanted to go to college, maybe even become a doctor.

He was in high school when he met Enriquez, who was 15 at the time and a guest at his cousin’s wedding. She was struck by how serious he was, and how smart. No matter her question he had an answer.

Enriquez’s parents were strict. She liked to go out, much more than Garcia did, but she could only meet him in public with her parents in tow, at community gatherings or the annual festival celebrating the town’s patron saint. Otherwise, he could come to the family’s house.

By the time Garcia moved in with Enriquez and her parents, when she was 18 and he was 20, he’d had to give up on going to college. There was no money for that. He went to work in a local dairy, then to the fields and the vegetable packing houses.

A year after he moved in, Garcia and Enriquez married. He didn’t want to start a family too soon, though. He wanted to save up for a house of their own. They made it three years. A house was still a distant possibility, but Garcia took the pregnancy as the best news.

Garcia and Enriquez on a boat in Lake Yuriria in Guanajuato, Mexico. (Photo provided by Nohemí Enriquez Fonseca)

The baby was 6 months old when Enriquez became convinced that something wasn’t right. Isaac was not developing the way he should. She started to look for help. Eventually, she brought Isaac to a private doctor, who said the baby needed to see a neurologist.

That one appointment was nearly a week’s salary. The neurologist scheduled a scan of the child’s brain. Enriquez and Garcia cobbled together what they could, figuring that it was just enough to pay for the scan and cover the bus fare to the facility for her, Isaac and his godmother, who wanted to come along. But when they got there, the scan was more than they were expecting, and more than they had. Isaac’s godmother came up with the remainder, but they were left with no money to get home. They found a bus willing to let them pay the fare at the destination. On the way, Enriquez called a friend to meet the bus and lend her the fare.

The more stressed her husband got, the quieter he became. And in the weeks after the scan, he said very little. He was also working constantly. The neurologist had explained that Isaac had cerebral palsy, which meant he would need a speech therapist, physical therapy and a nutritionist. The rehab facility was an hour and a half away by bus. The therapy sessions cost 1,200 pesos, or about $60, every week. The most Garcia could bring home each week, working as much overtime as he could, was 2,000 pesos. Typically it was more like 1,500.

Just as they got help covering the cost of Isaac’s treatment, he was diagnosed with a second condition, autism. The new medication cost more than what they’d been spending to manage his cerebral palsy.

The need for Garcia to go north was no longer merely important. It was urgent. He turned to his wife and said: “I have to find another solution.” And that’s when the H-2A visa came up.

Storm clouds move in over Roth Farms. (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)

After years of lobbying against various laws, Roth began to wonder if he could do more for farmers by joining the Legislature rather than fighting it. In 2016, he announced his run for a Florida house seat.

Not long after Roth won his race, Donald Trump entered the White House. Roth wholeheartedly supported Trump, but he would soon find that the president’s immigration agenda created a new problem for his farm. “With Donald Trump, there were not a lot of illegals coming to America,” Roth acknowledged, which aligns with the low numbers of immigrants who crossed the border during much of the former president’s first year in office. “We started to have to say, ‘Well, now what are we going to do?’”

For a time, he did what he’d always done: He fought actions that would harm undocumented workers and their employers. He voted against a 2019 E-Verify bill pushed by DeSantis. But he was more quiet about his opposition, he said, refraining from the strong language he’d previously used. The bill died in committee.

It was around that time that Roth, along with his son, who’d taken over the day-to-day operations of the farm, found a fix. It was available to only a sliver of the state’s employers: an agricultural visa program called H-2A.

The program, which allows the U.S. farming industry to bring in foreign laborers on a temporary basis, had been around in some form since the 1940s. But until recently Roth had little need for it – his workers, documented and not, came back every year. Plus, he had considered the program’s requirements to pay more than the minimum wage and cover the cost of transportation from Mexico and housing in Belle Glade too expensive. But, like many other farmers who’d struggled with labor shortages, he came around to it. The program could dependably deliver legal workers. H-2A visa certifications have increased fourfold in the last decade, and nowhere are there more of these workers than in Florida.

“H-2A,” Roth said, “was really the only choice.”

Employment information in both English and Spanish at the entrance of the Roth Farms office (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)

When Florida’s anti-immigration SB 1718 came around in 2023, Roth had an almost entirely H-2A workforce — which made it easier for him to support legislation that purported to push out undocumented workers. As for how to explain his change of heart to constituents: “Given the border crossing that’s going on, we did need to send a strong message,” he said. “If you're illegal, don't come to Florida. We're gonna make it tough on you.”

But some of his constituents couldn’t help but get a different message: “We’re going to make it tough on your workers.” They told Roth that the law itself, not the far-away border crossings, posed the immediate threat to their livelihoods.

Eventually, the potential for the law’s harm began to sink in. Weeks after his vote for SB 1718, in the summer of 2023, Roth showed up at meetings across his district on a campaign of damage control. “I apologize to you for this bad bill,” he told a group gathered at a local church, with the help of a Spanish interpreter.

Roth made numerous statements in public and private meetings that the law is predominantly political, intended “to help a governor run for president.” He said it had been laced with “purposeful loopholes” to protect employers from too much harm. For one, it doesn’t apply to small businesses with fewer than 25 workers. But chief among the loopholes, Roth said, is that the E-Verify requirement doesn’t extend to undocumented immigrants who already have jobs. “If you like your job, keep your job,” he’s become fond of saying.

Roth admits that, even today, he may have longtime workers who are undocumented. When workers in his own packing house started asking questions about the law, he said he “instructed all my management what to say, and I just told them very clearly, ‘This new bill that you're hearing all this talk about does not apply to workers that already have a job.’”

The full impact of SB 1718 is still not clear. Its E-Verify provisions did not take full effect until July. For some employers, it’s made life more difficult. “I can’t grow,” said Mark Baker, who owns a 40-year-old landscape and plant nursery in Delray Beach. He lamented that he can’t use the H-2A program, since his workers aren’t temporary. “I want to open another office, but I can’t because I can’t even staff the office I have.”

Despite having voted to crack down on immigrants in Florida, Roth maintains he still supports broader immigration legalization and insists it’s up to Washington to take action. He also admits he thinks such a fix is far off. What he knows for sure is that for farms like his, H-2A is working, that it incentivizes workers to come here the right way — with the assurance that worker and farmer alike will be protected.

First image: Garcia’s parents, Veronica Espitia and Salvador Garcia, in their home in Cerritos, Mexico. Second image: Enriquez and her 3-year-old son watch the rain in the plaza center of Pueblo Nuevo, Guanajuato, Mexico. (Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica)

That September 2023 morning started like so many others. Enriquez caught the bus to take Isaac to physical therapy. This time her husband came along. They stopped to eat something on the way back home, then Garcia collected the bags he had packed.

If he was nervous or frustrated or scared, he didn’t show it.

Garcia’s parents picked up the three of them to drive Garcia to the bus station. It would be tortuous for him to be away from his family, but the consolation was that the job would only last five months. It was dusk when they got to the bus stop, and they couldn’t linger. It was unsafe to be out in the dark. They hugged him tight. “Take care of our boy,” he said.

Garcia spent the following days sorting out paperwork with a labor subcontractor who specializes in recruiting Mexicans to work on U.S. farms. He knew a little about where he was headed: Belle Glade. His wife’s aunt had immigrated to a nearby town years earlier. Once he arrived, he visited with her before settling into his barracks-style lodging near the sugar cane fields, which happened to be just a few miles from Roth’s fields. Garcia texted his wife that he would try his best to get some rest that night, since he would start work in the morning.

The following afternoon, Sept. 13, 2023, Enriquez was just getting back from taking Isaac to therapy when someone called from Florida. It was a woman from the company that had hired Garcia. Her husband was fine, the woman said. He had fainted in the fields, she explained, which was something that happened from time to time, because of heat nearing 90 degrees. But no, he couldn’t talk to her right then. He was still unconscious. The woman gave Enriquez the name of the hospital where he was recovering.

As soon as they hung up, Enriquez called her aunt, who headed to the hospital. But when she arrived, she was told that Garcia had been transferred, to Palms West Hospital in Loxahatchee.

In the hours that followed, the calls to Enriquez accelerated. Amid all the ringing and buzzing, someone arranged that night for a video call so she could see her husband. He still hadn’t woken up. She spoke softly to him, trying to hold back her panic over the cables and tubes that crisscrossed his body, including one helping him breathe.

It was very early the next morning when the hospital called again. They needed Enriquez’s permission to resuscitate her husband. The words instinctively came to her — yes, save him — and she sprang into action. She realized she would need to somehow quickly cross the border to get to her husband. It seemed as if one minute, she was handing off Isaac to her mother and the next she was 900 miles away at the border crossing at Matamoros, Garcia’s mother by her side.

The two women had to wait on the Mexican side of the bridge for several hours. As they sat outside in the middle of the night, the hospital called again. They needed Enriquez to agree to resuscitate her husband. Again she said yes.

The nurses ventured one more question. In the event of a third resuscitation, would Enriquez have the same answer? Her husband was no longer well, they said. He was suffering. Enriquez weighed the pain in her soul. No, she said. Not a third time.

The border crossing took all day. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials had to ask so many questions to approve the two women for the humanitarian permit. Hours passed. Enriquez was aware that authorities kept trying to reach people at the hospital to confirm her husband’s condition.

Finally, the permits were approved. As the two women left the CBP building in Brownsville, Texas, an official saw them out, holding open the door. It would be the first time either woman had crossed into the United States. All the man said was, “I’m very sorry.”

Garcia’s grave in Pueblo Nuevo, Guanajuato, Mexico (Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica)

Roth had heard about the death of a worker on a nearby farm. He said it was sad. He also said one of his first thoughts was one of worry, about what state or federal agencies would do in response. “It's a big deal that somebody died,” Roth added. But “the government tends to overreact.”

In late 2023, Roth returned to Tallahassee to serve his final session in the Florida House before he termed out. He has plans to run for state Senate in 2026. Among the last bills he co-sponsored as a member of the House was one that would prevent local governments in Florida from implementing workplace heat protections.

It was introduced in reaction to a proposal in Miami-Dade County that would have required water, breaks and shade for outdoor workers. Roth had joined a chorus of business groups pushing forcefully to ban the local labor ordinance. “I’m a little bit insulted that some government bureaucrat thinks they need to help me take care of my employees,” he told a local Fox affiliate.

Roth had supported a bill four years earlier to require heat protections for student athletes, but he rejected the idea that Florida should impose protections for workers. He told ProPublica that employers don’t need state or local government to require safeguards, since employers already have every incentive to protect their workers. Given the shortage of workers across the state, he said, “do you really think they're not taking care of their employees?”

He also pointed out that the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration already regulates workplaces, including fining those that don’t offer heat protections. And ultimately, he said, it’s the responsibility of workers and their crew leaders to make sure they’re not putting themselves at risk. On his own farm, he said, workers know when they need to take breaks.

On March 12, 2024, days after the Florida Legislature passed the anti-heat protection bill, OSHA revealed the findings of its investigation into Garcia’s death. It determined that the Belle Glade company that hired Garcia and other H-2A workers to local farms had failed to adequately protect workers from the heat.

“This young man’s life ended on his first day on the job because his employer did not fulfill its duty to protect employees from heat exposure,” the OSHA area director said in a statement. “Had McNeill Labor Management made sure its workers were given time to acclimate to working in brutally high temperatures with required rest breaks, the worker might not have suffered a fatal injury.”

For McNeill Labor Management Inc.’s failures to protect Garcia and to report his death to the government, OSHA issued the company a fine of less than $28,000.

Owner Shannon McNeill told ProPublica that his company, which employs 700 mostly H-2A workers at the height of operations, provides workers with all of the protections that safety advocates call for, including water, shade and breaks. He also said that the company is now easing new hires more slowly into full-day shifts, a practice that OSHA already recommended. But he is contesting OSHA’s determination that the company is responsible for Garcia’s death.

Enriquez visits her husband's grave. (Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica)

McNeill Labor Management had paid for Garcia’s body to be returned to Mexico and his funeral expenses. On a morning in July, before a heavy rain set in, Nohemí Enriquez left her son with her mother near the church in the town of Pueblo Nuevo and drove out of the town center to visit her husband’s grave in a small, orderly cemetery. The flowers she placed there on her last visit had become dried and shriveled. She took them from the vase and threw them away, angry at herself for not bringing fresh ones. And then she prayed. “For those I love and who loved me,” his gravestone read.

One week earlier, on July 19, Roth was in the audience as Trump spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee about “a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction to communities all across our land.” He promised to deliver on a commitment to carry out “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

Roth, a party delegate from Florida, had spent the day before dancing and laughing on the floor with other delegates, as well as shedding a few tears. “It was very emotional for me when Trump came out,” he said.

Asked a week later if the mass deportations would do harm to the agricultural industry in Florida, he responded with confidence that Trump would not actually engage in an indiscriminate mass deportation program. But even if that did happen, he said, there will always be a supply of H-2A workers waiting. “We'll figure it out,” he said. “We'll get more.”

Translations by Wendy Pérez, Jesús Jank Curbelo and Greta Díaz González Vázquez.

by Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, James Barragán, The Texas Tribune, Vianna Davila, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Natalia Contreras, Votebeat

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 produced in collaboration with The Texas Tribune and Votebeat. Sign up for newsletters from The Texas Tribune and from Votebeat.

Mary Howard-Elley fervently believes illegal immigration in the U.S. is a critical problem that only former President Donald Trump can solve. She says the continuation of his border wall and promised mass deportations will make the country safer.

She agrees with Trump’s unfounded claims that Democrats are opening the borders to allow noncitizens to vote, fearing that it could ultimately cost him the election.

Howard-Elley didn’t pay much attention when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott helped fuel that narrative by announcing that the state had removed thousands of supposed noncitizens from its rolls, claiming some had a history of voting.

Then the U.S. citizen learned she was among them.

The elections office in Montgomery County, just north of Houston, had sent Howard-Elley a letter in late January saying that she had been flagged after she indicated that she was not a U.S. citizen in response to a jury summons. She had 30 days to provide the county proof of citizenship or she would be removed from the voter rolls, according to the letter.

The retired Transportation Security Administration agent was confused by how the county could come to that conclusion. And she seethed at the idea that anyone would question the citizenship of a former federal employee with the “whitest name you could have.”

“Who is allowing people to do this to United States citizens? I understand we have a problem with immigration, but come on now,” Howard-Elley said in an interview.

The 52-year-old disputes the county’s claim that she responded to the jury duty summons by saying she was not a citizen. Instead, Howard-Elley said, she called and asked to be exempted from jury duty because of guardianship duties for three of her grandchildren.

The Montgomery County district clerk’s office, which organizes jury duty, did not respond to repeated questions and denied a public records request for Howard-Elley’s response to the jury summons, asserting it was exempt from disclosure.

Regardless of how she was flagged as a noncitizen, Howard-Elley wanted to ensure she could vote. She ordered several copies of her certified Louisiana birth certificate and confirmed receipt with an elections office employee. She thought the matter was resolved.

But Howard-Elley’s registration was not reinstated, making her the 10th U.S. citizen identified by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and Votebeat who was removed from the rolls as a potential noncitizen. The news organizations tracked them down as part of an investigation that found Abbott’s claims about the state removing more than 6,500 noncitizens were likely inflated and, in some cases, wrong.

The 10 U.S. citizens who were struck from the rolls represented a range of racial and political backgrounds, and most were removed as the result of human error.

Abbott’s press release provided fodder for Republicans warning that noncitizens could vote in large numbers and sway the election, though experts say such instances are exceedingly rare.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the federal government last week, claiming the Department of Homeland Security has refused to help the state check the citizenship status of some registered voters. The federal agency offers states access to a database that can be used to verify immigration status, but Paxton argued it’s inadequate and requires a fee for each verification. Ten other states use the database for voting-related purposes.

Neither Abbott nor Paxton responded to questions for this story. DHS has not filed a response to the attorney general’s lawsuit in federal court.

From left: Howard-Elley with her grandsons, Skylar Lopez, 6, and Bryson Lopez, 8, at her home in Splendora, Texas (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Howard-Elley’s case shows how eligible voters can be removed from the rolls — and how tough it can be to get back on.

She didn’t realize her registration was canceled until reporters called her this month. Darla Brooks, the Montgomery County voter registration manager, told both Howard-Elley and the news organizations that she had not been reinstated in March because her birth certificate arrived after the 30-day window she was given to prove her citizenship.

On Oct. 14, Brooks said Howard-Elley had now also missed the registration deadline for this year’s election and would not be able to vote.

The election official was wrong.

Multiple voting rights lawyers pointed to a state law that says counties should immediately reinstate voters’ registrations that were wrongly canceled. Brooks initially told reporters that the law did not apply to Howard-Elley because the county had followed proper procedures when removing her.

But when the news organizations brought the same question to the secretary of state’s office, which provides counties with guidance on implementing election laws, the answer was different.

A 2021 agency advisory instructs counties to immediately reinstate voters removed for failing to respond to a notice as soon as they present proof of citizenship. They can even be reinstated at a polling place on Election Day.

Less than two hours after the news organizations sent the secretary of state’s advisory to Montgomery County, Howard-Elley was back on the rolls.

“I’m sorry that Montgomery County has to be shown the law to abide by it,” Howard-Elley said. She added that this election would have been the first time in more than 30 years she failed to cast a ballot for president. “I just hope they don’t do this to anybody else ever again because it’s not fair.”

Montgomery County elections administrator Suzie Harvey said her office had never had to deal with a situation like Howard-Elley’s, and while she likely saw the advisory when it was issued, she had forgotten about the specific guidance. She said her office worked quickly to reinstate Howard-Elley when the news organizations flagged the advisory and she is gratified that Howard-Elley will be able to vote.

“That would have been extremely tragic,” Harvey said.

Not every voter has Howard-Elley’s tenacity, or news organizations asking persistent questions about how their case was handled.

How to Dispute Your Removal

If your voter registration is canceled because you failed to respond to a letter trying to confirm your citizenship, here’s what you can do:

• Contact your county elections office before heading to the polls. Show proof of your citizenship and ask to be reinstated.
• You can also share this 2021 advisory from the Texas secretary of state’s office on reinstating citizens to the voter rolls.
• Common forms of documentation include a U.S. passport or certified birth certificate. See the full list of acceptable proof of citizenship in the advisory.
• If you don’t find out until you arrive at the polls that you need to show proof of citizenship, that advisory still requires election officials to reinstate you immediately after you do so.
• Contact the Texas secretary of state’s office for additional assistance.

“Voting should not be so hard that you have to be a lawyer or have lawyer skills to be able to vote,” said Nina Perales, vice president of litigation at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Perales said it would take “heroic efforts” by the average voter to research the election laws and advocate for their registration to be reinstated.

Even then, the decision would depend on how election officials in their county interpret laws and guidance.

Three county election officials gave different answers to the question of whether they would reinstate a voter in Howard-Elley’s situation, though all stressed they would try their best to follow the law.

One said the voter should be reinstated. The other two said they would likely reinstate the voter after the registration deadline only if the county had erred in some way.

Those differences give “voters in some counties fewer rights than voters in other counties,” said Emily Eby French, the policy director at Common Cause Texas, a nonprofit that advocates for voting access.

Howard-Elley said she is disturbed at how close she came to losing her ability to vote. If reporters hadn’t called her, Howard-Elley said, she might have been turned away at the polls.

Help Us Report on the Removal of Voters from Texas’ Voter Rolls

The Texas Tribune, ProPublica and Votebeat want to hear from Texas voters who believe their registrations have been incorrectly canceled or flagged, in order to inform our reporting on issues with the state’s voter registration review system.

Get in Touch

She said she worries about whether other eligible voters are among those labeled as noncitizens and that Abbott should look into whether there are more U.S. citizens among them. The lifelong Republican said state and county officials need to be held accountable to ensure more U.S. citizens are not erroneously removed.

“The system is very flawed,” Howard-Elley said. “I feel really sad that we’re in a situation like this. You would think in 2024 we wouldn’t have issues like this.”

She intends to cast her ballot for Trump.

by Ruth Talbot, Asia Fields, Nicole Santa Cruz and Maya Miller, design by Zisiga Mukulu and Ruth Talbot, illustrations by Matt Rota 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.

As homelessness has surged to record levels in the U.S., cities are increasingly removing or “sweeping” tents or entire encampments of people living outdoors.

Cities say they carry out these clearings humanely with the goal of getting people off the street. But they often result in people's belongings being thrown away. ProPublica found — through reviewing records from 16 cities, reporting in 11 cities and speaking with people across the country — that these actions create a cycle of hardship.

Elijah Harris, 38, was living in a tent near Hollywood in January when Los Angeles sanitation workers showed up late one morning. Harris said he left to warn others nearby that the city was clearing the area. He came back to find his tent and its contents gone. He lost everything he needed for his job with DoorDash: his electric bike, ID and iPhone.

Elijah Harris, in a handwritten response to a prompt from ProPublica, described the loss of everything he needed to deliver for DoorDash, alongside storage and mail keys, money and all his identification. (Elijah Harris)

Losing his phone meant he had to regain access to his DoorDash account. Without his passport and Social Security card, which he said were also taken, that process proved difficult.

“They ask you to take a picture of the front and back of your ID and then take a selfie to verify it’s you, but I couldn’t do that,” Harris said. “It was a disaster.”

He said he couldn’t do his delivery job for months and then had to ride a nonelectric bike, which limited the area he could deliver to and the amount he earned.

Los Angeles officials did not comment on Harris’ case but said in a statement that the city “works to not unnecessarily remove anyone’s belongings” and that unattended items are stored or thrown away.

Harris, who lives in Los Angeles, said the loss of items he needed to work was a “disaster.”

(Elijah Harris) “I was trying to get off the streets, but they set me back. It’s not easy getting services, and trying to find work, and trying to save.”

Harris is one of thousands of people living on the streets in the United States who have been subject to sweeps, the term often used to describe how cities dismantle homeless encampments or clear areas where people are living outside.

Cities, including Los Angeles, have policies to alert people before a sweep. In an ideal scenario, city officials said, people would be packed before crews arrive. But advance notice is not always required. Many people told ProPublica they didn’t know workers were coming or had stepped away for work, appointments or to find water when workers came. Some were in the process of moving their items but couldn’t do so quickly enough. Workers sorted through what’s left, sometimes storing items and throwing others into garbage bags or trucks.

Crews in Denver throw out the tents of an encampment site in 2020. (Hyoung Chang/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post/Getty Images)

Encampment removals have become more common as local governments try to reduce the number of people living on sidewalks and in other public spaces. They are likely to escalate further after a U.S. Supreme Court decision in June allowed municipalities to arrest or cite people for sleeping on public property even if there’s no available shelter.

Municipalities are often under pressure from business owners and residents to remove encampments, which officials said can obstruct sidewalks and pose public health, safety or environmental hazards.

Many cities told ProPublica that letting people live outside is not compassionate. “We cannot allow unsheltered residents to live in conditions that are below what we would accept for ourselves,” a Minneapolis spokesperson said in a statement to ProPublica.

Two people left a note for cleanup crews in Portland, Oregon, that said they had left for a housing appointment that had taken months to get but would return as soon as they could, according to a photo in city records. (Records from city of Portland, Oregon)

Some cities, including San Francisco, characterized encampment removals as a first step toward shelter and housing.

“We are going to make them so uncomfortable on the streets of San Francisco that they have to take our offer” of shelter or housing, San Francisco Mayor London Breed said in July after announcing more aggressive sweeps would take place.

Advocates and people living on the streets say encampment clearings perpetuate homelessness.

“Every time someone gets swept, it just sets us back like 10 steps,” said Duke Reiss, a peer support specialist at Blanchet House in Portland, which provides meals and services to those experiencing homelessness. “It makes it almost impossible to get people help because everything requires documentation.”

A log of documents collected during an encampment removal in San Jose, California. Second image: Identification documents taken in encampment removals in Portland. (Documents redacted by ProPublica. City of San Jose, California, and City of Portland.)

While many cities instruct workers to store identification, service providers told ProPublica about people they were working with who struggled to access Medicaid, disability benefits, food stamps, sobriety programs and housing after their documents were confiscated in encampment removals.

Courts have ruled that the destruction of property during sweeps violates the Fourth and 14th amendments, which prohibit unreasonable seizures and guarantee due process and equal protection under the law.

Some U.S. cities have established programs to store belongings — sometimes in response to those lawsuits. But they still have broad discretion over what ends up in the trash. ProPublica found that even when objects taken from encampments are stored, people are rarely reunited with their belongings.

Images of the storage facility in Portland (Asia Fields and Ruth Talbot/ProPublica)

To understand what governments confiscate and how it impacts people living on the street, we received storage records from 14 cities with large homeless populations and reported on the ground in 11 cities. We spoke to 135 people who had experienced sweeps, and we gave many notecards to write about the consequences in their own words.

Over and over, they told ProPublica that having possessions taken traumatizes them, exacerbates health issues and undermines efforts to find housing and get or keep a job. More than 200 additional people who went through sweeps, outreach workers and others who have worked with unhoused people wrote to us echoing these sentiments.

The storage records included images and written descriptions of the items cities had collected. Some records described the brand or color of belongings. Others had little detail, referring to most belongings as a “personal item” or providing no description at all.

Here are just some of the items that were taken.

Survival Gear

ProPublica saw more than 400 references to tents and over 400 references to sleeping bags or blankets in the logs. Other survival items included a camping stove, a heater, soap, shampoo, toothpaste and deodorant.

(Photos from Portland, Oregon, and San Jose, California)

In the three years Steven lived outside around Little Rock, Arkansas, he said he got frostbite leading to the amputation of his feet.

City workers cleared his camp in February after a snowstorm. Steven, 39, who uses a wheelchair, remembers asking for more time to pack. He said he was told no and was only able to gather a pillow, a backpack with some clothing and a Bible. Workers bulldozed everything else, including the tent and bedding that kept him warm.

City workers came to his new camp and took everything else. He got frostbite again.

Steven got frostbite after two encampment removals where his belongings were taken.

(Steven) “I would almost say it’s borderline harassment, but there’s nothing borderline about it.”

Almost everyone who shared their stories with ProPublica said they lost items needed to survive, such as tents, sleeping bags and blankets.

Rebecca Huggins, 33, broke her foot this year and needed surgery. While she was recovering, she slept in a dry riverbed in a Phoenix park. City workers confiscated her tent, umbrella, ice chest, sunscreen and pain medication as temperatures rose to 100 degrees, Huggins said.

Handwritten card reading “My tent was taken also my blankets, cooler, food, prescription medicines. It made it harder for me to be comfortable in this heat and took my shelter away from me made me feel less safe…” (Here and throughout the rest of the story, ProPublica features excerpts from handwritten cards written by people we interviewed.)

“It was really hard for me,” she said. “They took everything, my sunscreen, everything, like all my necessities to be almost comfortable.”

Violette Loftis, a 42-year-old in Portland, said she’s lost tents to sweeps and theft.

“I’ve had many tents, and I never had one for more than like a week, if that,” Loftis said. “I’ve started over so many times it’s like nothing now, but like the first few times I was just like lost.”

To avoid sweeps, Loftis now sleeps in doorways without a tent.

Handwritten card reading “I have lost everything clear down to the clothes on my back. I now wear a purse that I wear 24-7. I have no trust and I live like an animal and have serious mental issues because of it. Help it get better.”

Sometimes the belongings that were taken included supplies purchased using government funding. Portland officials say they regularly dispose of tents; the county has handed out thousands of tents in recent years. In San Francisco, an organizer told us the Department of Public Health hands out hygiene kits that are confiscated in encampment removals. Outreach workers said it can be challenging to get people government-subsidized service again when their phones are taken.

“We’re actually getting money from the city or the county to purchase these things for individuals, and then they’re just turning around and throwing them all away the next day,” John Rios, a case manager for people experiencing homelessness in Seattle, told ProPublica.

A Seattle spokesperson said tents and other gear are stored unless they are wet or hazardous.

Work Items

ProPublica saw over 150 references to tools and toolboxes in the logs. Other work items included a new work jacket, a chest of hand and power tools, phones and battery chargers.

(Photos from Portland, Oregon, and San Jose, California)

People experiencing homelessness told us that the confiscation of belongings — such as tools, phones and modes of transportation — limited their ability to work.

In Los Angeles, Mario Van Rossen said he lost tools he used to do gardening, landscaping and handyman jobs this year. He had moved his belongings to a nearby street that he thought was outside the sweep zone, but city workers still took the tools while he watched.

(Mario Van Rossen) “You guys stripped me of my living. I use those tools to make money to hopefully get off the streets.”

He said he lost more items in another sweep after speaking to ProPublica in June.

In early June, as temperatures creeped above 100 in Las Vegas, Dorothy said she ran to grab water. When she returned, her wagon — stuffed with her work clothes, blankets, four tents and eyeglasses — was gone.

Dorothy, a security guard, said it would take months to replace what she needed for work.

“They threw away me and my son’s badges,” she said. “So therefore, we can’t go to work.”

Ronald Brown, 61, was working as a street musician in Portland when he said his tent and the guitars inside were taken.

City contractors left cards with their number, but when he called, they said they didn’t have the instruments. Brown said he has no idea if they lost or stole them or if someone else took them in the chaos of the sweep.

Portland officials said they didn’t see instruments in the photos crews took of a sweep in the area.

Medical Supplies

ProPublica saw over 80 references to wheelchairs or walkers in the logs. Other medical supplies included an oxygen tank, a dose of the overdose-reversal drug Narcan, a first-aid kit, a bottle of migraine relief medicine and a blood sugar monitor.

(Photos from Portland, Oregon, and San Jose, California)

Outreach workers and people who’ve experienced removals told us of the loss of CPAP machines; antibiotics; Narcan to reverse drug overdoses; medications for blood pressure, diabetes and seizures; wound care items; mood stabilizers; nebulizers; inhalers; insulin; and prenatal items.

When medications or medical devices are taken, health conditions can worsen and visits to emergency medical services can increase. Replacing medication and devices can also be expensive.

Barbara DiPietro, senior director of policy at the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, said when medications are taken from people it’s “significantly destabilizing.”

“What would happen if you just suddenly went off all of your medications?” she said. “How would that throw your entire body off, but then also your ability to work, your ability to take care of your daily functions?”

In the fall of 2023, Greg Adams was sleeping near the Sacramento River when a crew arrived. He said he lost his hiking backpack because he couldn’t carry it up an embankment. Inside the backpack, Adams kept Keppra, a seizure medication. It took months to replace, and in that time he said he experienced a seizure, causing him to fall and injure his head.

Handwritten card reading “My seizure medication motorhome all my belonging. It hurt my head”

Sacramento officials said that multiple agencies have jurisdiction over the area.

Helen’s Hepatitis C medication has been taken multiple times in Portland. For it to be effective, Helen had to finish all of the medication, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

“I was flipping out,” she said. “That stuff’s not cheap.”

Helen had to work with a clinic to get a replacement approved. To keep it safe, she stored it at a local nonprofit.

Portland officials say they tell workers to always store prescribed medication.

Adam Mora said he had eyeglasses taken in a sweep in Riverside, California, this year.

Handwritten card reading “My prescription glasses were taken. Have been getting head aches. They just come and throw our stuff away. And they just don’t care. Like it was nothing to them. Thank you”

His partner said her supply of contacts was also taken.

Riverside officials did not comment on specific cases but said they do their work with the “utmost professionalism and respect.”

Clothing

ProPublica saw over 1,300 references to clothing or shoes in the logs. That included work pants, socks, underwear and Keds sneakers.

(Photos from Portland, Oregon, and San Jose, California)

Candince Swarm’s boyfriend, Armando, died in July 2021. Swarm, who is 38 and lives in Austin, Texas, kept the shirt he was wearing that day in a Ziploc bag. She described taking it out once: “It still smelled like him, you know, and I just missed him so much in that moment and I just hugged the shirt and I cried.”

In November 2023, city workers told her she had 72 hours to move her belongings. She said workers returned about 48 hours later and crushed her van and everything inside, including Armando’s shirt.

Jeffery Stafford, in Riverside, said he watched a city crew dispose of his tent, shoes and clothes. “They came in with the Bobcat and just picked up whatever they could, threw it in the truck and took it,” the 32-year-old said. Afterward, he said, he “started wandering the streets,” trying to replace his survival gear.

Handwritten card reading “My clothes because it’s hard to keep clean being on the streets so it made me feel insecure to ask people for help.”

Kayla said she lost all of her clothes when workers removed her encampment in San Francisco in 2020. Kayla’s mother had taken her shopping recently.

“I came back and everything was gone,” she said.

Handwritten card reading “My clothes that my mom had just bought for me. It was really hard to tell her that all the clothes we went shopping together were lost before I even got to wear them.” Sentimental Items

ProPublica saw over 125 references to belongings described as “personal” in the logs. Sentimental items included an American flag, a pink diary, a silver heart ring and a copy of the New Testament.

(Personal information redacted by ProPublica. Photos from Portland, Oregon.)

Since Teresa Stratton, 61, became homeless with her daughter over a year ago, she’d kept her husband’s ashes in an urn made of Himalayan sea salt. Ray, the “love of her life,” died in 2020.

Teresa Stratton said her husband’s ashes were taken in a sweep in Portland.

(Teresa Stratton) “You could see it in his eyes every time he looked at me, how much he loved me.”

In April, when city contractors came through Delta Park in North Portland, she said Ray’s ashes were taken.

Portland officials said they didn’t see an urn in photos taken by workers. They said depending on how the ashes were stored, they could have been thrown away.

Advocates and people experiencing homelessness repeatedly mentioned having ashes taken during sweeps.

Handwritten card reading “My husband's ashes: I made me feel alone, scared, empty. Now I wonder where he is and if he’s all still in his urn and if he’s ok. And I hope he’s not in the dump.”

Many cities only store items that cleanup crews deem valuable and in good condition, meaning things like letters and photos can be discarded. In interview after interview, people said the loss of these belongings stuck with them the most.

ProPublica saw over 125 references to belongings described as “personal.”

Over six years, Mary and Jeff Yahner said crews in the Phoenix area took their belongings at least a dozen times. They’ve lost and replaced documentation and clothing. But Mary, 59, gets emotional when she thinks about the loss of blue baby shoes that her son and daughter wore.

Handwritten card reading “I had my kid’s baby shoes w/ me since we became homeless. It was all I had left of them {they are w/ family}. The police/city took them w/ the rest of our stuff. It broke my heart.”

Harold Odom, 64, has been housed for about seven years. But he still thinks about the family photos, including of his late mother and sister, that he said were taken from him in a sweep in Seattle.

“It’s a sense of loss that doesn’t go away,” he said. “Knowing that my belongings are likely gone for good — trashed or lost forever — fills me with a sadness that’s hard to bear.”

Brandon Lyons, 28, had his belongings taken by Riverside’s code enforcement unit last year. Lyons said he and his friends moved their belongings out of the area, but the city still took them when they were briefly left unattended.

Handwritten card reading “They took my baby pictures and my moms obituaries.”

Crystal was most devastated to lose a rhinestone crown during a Portland sweep.

“It was just the feeling when I wore it,” she said. “Like I was somebody.”

There were sweeps in the area around this time, but city officials said they didn’t find a record of her items.

Repeated Loss

ProPublica spoke to many people who lost nearly everything they owned repeatedly. They told us how this extreme loss disoriented and demoralized them.

After two sweeps in the span of a few months, Jerry Vermillion, 60, said he stopped trying to rebuild and spent most of the past two years in Portland “wandering around sleeping in a doorway here, a doorway there, not settled.”

“You better get used to starting over. If you get attached to anything, you’ll get devastated,” he told ProPublica.

Handwritten card reading “I felt violated, I felt that no-one cared, and was very hurt and angry.” (Luanne Loving, 66, Portland) Handwritten card reading “It made surviving day to day life difficult to be able to progress out of being homeless and was a setback that made the depressive state I was in even worse. Then other people would take advantage of me even worse than they already have.” (Drew Dinh, 40, Minneapolis)

Vermillion is in temporary housing now, as he secured one of 20 spots offered by a local nonprofit. But he said the sweeps did not motivate him to find housing.

Even when someone gets off the streets, the loss of what was taken stays with them. Deonna Everett, 68, said the city of Santa Cruz, California, threw away many of her belongings, including furniture she’d saved from when she was housed in early 2024. When she moved into new housing in June, she had only clothes and a few other items.

“I don’t know if anything will ever seem quite right after what happened,” Everett said. “But I have to keep in mind that there’s got to be a light at the end of this tunnel. And so I’m just going to keep a close eye on that light. I hope it’ll shine.”

One person, who asked not to be named because of safety concerns, offered a description for people on the streets: “I call us the missing-stuff folks,” she said. “We’re missing our families, we’re missing our homes, we’re missing our stuff.”

How We Reported This Story

ProPublica received records of personal property collected during homeless encampment removals in 14 cities. Out of thousands of items in those responses, ProPublica chose a small selection to display here, prioritizing notable entries and items representative of those commonly seen.

Some records clearly indicated whether an item had been disposed of by the city. Other records did not explicitly list a status for items. When possible, via reaching out to cities or cross-checking against property retrieval logs, ProPublica confirmed that the items displayed were disposed of. When we could not confirm whether an item was disposed of, ProPublica only used items that were not listed as claimed.

We verified that sweeps occurred in the geographic area and around the time that our sources described using additional interviews, city data, sweeps schedules or media reports. We also gave cities the opportunity to respond to what would be included in this story, and we noted throughout when they provided relevant context or disagreed with specific details. We verified each person’s identity through public records. In one case, due to a common name and difficulty reconnecting with the source, we confirmed the name matched what was given to service providers. We used only first names when people said the publication of their full names would pose safety risks.

Get in Touch

ProPublica is working on multiple projects related to homelessness, and we are committed to hearing from the communities who have experiences and stories to share.

• In New York, we’re partnering with New York Focus to investigate hotels and motels used to house people who are homeless. Reach the reporters through this form.
• In Maine, we’re partnering with the Bangor Daily News to report on evictions, especially those from public housing authorities. Reach the reporters through this form.
• In Oregon, we’re partnering with Street Roots to investigate Portland’s city spending related to homelessness. If you have insights, contact the reporter at k.rambo@streetroots.org.

If you have other experiences to share regarding homelessness, contact us through this form.

Hailey Closson and Anna Maria Barry-Jester contributed reporting.

by Molly Redden and Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented

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

A key ally to former President Donald Trump detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest, defund the Environmental Protection Agency and put career civil servants “in trauma” in a series of previously unreported speeches that provide a sweeping vision for a second Trump term.

In private speeches delivered in 2023 and 2024, Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, described his work crafting legal justifications so that military leaders or government lawyers would not stop Trump’s executive actions.

He said the plans are a response to a “Marxist takeover” of the country; likened the moment to 1776 and 1860, when the country was at war or on the brink of it; and said the timing of Trump’s candidacy was a “gift of God.”

“Their Entire Apparatus Is Exposed to Our Strategy” (Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

ProPublica and Documented obtained videos of the two speeches Vought delivered during events for the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank led by Vought. The think tank’s employees or fellows include Jeffrey Clark, the former senior Justice Department lawyer who aided Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election result; Ken Cuccinelli, a former acting deputy secretary in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump; and Mark Paoletta, a former senior budget official in the Trump administration. Other Trump allies such as former White House adviser Steve Bannon and U.S. Reps. Chip Roy and Scott Perry either spoke at the conferences or appeared on promotional materials for the events.

Vought does not hide his agenda or shy away from using extreme rhetoric in public. But the apocalyptic tone and hard-line policy prescriptions in the two private speeches go further than his earlier pronouncements. As OMB director, Vought sought to use Trump’s 2020 “Schedule F” executive order to strip away job protections for nonpartisan government workers. But he has never spoken in such pointed terms about demoralizing federal workers to the point that they don’t want to do their jobs. He has spoken in broad terms about undercutting independent agencies but never spelled out sweeping plans to defund the EPA and other federal agencies.

Vought’s plans track closely with Trump’s campaign rhetoric about using the military against domestic protesters or what Trump has called the “enemy within.” Trump’s desire to use the military on U.S. soil recently prompted his longest-serving chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, to speak out, saying Trump “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”

Other policies mentioned by Vought dovetail with Trump’s plans, such as embracing a wartime footing on the southern border and rolling back transgender rights. Agenda 47, the campaign’s policy blueprint, calls for revoking President Joe Biden’s order expanding gender-affirming care for transgender people; Vought uses even more extreme language, decrying the “transgender sewage that’s being pumped into our schools and institutions” and referring to gender-affirming care as “chemical castration.”

Since leaving government, Vought has reportedly remained a close ally of the former president. Speaking in July to undercover journalists posing as relatives of a potential donor, Vought said Trump had “blessed” the Center for Renewing America and was “very supportive of what we do,” CNN reported.

Vought did not respond to requests for comment.

"Since the Fall of 2023, President Trump’s campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term,” Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement. She did not directly address Vought’s statements.

Karoline Leavitt, his campaign’s national press secretary, added there have been no discussions on who would serve in a second Trump administration.

In addition to running his think tank, Vought was the policy director of the Republican National Committee’s official platform committee ahead of the nominating convention. He’s also an architect of Project 2025, the controversial coalition effort mapping out how a second Trump administration can quickly eliminate obstacles to rolling out a hard-right policy agenda.

As ProPublica and Documented reported, Project 2025 has launched a massive program to recruit, vet and train thousands of people to “be ready on day one” to serve in a future conservative administration. (Trump has repeatedly criticized Project 2025, and his top aides have said the effort has no connection to the official campaign despite the dozens of former Trump aides and advisers who contributed to Project 2025.)

Vought is widely expected to take a high-level government role if Trump wins a second term. His name has even been mentioned as a potential White House chief of staff. The videos obtained by ProPublica and Documented offer an unfiltered look at Vought’s worldview, his plans for a Trump administration and his fusing of MAGA ideology and Christian nationalism.

A Shadow Government in Waiting

In his 2024 speech, Vought said he was spending the majority of his time helping lead Project 2025 and drafting an agenda for a future Trump presidency. “We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”

Vought laid out how his think tank is crafting the legal rationale for invoking the Insurrection Act, a law that gives the president broad power to use the military for domestic law enforcement. The Washington Post previously reported the issue was at the top of the Center for Renewing America’s priorities.

“We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do,’” he said. Vought held up the summer 2020 unrest following George Floyd’s murder as an example of when Trump ought to have had the ability to deploy the armed forces but was stymied.

Vought’s preparations for a future Trump administration involve building a “shadow” Office of Legal Counsel, he told the gathered supporters in May 2023. That office, part of the Justice Department, advises the president on the scope of their powers. Vought made clear he wants the office to help Trump steamroll the kind of internal opposition he faced in his first term.

“We’re Trying to Build a Shadow Office of Legal Counsel” (Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

Historically, the OLC has operated with a degree of independence. “If, all of a sudden, the office is full of a bunch of loyalists whose only job is to rubber-stamp the White House’s latest policy directive, whose only goal is to justify the ends by whatever means, that would be quite dangerous,” said an attorney who worked in the office under a previous Republican administration and requested anonymity to speak freely.

Another priority, according to Vought, was to “defund” certain independent federal agencies and demonize career civil servants, which include scientists and subject matter experts. Project 2025’s plan to revive Schedule F, an attempt to make it easier to fire a large swath of government workers who currently have civil service protections, aligns with Vought’s vision.

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

“We want to put them in trauma.”

“We Want the Bureaucrats to Be Traumatically Affected” (Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

Vought also revealed the extent of the Center for Renewing America’s role in whipping up right-wing panic ahead of the 2022 midterms over an increase in asylum-seekers crossing at the U.S.-Mexico border.

In February 2022, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich released a legal opinion claiming the state was under “invasion” by violent cartels and could invoke war powers to deploy National Guard troops to its southern border. The legally dubious “invasion” theory became a potent Republican talking point.

Vought said in the 2023 speech that he and Cuccinelli, the former top Homeland Security official for Trump, personally lobbied Brnovich on the effort. “We said, ‘Look, you can write your own opinion, but here’s a draft opinion of what this should look like,’” Vought said.

The nonpartisan watchdog group American Oversight later obtained an email in which Vought pitched the “invasion” framework to Brnovich.

Brnovich wrote in an email to ProPublica that he recalled multiple discussions with Cuccinelli about border security. But he added that “the invasion opinion was the result of a formal request from a member of the Arizona legislature. And I can assure you it was drafted and written by hard working attorneys (including myself) in our office.”

In the event Trump loses, Vought called for Republican leaders of states such as Florida and Texas to “create red-state sanctuaries” by “kicking out all the feds as much as they possibly can.”

“Nothing Short of a Quiet Revolution”

The two speeches delivered by Vought, taken together, offer an unvarnished look at the animating ideology and political worldview of a key figure in the MAGA movement.

Over the last century, Vought said, the U.S. has “experienced nothing short of a quiet revolution” and abandoned what he saw as the true meaning and force of the Constitution. The country today, he argued, was a “post-constitutional regime,” one that no longer adhered to the separation of powers among the three branches of government as laid out by the framers.

He lamented that the conservative right and the nation writ large had become “too secular” and “too globalist.” He urged his allies to join his mission to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.”

And in one of his most dramatic flourishes, he likened the 2024 election to moments in America’s history when the country was facing all-out war.

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

Vought said that independent agencies and unelected bureaucrats and experts wield far too much power while the traditional legislative process is a sham. He extended that critique to agencies like the Department of Justice and the Federal Reserve, whose independence from the White House had long been protected by both political parties.

“The left in the U.S. doesn’t want an energetic president with the power to motivate the executive branch to the will of the American people consistent with the laws of the country,” he said in the 2024 speech. “They don’t want a vibrant Congress where great questions are debated and decided in front of the American people. They don’t want empowered members. They want discouraged and bored backbenchers.”

He added, “The all-empowered career expert like Tony Fauci is their model, wielding power behind the curtains.” Fauci was one of the top public health experts under Trump at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and a key figure in coordinating the national response.

What sets Vought apart from most of his fellow conservative activists is that he accuses powerful organizations on the right of being complicit in the current system of government, singling out the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, the conservative and libertarian legal network co-chaired by activist Leonard Leo. The society is widely seen as an instrumental force in cultivating young conservative lawyers and building a bench of future judges whose embrace of legal theories like originalism and textualism have led to decisions overturning abortion rights, environmental protections and social welfare policies.

Yet in his 2024 speech, Vought accused the Federalist Society and “originalist judges” of being a part of the problem, perpetuating the “post-constitutional structure” that Vought lamented by not ruling more aggressively to weaken or dismantle independent regulatory agencies that Vought and his allies view as illegitimate or unconstitutional.

It was “like being in a contract quietly revoked two decades ago, in which one party didn’t tell the other,” he said. “At some point, reality needs to set in. Instead, we have the vaunted so-called Federalist Society and originalist judges acting as a Praetorian Guard for this post-constitutional structure.”

Echoing Trump’s rhetoric, Vought implicitly endorsed the false claim of a stolen 2020 election and likened the media’s debunkings of that claim to Chinese Communist propaganda.

“In the aftermath of the election, we had all these people going around saying, ‘Well, I don’t see any evidence of voter fraud. The media’s not giving enough [of] a compelling case,’” he said. “Well, that compelling case has emerged. But does a Christian in China ask and come away saying, ‘You know, there’s no persecution, because I haven’t read about it in the state regime press?’ No, they don’t.”

“A Compelling Case” (Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

Vought referred to the people detained for alleged crimes committed on Jan. 6, 2021, as “political prisoners” and defended the lawyers Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman, who have both faced criminal charges for their role in Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Federal law enforcement agencies, he added, “are keeping political opponents in jail, and I think we need to be honest about that.”

The left, Vought continued, has the ultimate goal of ending representative democracy altogether. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country,” he said, “in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us. And they are going to continue to aim it until they no longer have to win elections.”

When Democrats called Trump an “existential threat to democracy,” they were not merely calling for his defeat at the ballot box, he said, but were using “coded language the national security state uses overseas when they are overthrowing other governments” to discourage the military from putting down anti-Trump protests should he win.

“They’re making Trump out to be a would-be dictator or an authoritarian,” he said. “So they’re actively working now to ensure, on a number of levels, that the military will perceive this as dictatorial and therefore not respond to any orders to quell any violence.”

Trump, Vought insisted, has the credibility and the track record to defeat the “Marxist” left and bring about the changes that Vought and his MAGA allies seek. In his view, the Democratic Party’s agenda and its “quiet revolution” could be stopped only by a “radical constitutionalist,” someone in the mold of Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. For Vought, no one was in a better position to fill that role than Trump.

“We have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role, a man whose own interests perfectly align with the interests of the country,” Vought said. “He has seen what it has done to him, and he has seen what they are trying to do to the country.

“That,” he added, “is nothing more than a gift of God.”

by Alec MacGillis

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

Twelve years ago, Sen. Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat, took the stage at his election night party in Columbus to celebrate winning a second term. Barack Obama had just carried Ohio for the second time, after emphasizing his administration’s rescue of the auto industry. Brown wanted to proclaim that success onstage, but he was losing his voice, so his wife, the writer Connie Schultz, took over for him.

As she got to Jeep expanding its Toledo operations and General Motors building the Chevy Cruze at its rejuvenated plant near Youngstown, Brown started interjecting croaks to make sure she got the details right. “The aluminum is made in Cleveland … the transmission is made in Toledo … the engine is made in Defiance … the airbag is made in Brunswick.”

I thought about that moment often while on the campaign trail in Ohio this month. Brown is running for re-election again. But the political landscape is much changed. Ohio is no longer a presidential battleground. GM no longer makes the Cruze — the Lordstown plant where it was assembled closed in 2019. And Brown, who won his last two races by 5 and 7 points, is in a tight race against a car dealership magnate named Bernie Moreno.

Brown and a dwindling band of Democrats in Ohio are still making the case for a certain kind of Democratic Party — one that cares about the working class, that invests in their towns and factories and values the manufacturing jobs that power the nation. That case should have become easier to make of late. Over the past four years, the Biden administration has championed huge investments in renewable energy and computer chip production; two new Intel plants are under construction near Columbus. Yet the political landscape is tougher than ever for Brown and the last remaining Ohio Democrats.

There are several possible explanations. Sixty percent of Ohio residents have only a high school diploma, an associate degree or a few years of college — a relatively high percentage. Union membership has dwindled from its peak in 1989. And the Biden investments have taken a while to ramp up.

At a Brown rally outside an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers hall in Dayton, the head of the local building trades council, David Cox, told me that his members were getting more work than they’d seen in 35 years. Then why, I asked, wasn’t this restoring support for Democrats among workers? “It takes a little while for these guys to wake up,” Cox said.

But Democrats often overlook another dynamic at play here, and that’s the role of place: Even if your own finances are secure, if you look out your window and see your city or town struggling, you believe you are, too. Some academics have referred to this as a sense of “shared fate,” and it could be a powerful force in this election, especially in small cities in the industrial Midwest — such as Reading and Erie in Pennsylvania, Saginaw and Battle Creek in Michigan, Oshkosh and Racine in Wisconsin — where Brown and other Democrats are fighting to hang on to their seats and where Kamala Harris needs to do well (or at least hold her own).

In 2007, the academic Lorlene Hoyt and the city planning consultant André Leroux assembled a nationwide list of “forgotten cities” that were old and small, with a population of 15,000 to 150,000 and a median household income of less than $35,000. Recently, the urban researcher Michael Bloomberg updated it. Of the 179 cities now on the list, 37 are in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. And leading the way, with 23 cities, is Ohio.

Pundits often overlook these sorts of places (they tend to focus on big blue cities, deep-red rural areas and the suburbs in between), but given how clustered these smaller cities are in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, they will matter greatly in the battle for both the White House and for control of Congress. Lately, two of Ohio’s have gained special prominence: Middletown (population 50,000) as the hometown of JD Vance, and Springfield (roughly 60,000) as home to a large community of Haitian immigrants that both Vance and Donald Trump have made a target of their rhetoric.

I have visited dozens of these cities. They often have handsome downtowns with stately central squares and ornate, century-old bank buildings that rise 10 or 12 stories, but it can be difficult to find a cup of coffee after 2 p.m. or a place to watch a ballgame on TV at night. The local news is full of the sort of items I found a few weeks ago in a newspaper in Lima, Ohio (population 35,000): a report that the area was getting its 12th Dollar General store and a letter to the editor lamenting the closure of a Dana Incorporated auto-parts plant with 280 jobs. Just as troubling, young people are becoming harder to find; they’re more drawn to thriving larger cities, such as Columbus, which has been vacuuming up strivers from across the state.

For decades, these smaller cities leaned Democratic, but in the past decade, they have turned redder. In 2012, Obama won Green Bay, Wisconsin, by nearly twice as large a margin as Joe Biden did in 2020; Obama won Saginaw by an extra 15 percentage points. Even in Biden’s hometown, Scranton, Pennsylvania, Obama’s margin was more than 4,000 votes larger.

What’s so perplexing to liberals about this shift is that many of the people who left the Democratic Party are doing well for themselves; these cities are full of small-business owners, factory workers and retirees with pensions getting by under a Democratic president. But seeing your small city become a shadow of its former self can open you to a hard-edge populist message even if you yourself are managing. That’s what scholars mean by “shared fate,” and it’s what’s missed when we analyze voting behavior only by income or education level or race.

Rep. Marcy Kaptur — an Ohio Democrat who is a city planner by training and, after more than 40 years in office, the longest-serving woman in the history of Congress — understands this visceral reality. Her mother was a union organizer at a spark plug factory, and she has watched these wrenching changes play out from Toledo to the smaller cities she has represented, such as Sandusky and Lorain.

It’s rare to hear her talk up the social issues that often dominate debate on the left. Instead, she is most insistent about whether the nation’s industrial base can support its military, whether small cities have economic development expertise, whether workers at Toledo’s closed power plant can find new jobs. “I believe economics isn’t destiny, but it’s 85% of it,” she told me this month during a visit to a new Cleveland-Cliffs steel plant in Toledo.

For years, she has been struggling to get Democratic leaders to care about left-behind districts such as hers. In 2018, Hillary Clinton boasted that the areas she had carried in her 2016 loss produced two-thirds of the nation’s gross domestic product, as if votes from the economically thriving areas counted more. Two years earlier, Chuck Schumer, now Senate majority leader, declared, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

This logic confounds Kaptur, who is now in a closely fought race with a state legislator, Derek Merrin. “A country can’t survive when vast segments of your population cannot get ahead,” she told me. Last year, to impress on party leaders how much ground Democrats are losing in districts like hers, her office produced a chart ranking the 435 House districts by median income. The moral: Democrats now represented most higher-income districts — in places like the Bay Area, the Northeast and metro Washington — while Republicans dominated in many lower-income ones. Her own district was 341st on the ranking, surrounded by red ones. “Washington has trouble seeing us,” she said. “They need binoculars.”

For Brown, the plight of these small cities is personal, because he’s from an archetypal one: Mansfield (population 48,000), which has lost a string of manufacturers. This month, the first person whom I met upon arriving at its central square was a woman asking for money. Brown’s father was a doctor, but as Brown often reminds voters, he went to school with the children of factory workers, a perspective that set him, like Kaptur, against trade deals such as NAFTA that many other Democrats supported.

“Politicians of both parties have done the bidding of wealthy corporations and sold the country out over and over and over again,” he said at a United Auto Workers hall in Toledo this month.

After the event, I asked him about the difficulties facing small cities. “Those cities were even more damaged than metropolitan areas because young people often tended to leave because there wasn’t the economic opportunity,” he said. “So I pay special attention to them.”

On the campaign trail, this means making more visits to the smaller cities than most other Democrats might. These cities also figure prominently in Brown’s stump rhetoric. “I grew up in Mansfield, Ohio, a town that looks a lot like Springfield, looks a lot like Zanesville, looks a lot like Hamilton or Middletown” is how Brown opened his remarks outside the union hall in Dayton, a city also on the updated “forgotten” list. After that event, he fell into an extended conversation with a new sort of small-city leader: one of the pioneers of the Haitian community in Springfield, who now owns five houses there and had come to Dayton to see Brown speak.

Without a doubt, Brown’s and Kaptur’s understanding of such places has helped them survive as long as they have as the state turned redder. It’s not as if their opponents have been offering these small cities many concrete solutions of their own. Far from it: Moreno’s ads center on his backing by Trump, and virtually all of the tens of millions of dollars in attack ads being run against Brown by outside groups focus on transgender youth.

There’s a painful irony in this for Democrats such as Brown and Kaptur. For years, they have been urging their party to pay more heed to these scattered outposts of their base: to Mansfield and Middletown, Springfield and Sandusky, all across their state and region. They were largely vindicated in their warnings about trade policy and political fallout, and a national Democratic response finally arrived in the past few years.

But in many places, demoralization had already spread so far, and local institutions had withered so much, that it became much easier for an opposition message based on nationwide culture-war appeals to register. Brown is as vulnerable now as he has ever been — running only 4 points ahead of Harris in the latest poll — and Kaptur’s race is just as competitive. This is doubly painful for them because they have largely skirted the culture-war front over the years, concentrating instead on economic issues.

Brown and Kaptur may well survive their latest challenges. But it’s hard to see how Democrats will revive their standing in Ohio — or enhance their prospects in the nearby swing states that remain more within their reach, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania — without helping these small cities revive, too. As Kaptur told me simply, sitting in her Toledo office overlooking the Maumee River: “They need to be seen.”

by Eli Hager

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

In 1996, a familiar Republican candidate ran for president calling himself an “America-first” populist, riling up his supporters by claiming that immigrants were “invading” our country.

“I’ll build that security fence, and we’ll close it, and we’ll say, ‘Listen, José, you’re not coming in this time!’” shouted the candidate, Pat Buchanan, to raucous applause at an Iowa rally early that year.

Anti-immigrant sentiment was simmering across the nation, and it was about to translate into federal policy. Leading congressional Republicans, channeling Buchanan’s ideas, were drafting the most restrictionist immigration legislation in nearly a century. The bill included not just a crackdown on undocumented migrants but also provisions that would cut legal immigration almost in half. It looked likely to pass.

But then the business community, so reliant on immigrant workers, showed up.

A motley crew of corporate types, including lobbyists for ascendant Silicon Valley and Seattle tech companies like Microsoft, Intel and Hewlett-Packard, swarmed the nation’s capital, navigating House and Senate hallways as well as the legislative process. Alongside the National Association of Manufacturers and other business groups, they spent months in crowded conference rooms finding common ground with Hispanic and civil rights organizations. They circulated policy briefs to persuadable lawmakers. They counted votes.

They poured resources into the effort, commissioning studies and getting op-eds published defending immigrants.

That spring, their coalition defeated the proposed bill and its attack on legal immigration, forcing Republicans to pursue a scaled-back, though still very tough, illegal immigration enforcement measure.

And Buchanan, after several early victories in the primaries, dropped his bid for the presidency.

Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan speaks at a Christian Coalition rally in 1996. (Brooks Kraft LLC/Sygma via Getty Images)

This was, for decades, the classic role of the business community in immigration politics. They rarely won total victories, and their motivation, typically, wasn’t much more complicated than economic self-interest.

From the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (the largest lobbying organization in the nation, representing business interests) to the “Growers” (agricultural businesses employing migrant farmworkers) to hotel, restaurant and construction industry associations, they spent time and money on Capitol Hill largely to fend off threats to their existing supply of immigrant labor. They also advocated for guest worker programs and a range of types of visas and work permits for new foreign-born workers.

But they were always there, on the Hill and in the public conversation. They built coalitions, leveraging their considerable influence over Republicans and finding the compromises with Democrats that were available to make.

And in the process, they fundamentally moderated the nation’s immigration debate.

These business groups — alongside immigration and labor advocacy groups on the left, including the National Council of La Raza (now called UnidosUS) and the United Farm Workers — helped achieve multiple overhauls of the U.S. immigration system this way. They were deeply involved in the negotiations that led to President Ronald Reagan’s sweeping legalization of the status of undocumented immigrants in 1986. Then, they successfully fought for the creation of several new and expanded visa categories, as well as the Temporary Protected Status program, in 1990.

Even when they failed to get subsequent immigration reform bills passed, their continued active presence in the debate provided a crucial counterweight to the nativist wing of the Republican Party — which was always close to power, long before Donald Trump came on the political scene.

As Virginia Lamp, who during that period was an immigration and labor-relations lobbyist for the Chamber of Commerce, once put it to a panel of immigration experts, the business community had to challenge the “faulty assumption” that immigration negatively affects the economy (and that the border is “out of control”). These ideas, she said, are “based on a type of selfish nationalism.”

Virginia Lamp is now Ginni Thomas, the hyperconservative wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. She is better known these days as an “America First” election denier.

First image: Ginni Thomas attends a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in 1991. Thomas, formerly Virginia Lamp, spent years lobbying for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Second image: President George W. Bush speaks to small-business owners at the Chamber of Commerce in 2004. (First image: Arnie Sachs/CNP/Getty Images. Second image: Dennis Brack/Bloomberg via Getty Images.)

Indeed, things have changed.

According to ProPublica interviews with more than 20 longtime business lobbyists across a range of industries, as well as congressional staffers and federal officials, the U.S. business community has increasingly retreated from immigration politics over the past decade and especially this year. They have largely relinquished their previous role as a lobbying force and moderating presence on this issue, despite their need for immigrant workers arguably being greater than ever. And they’ve been noticeably absent even as the current Republican presidential candidate promises to deploy the military to mass-deport 15 million to 20 million immigrants, and even as he continues to hack away at the political popularity of immigration itself — the effects of which might be felt for decades to come.

Some erstwhile pro-immigration business leaders in Silicon Valley in particular have not only declined to speak out against Trump’s rhetoric and policy plans, they have gone all in on him. Elon Musk, an immigrant, has immersed himself in nativism. Mark Zuckerberg says that he’s done with politics, despite once making immigration reform a priority.

Many business leaders have backed away from this policy area out of a calculation that they can still get corporate tax cuts and slashed labor and environmental regulations from Trump’s version of the Republican Party, several prominent business lobbyists told me.

In a hyperpolarized political climate in which getting something practical done on immigration would be difficult — and costly, in terms of both political capital and lobbying dollars — they’ve had to mostly set it aside for now, many said.

Randy Johnson, a previous senior vice president at the Chamber of Commerce, spent decades in Washington, D.C., lobbying for comprehensive immigration reform among other employment issues. In recent interviews and emails with ProPublica, though, he said that “immigration, while an important issue for the business community, has never been a tier-one issue.” He said that it’s typically easier to raise a “war chest” of lobbying dollars from chamber members when the subject is Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations, worker unionization or tax reform (including reducing taxes on inherited wealth). Those are all bigger immediate concerns for CEOs, Johnson said, because “the impact on the bottom line is more direct and obvious,” whereas “the benefits of immigration reform tend to be more uncertain and diffuse.”

“Business has kind of abdicated the field at the grassroots level,” said C. Stewart Verdery Jr., founder of Monument Advocacy, a lobbying and consulting firm that counts Microsoft, Amazon, J.P. Morgan, Netflix, Starbucks and PepsiCo as clients, among others. Verdery was previously assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, in a role overseeing both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. “When I’ve seen business get really engaged, when they really want something — whether it’s tax reform, permitting reform, trade deals — there’s a lot that they can do.”

Verdery said that businesses and business associations could, for example, spend $100 million on ambitious media campaigns to counteract the anti-immigrant rhetoric that Fox News churns out every night. They could run ads, fund rallies, get involved in local political races.

But they have not done these things lately, at least not on any large scale. Meanwhile, right-wing groups continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on increasingly extreme anti-immigrant advertising.

Even when the most consequential bipartisan immigration legislation in years came before Congress earlier this year, business groups and lobbyists didn’t flock to congressional offices and hearing rooms the way that they had in 1986 and 1990 and 1996 (and 2001, and 2005, 2006 and 2007, and 2013). They weren’t there in force to supply their industry expertise and fight for the best possible bill, as was once their MO — nor did they push back aggressively when Trump started attacking the bill for political reasons.

Rick Swartz founded the National Immigration Forum, which has long played a significant role in shaping immigration politics. (Shuran Huang for ProPublica)

“They know how to play power games,” said Rick Swartz, an immigration lobbyist who since the 1980s has helped forge coalitions of business groups, liberal advocates and policymakers in Washington. He founded the National Immigration Forum, an umbrella organization of immigration advocacy groups. “There have been real battles happening, that are consequential, that business has a lot at stake in,” Swartz said. “Where are they?”

Many ostensibly pro-immigration business interests, like the Koch network, have been pouring money into the campaigns of business-friendly conservative candidates even if they attack immigrants, Swartz said. “Money is fungible,” he said, so supporting such candidates “fuels nativism even if derivatively and hidden by the occasional op-ed or roundtable study.”

“This, to me,” he concluded, “is declining to rise to the moment.”

Viewed through a purely economic lens, the business sector would have every reason to keep fighting for more immigrants. The U.S.-born working population is in relative decline, due to both our postpandemic labor shortage and the aging and retirement of tens of millions of baby boomers. Around 8 million jobs nationally are sitting unfilled right now — untapped capacity that companies could unleash more of with more workers from abroad, who are younger on average.

Of course, many manufacturing jobs have actually been shipped overseas, many service jobs automated. Some bad-actor businesses, too, rely on migrant workers continuing to be undocumented; it makes those workers easier to exploit.

Still, without immigrants, businesses around the country that rely on in-person work would struggle to find enough people to hire. In construction, homes would go unbuilt, causing housing prices, already painfully high, to soar. Nursing homes and the home health care sector, dangerously understaffed as they are, would face a crisis-level labor shortage. Ditto with child care and the dairy industry. And Big Tech would lose some of its best and brightest.

Moreover, our current immigration system is chaotic, choked with visa and asylum backlogs. Every day, migrant workers face tremendous uncertainty about whether they can even legally go to work.

Business generally prizes stability and predictability among its employees. Reform would seem to be a priority.

But the elephant in the room is Trump. Under his thrall, the anti-immigrant wing of the GOP has mushroomed, its rhetoric increasingly frightening to Chamber of Commerce types, many told me in interviews. They’ve become wary of even seeming like traditional Republicans anymore, some said, let alone advocating publicly on this issue.

Jennie Murray, president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum (Shuran Huang for ProPublica)

“Businesses are inherently risk-averse,” said Jennie Murray, president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum. In an earlier role, she ran the forum’s Corporate Roundtable for the New American Workforce, an immigrant worker-integration program co-founded by Walmart and Chobani.

Murray pointed to recent episodes in which Trump and other Republicans have directly attacked private companies as reasons why the business community doesn’t want to do as much public-facing advocacy on this issue right now. (Trump has gone after Twitter, the NFL, Amazon, Apple and General Motors, among others; for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, it’s Disney.)

Murray said that some businesses and business groups are still working with the federal government in a more behind-the-scenes way, on issues like processing visa backlogs, advancing immigrant worker training and developing services for refugee employees.

Bob Worsley, a real estate and energy business owner who was also an Arizona state senator and is now co-chair of the board of the American Business Immigration Coalition, said that the recent relative inactivity of the business community on immigration can partly be attributed to a type of “cancel culture.” In an atmosphere in which your political party (he’s a Republican) and even your church expect you to be in favor of things like deporting migrants, Worsley said, business owners have developed a “fear of coming out” about their support of immigration. Doing so, he said, can actively be bad for business.

Several business owners highlighted last year’s right-wing boycott of Bud Light as a worst-case scenario — losing customers en masse for taking even a mild stand on a hot-button political topic.

“It’s become almost an impossible juxtaposition,” Worsley said. Many of his fellow businesspeople support Trump, “and yet their business relies on these workers, or they would not be in business.”

Denyse Sabagh, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (Shuran Huang for ProPublica)

Denyse Sabagh, a past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and a longtime immigration advocate representing businesses and others, said that she hears from businesspeople “every day” who want help obtaining visas or legal status for their current or future employees. She said she often recommends that they contact their representatives in Congress, “because the more that [lawmakers] hear from business, the more likely it’s going to be effective.” But her clients haven’t been taking her up on that, she said.

“It’s surprising to me that they’re not more involved,” Sabagh said. “They’re all clamoring for workers.”

Even if individual businesses are afraid of speaking up, it would ostensibly be the job of the business associations and coalitions to publicize and advocate for what their members’ long-term labor needs are. But they too have been shying away from doing so of late.

The executive director of the Critical Labor Coalition, which includes the American Hotel and Lodging Association, the National Restaurant Association, Chipotle and other business groups and businesses, has even said that it’s best to avoid saying the word “immigration” on Capitol Hill altogether and, instead, to use “workforce solutions.”

This all creates a feedback loop, business lobbyists and congressional staffers said. Business looks at the state of things on the Hill and in presidential politics and sees more land mines than viable immigration reforms to rally around. As a result, Republicans no longer get as much input from business on this topic — which they have historically been responsive to. Then, the political conversation focuses ever more narrowly on the border, crime and asylum backlogs, none of which are as interesting to business as legal immigration and visas.

That’s too bad, said J. Michael Treviño, a Texas businessman, civil rights advocate and proponent of immigration reform; he has spent much of his career in the oil and gas industry. Treviño said that when the business community isn’t at the table, policymakers “lose the facts” about how immigrants generate economic growth and benefit society.

Business leaders and advocates providing those facts, he said, is “the only way that you can actually refute the misinformation, of which there is so much.”

J. Michael Treviño, a businessman specializing in immigration politics, spent much of his career in the oil and gas industry. (Shuran Huang for ProPublica)

This didn’t all start with Trump, of course.

In the mid-2000s, congressional staffers along with business and other pro-immigration groups were busy hashing out the details of a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform compromise shepherded by Sens. Ted Kennedy and John McCain.

But something had been happening politically in the years since 9/11, a nation-changing event that ushered in a newly intense fear of foreigners stoked by increasingly powerful media personalities at Fox News and on talk radio. Businesspeople and their allies in Congress didn’t fully grasp this phenomenon until lawmakers faced an onslaught of grassroots right-wing opposition to the legislation, in 2006 and 2007 and heading into the 2008 election. Even McCain turned against it, amid his race for president that year. (He still lost.)

Many of those dynamics have persisted, leading several business leaders and lobbyists supportive of immigration reform to tell me that it’s not them who have changed. It’s the very nature of Congress, which was thrust into growing levels of dysfunction from 2008 onward, a period that also included xenophobia surrounding the first Black president; President Barack Obama’s own rightward turns on immigration; the rise of social media and the misinformation it spreads about this issue in particular; and increased partisan gerrymandering and polarization generally.

Yet all of that notwithstanding, much bipartisan federal legislation has still been passed in recent years. And the food, drug, gun and oil industries still push for less-popular policies by throwing their considerable money and muscle at lobbying.

Charles Kamasaki, a longtime immigration reform expert and advocate who wrote the definitive book on 1986’s successful reform effort and the other legislative battles that followed, put it this way: “Business still gets what they think of as a fair hearing on Capitol Hill, but only on issues that are ‘existential’ to them.” These days, he said, that mainly means tax cuts and deregulation.

Immigration is “being trumped, pun intended, by other considerations,” Kamasaki said.

When businesses do still engage on immigration, he added, it’s usually to try to shape a specific piece of policy affecting their specific industry’s often narrow interests. It’s not as coalitional and big-picture anymore, which diminishes the old strength in numbers. They’re much less likely than they once were to stand up for comprehensive immigration reform on the grounds that immigration, writ large, is good.

Charles Kamasaki has spent decades advocating for Latino and immigrant communities, including by working on legislative efforts at comprehensive immigration reform. (Shuran Huang for ProPublica)

Some corporate-backed lobbying groups, such as fwd.us and the American Business Immigration Coalition, have stayed involved in immigration politics in a forward-looking, idealistic way, although they aren’t as powerful of a presence on Capitol Hill. Businesses will still speak up, meanwhile, against efforts to make them responsible for checking the immigration status of their workers, including through E-Verify. They’ll also get behind relatively popular causes like a pathway to citizenship for “Dreamers.” And Chamber of Commerce officials have highlighted recent reforms to the EB-5 visa program for immigrant investors as well as incremental increases to the cap on H-2B visas (for temporary or seasonal workers in the hotel, landscaping and other industries) as advocacy successes.

Some in the agricultural sector, perhaps more reliant on undocumented migrant workers than any other, have even recently begun to sound the alarm on Trump’s mass-deportation proposals.

Swartz, the pro-immigration lobbyist, acknowledged that there are exceptions to the idea that the business community has disengaged from the politics of immigration entirely. “But it’s the big picture, about power and the exercise of power,” he said. He added that businesses have a special responsibility to do much more than they’re currently doing because in a possible Trump mass-deportation situation, “the easiest undocumented people to target will be in the workplace.”

Craig Regelbrugge, a business lobbyist, chaired the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform. (Shuran Huang for ProPublica)

All the while, without the reliable participation of business, center-left immigration advocacy groups have been feeling as though they “don’t have a partner in this anymore,” said Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at Third Way, a center-left public policy think tank.

And the left, still fighting for a path to citizenship for undocumented people, family immigration policies and protections for refugees, is out in the cold.

Craig Regelbrugge, a business lobbyist who in the late ’90s and aughts represented agriculture interests including in his role as chair of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform, remembers the “sense of purpose” of being fully absorbed in immigration politics back then. That included negotiating with his ostensible opponent, the leadership of the United Farm Workers, to jointly pressure policymakers to make effective immigration policy.

“I just don’t think there’s as much of that happening anymore,” Regelbrugge said. He pointed to how the organized anti-immigrant movement of the Trump era wears its ideology as a badge of honor, fundraises and spends off of that, and shows up for the fight. Business, Regelbrugge said, could stand to relearn those arts.

Help ProPublica Reporters Investigate the Immigration System

by Corey G. Johnson

For years, America’s most iconic gun-makers turned over sensitive personal information on hundreds of thousands of customers to political operatives.

Those operatives, in turn, secretly employed the details to rally firearm owners to elect pro-gun politicians running for Congress and the White House, a ProPublica investigation has found.

The clandestine sharing of gun buyers’ identities — without their knowledge and consent — marked a significant departure for an industry that has long prided itself on thwarting efforts to track who owns firearms in America.

At least 10 gun industry businesses, including Glock, Smith & Wesson, Remington, Marlin and Mossberg, handed over names, addresses and other private data to the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The NSSF then entered the gun owners’ details into what would become a massive database.

The data initially came from decades of warranty cards filled out by customers and returned to gun manufacturers for rebates and repair or replacement programs.

A ProPublica review of dozens of warranty cards from the 1970s through today found that some promised customers their information would be kept strictly confidential. Others said some information could be shared with third parties for marketing and sales. None of the cards informed buyers their details would be used by lobbyists and consultants to win elections.

Warranty card from Remington with common usage disclosure language The warranty card disclosure reads, “Thanks for taking the time to fill out this questionnaire. Your answers will be used for market research studies and reports — and will help us better serve you in the future. They will also allow you to receive important mailings and special offers from a number of fine companies whose products and services relate directly to the specific interests, hobbies, and other information indicated above.” (Obtained by ProPublica)

The gun industry launched the project approximately 17 months before the 2000 election as it grappled with a cascade of financial, legal and political threats. Within three years, the NSSF’s database — filled with warranty card information and supplemented with names from voter rolls and hunting licenses — contained at least 5.5 million people.

Jon Leibowitz, who was appointed to the Federal Trade Commission by President George W. Bush in 2004 and served as chair under President Barack Obama, reviewed several company privacy policies and warranty cards at ProPublica’s request. The commission has enforced privacy protections since the 1970s.

Leibowitz said firearms companies that handed over customer information may have breached federal and state prohibitions against unfair and deceptive business behavior and could face civil sanctions.

“This is super troubling,” said Leibowitz, who left the commission in 2013. “You shouldn’t take people’s data without them knowing what you’re doing with it — and give it or sell it to others. It is the customer’s information, not the company’s.”

The undisclosed collection of intimate gun owner information is in sharp contrast with the NSSF’s public image.

Founded in 1961 and currently based in Shelton, Connecticut, the trade organization represents thousands of firearms and ammunition manufacturers, distributors, retailers, publishers and shooting ranges. It is funded by membership dues, donations, sponsored events and government grants. While not as well known as the chief lobbyist for gun owners, the National Rifle Association, the NSSF is respected and influential in business, political and gun-rights communities.

For two decades, the group positioned itself as an unwavering watchdog of gun owner privacy. The organization has raged against government and corporate attempts to amass information on gun buyers. As recently as this year, the NSSF pushed for laws that would prohibit credit card companies from creating special codes for firearms dealers, claiming the codes could be used to create a registry of gun purchasers.

As a group, gun owners are fiercely protective about their personal information. Many have good reasons. Their ranks include police officers, judges, domestic violence victims and others who have faced serious threats of harm.

In a statement, the NSSF defended its data collection. Any suggestion of “unethical or illegal behavior is entirely unfounded,” the statement said, adding that “these activities are, and always have been, entirely legal and within the terms and conditions of any individual manufacturer, company, data broker, or other entity.”

The gun industry companies either did not respond to ProPublica or declined to comment, noting they are under different ownership today and could not find evidence that customer information was previously shared. One ammunition maker named in the NSSF documents as a source of data said it never gave the trade group or its vendors any “personal information.”

ProPublica established the existence of the secret program after reviewing tens of thousands of internal corporate and NSSF emails, reports, invoices and contracts. We also interviewed scores of former gun executives, NSSF employees, NRA lobbyists and political consultants in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.

The insider accounts and trove of records lay bare a multidecade effort to mobilize gun owners as a political force. Confidential information from gun customers was central to what NSSF called its voter education program. The initiative involved sending letters, postcards and later emails to persuade people to vote for the firearms industry’s preferred political candidates. Because privacy laws shield the names of firearm purchasers from public view, the data NSSF obtained gave it a unique ability to identify and contact large numbers of gun owners or shooting sports enthusiasts.

It also allowed the NSSF to figure out whether a gun buyer was a registered voter. Those who weren’t would be encouraged to register and cast their ballots for industry-supported politicians.

From 2000 to 2016, the organization poured more than $20 million into its voter education campaign, which was initially called Vote Your Sport and today is known as GunVote. The NSSF trumpeted the success of its electioneering in reports, claiming credit for putting both George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump in the White House and firearm-friendly lawmakers in the U.S. House and Senate.

In April 2016, a contractor on NSSF’s voter education project delivered a large cache of data to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm credited with playing a key role in Trump’s narrow victory that year. The company later went out of business amid a global scandal over its handling of confidential consumer data.

The data given to Cambridge included 20 years of gun owners’ warranty card information as well as a separate database of customers from Cabela’s, a sporting goods retailer with approximately 70 stores in the U.S. and Canada.

Cambridge combined the NSSF data with a wide array of sensitive particulars obtained from commercial data brokers. It included people’s income, their debts, their religion, where they filled prescriptions, their children’s ages and purchases they made for their kids. For women, it revealed intimate elements such as whether the underwear and other clothes they purchased were plus size or petite.

The information was used to create psychological profiles of gun owners and assign scores to behavioral traits, such as neuroticism and agreeableness. The profiles helped Cambridge tailor the NSSF’s political messages to voters based on their personalities.

GunVote is in full swing this year, but it is unclear what role, if any, the database is playing in the election.

The pro-gun candidates the NSSF helped send to the White House and Congress in the last two decades have secured major political victories for the industry. They blocked Congress from extending a ban on assault weapons sold to civilians and granted gun companies sweeping legal immunity from lawsuits related to the misuse of firearms.

As the body count from mass shootings at schools and elsewhere in the nation has climbed, those politicians have halted proposals to resurrect the assault weapons ban and enact other gun control measures, even those popular with voters, such as raising the minimum age to buy an assault rifle from 18 to 21.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the NSSF acknowledged it had used the customer information in 2016 for “creating a data model” of potentially sympathetic voters. But the group said the “existence and proven success of that model then obviated the need to continue data acquisition via private channels and today, NSSF uses only commercial-source data to which the data model is then applied.”

The NSSF declined to elaborate or answer additional questions, including whether the trade group notified people in its database about how it was using their information.

In 2022, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., sent the NSSF a list of questions after reading leaked documents that made a passing reference to the database. In its answers, the NSSF would not acknowledge the database’s existence.

“The hypocrisy of warning about a governmental registry and at the same time establishing a private registry for political purposes is stunning,” Blumenthal said after learning about the program from ProPublica. “Absolutely staggering.”

“We Didn’t Have Any Friends in That Room”

It started with a school shooting.

On Jan. 17, 1989, a man armed with a Chinese-made AK-47 walked onto the campus of an elementary school in Stockton, California. He fired more than 100 rounds in approximately two minutes, killing five children and injuring more than two dozen others.

The shooter had an extensive criminal history but had no trouble buying the weapon from an Oregon gun store. Oregon and federal laws didn’t require background checks for purchasing semiautomatic rifles like an AK-47.

The rampage shocked the nation.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives suspended imports on foreign made semiautomatic weapons. President George H.W. Bush, an avid hunter and NRA member, made the suspension permanent, blocking 43 types of internationally made weapons from being sold in the U.S. California banned more than 50 brands and models of rifles, shotguns and pistols. Chief among them was the TEC-9, a semiautomatic pistol popularized in TV shows like “Miami Vice” that had become the weapon of choice for gangs and drug dealers. New Jersey passed legislation forbidding the sale of TEC-9s in the state.

A young lobbyist representing the weapon’s small Miami-based manufacturer, Intratec, watched gun executives testify at a hostile congressional hearing in the early 1990s. He wondered how the industry could fight back. “We didn’t have any friends in that room,” Richard Feldman recalled recently. “I thought if the people who actually used and liked the TEC-9 were here, maybe we could have an impact.”

Richard Feldman at his home in Rindge, New Hampshire. Feldman, while working as a gun industry lobbyist, originated the idea of using product registration forms as a political tool to mobilize gun owners. The National Shooting Sports Foundation later used warranty cards and other data to locate and persuade hunters, shooters and gun enthusiasts to vote for the industry’s preferred candidates. (T.J. Kirkpatrick for ProPublica)

After the hearing, Feldman said, he asked Intratec for the firm’s warranty cards. Almost immediately, Intratec sent him boxes upon boxes for his review. They contained more than 90,000 names of owners across the country. Building a database would be a monumental task, one beyond the resources of the lobbying organization Feldman worked for. But Feldman said he saw the idea’s potential for the gun industry. About 4 in 10 households nationwide owned guns, and only a small fraction of those people belonged to the NRA. If the massive numbers of gun enthusiasts could be mobilized, Feldman thought, the fight over gun control would be fairer. (Intratec went out of business in 2001.)

Then on July 1, 1993, a failed businessman, armed with two TEC-9s and a grudge, killed eight people and injured six inside a law office in San Francisco. At the time, the tragedy was the deadliest shooting in Bay Area history, and again the nation’s attention was focused on high-powered guns.

With the support of President Bill Clinton’s White House and over the vehement protests of the gun industry and the NRA, Congress banned the sale of assault weapons for 10 years and required background checks on firearms purchasers. In a sign of bipartisan support, dozens of Republican lawmakers voted for the assault weapon ban, and it was endorsed by former Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

Worried about the gathering momentum of gun control, Feldman said sometime in the mid-1990s he shared the warranty card idea with James Jay Baker, a lawyer who had been the chief lobbyist for the NRA. Baker at that time represented the firearms industry and reported directly to the president of the NSSF.

First image: Wayne LaPierre, CEO and executive vice president of the National Rifle Association of America; James Jay Baker, then executive director of the NRA’s Institute of Legislative Affairs; and Feldman at an NRA convention in 1992. Second image: Feldman with President Bill Clinton and U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno at a White House ceremony in 1997. (Courtesy of Richard Feldman)

Feldman flew to Washington, D.C., and met Baker at his small office. As Feldman explained the political benefits of an industrywide warranty card project, Baker became excited, Feldman remembered.

“He loved the idea,” Feldman said. (Baker didn’t respond to messages and hung up when a ProPublica reporter reached him by phone.)

By June 1997, Bushnell, which makes rifle accessories, had given the NSSF a list of customers who had filled out warranty cards, according to an NSSF monthly report to its members. (A spokesperson for Vista Outdoor, which acquired Bushnell in 2014, said the firm has “no evidence that such information was shared under prior ownership” and that the “NSSF reports that no such information was ever shared by Bushnell.”)

In a letter sent to gun industry executives two months later, Baker complained that only two companies had provided data. The letter, sent to the leaders of Marlin, Remington, Smith & Wesson, and 17 other major companies, urged manufacturers to join the warranty card sharing and stressed the need for more tools to politically mobilize gun owners.

Baker urges firearms industry leaders to share their warranty cards The letter from James Baker reads, “I’m told that only two companies have forwarded their database, and unless we wish to rely upon other groups’ efforts, this as-yet-uncompiled database will be our single greatest resource for both grassroots work and PAC development. Anything you can do to assist in the compilation effort would be greatly appreciated.” (Excerpt of a letter from James Jay Baker to members of the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute executive committee. Obtained by ProPublica.)

“This as-yet-uncompiled database will be our single greatest resource for both grassroots work and PAC [Political Action Committee] development,” Baker wrote. “Anything you can do to assist in the compilation effort would be greatly appreciated.”

“Initial Participation in the Database Has Been Very Positive”

It was another school shooting that accelerated gun control reforms in the late 1990s and propelled a dramatic change in the way the industry would respond.

On April 20, 1999, two teenagers stalked the halls of Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. They wore black trench coats and were armed with a TEC-9, a carbine rifle, two shotguns and pipe bombs.

The pair sprayed 188 rounds of ammunition, killing 13 people and injuring 24 others, before ending their murderous spree in suicide.

The news roiled the titans of America’s gun companies. They were already panicked over a succession of cataclysmic threats. Domestic production sagged throughout the decade as the ranks of their prime customer base, hunters, grew older and fewer.

Two months before the Columbine massacre, a federal jury for the first time held 15 firearms makers liable for shootings in New York. The verdict came in a lawsuit that used a novel theory arguing that manufacturer negligence was a key contributor to the violence. A procession of cities, aided by gun control groups and high-powered law firms, filed similar suits that threatened to force much of the industry into bankruptcy. Two companies — including one of the nation's largest handgun makers — closed.

Now, in the wake of the Colorado school shooting, congressional leaders were calling for tighter gun restrictions and expanded background checks. Vice President Al Gore would make gun control a central part of his presidential campaign the next year.

For weeks, firearms industry executives from as far as Oregon and New York flew into NSSF meetings held in Bridgeton, Missouri; Dulles, Virginia; and Phoenix to hammer out an action plan. They eliminated the NSSF’s self-imposed prohibition on campaigning and agreed to hire lobbyists for a Washington, D.C., office, according to internal NSSF board records.

The lurch toward electioneering represented a seismic shift for the NSSF. Since 1961, the organization’s bylaws blocked any involvement in politics. For most of that time, gun companies had been content to allow the NRA and other groups to speak publicly on behalf of firearms interests.

In late 1999, 22 executives were tapped to oversee a new group created by the NSSF, the Hunting and Shooting Sports Heritage Foundation. The foundation’s purpose was to defend the gun industry from the legal onslaught and transform its public image, according to NSSF records.

In an interview with ProPublica, Larry Keane, senior vice president of the NSSF since 2000, downplayed the scope and significance of the database. Only two manufacturers provided warranty cards to the NSSF, he said. The trade group, he initially claimed, did not keep the information but simply converted the warranty cards into data that was returned to the manufacturers.

But internal organization records paint a different picture.

“Initial participation in the database has been very positive and we will have 400,000 names on file and available by year’s end,” said a November 1999 NSSF board document. Five manufacturers had already turned over data from warranty cards. One state conservation agency had offered hunting license information, according to the document, which didn’t name the agency.

“We also propose to sell the database to NSSF members, as well as non-shooting related companies and organizations to offset the cost of data entry and maintenance,” the record said.

A draft copy of the policies and procedures for the Hunting and Shooting Sports participant database said purchasers of the list could buy a segment or all of it.

“At no time will any outside party be provided with any information relating to the source of the names,” the draft said. The document did not address customer consent or privacy issues.

The NSSF did not respond to a ProPublica question asking whether it had ever sold the data.

The database drew on warranty cards, hunting licenses and NSSF mailing lists, the draft of the policies and procedures said. The customer items captured included first and last names, addresses and dates of birth. Additionally, it would include age of the gun owners, gender, income, education, email addresses, profession, number of firearms, household size, dates of gun purchases, whether they were a hunter or target shooter, and average days at the gun range or on the hunt.

Gun company warranty cards often asked detailed personal questions of their customers

Various manufacturers inquired about customers’ major life events, annual income, education and occupation.

(Obtained by ProPublica)

Nearly 100 companies committed a percentage of their sales to the Hunting and Shooting Sports Heritage Foundation. The foundation raised about $10 million in the months before the 2000 election, according to NSSF documents, and spent $6 million on direct mail, TV and radio ads for the presidential and congressional races. The NSSF’s first-ever election campaign, Vote Your Sport, was born.

The goal was to galvanize gun owner, shooting sports enthusiast and hunter support for George W. Bush and the Republican ticket. The NSSF picked 11 states — Arkansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington. If turnout was successful in those areas, Bush would pick up nearly half of the 270 electoral votes needed to win.

Vote Your Sport received a boost when retailer Cabela’s decided to help. Founded in 1961 and headquartered in Sidney, Nebraska, the company specialized in selling guns and related accessories to hunters, shooters and outdoor enthusiasts. On its website, the Hunting and Shooting Sports Heritage Foundation publicly listed manufacturers, dealers and other contributors; Cabela’s was not included. But an NSSF summary of its electioneering said the retailer shared data on 356,000 customers.

Cabela’s privacy policies in 2000 told customers their information would not be shared for commercial purposes but their postal addresses could be given to “reputable companies” in “order to keep you informed of other outdoor products and manufacturers.” There was no mention of using the information for political purposes.

Contrasting Cabela’s data sharing with its privacy policy

NSSF board documents and privacy policy excerpts

First image: Excerpt from documents given to NSSF board members for a Nov. 14, 2000, meeting in Tampa, Florida. Second and third images: Cabelas.com as it appeared on Nov. 14, 2000. (First image: Obtained by ProPublica. Second and third images: Screenshot of cabelas.com via web.archive.org.)

Bass Pro Shops, which bought Cabela’s in 2017, said in a statement that the company had been unable to find evidence that Cabela’s had taken any action “that would violate our long-standing policy of protecting our customers’ privacy.”

Less than two weeks before the 2000 election, the Vote Your Sport campaign used Cabela’s names and a list of hunters purchased from a data broker company to send mail to more than 2.5 million people in the targeted states.

It’s difficult to assess Vote Your Sport’s impact. But the NSSF claimed in a public report the next year that it was a “critical component” of Bush’s victory.

“Given the closeness of the election, it’s easy to imagine a different outcome” without the gun industry’s get-out-the-vote effort, the report said.

About 3 million more people in the targeted states voted than in 1996. Seven million hunters and shooters lived in the 11 states, the NSSF estimated. An overwhelming majority of those voters nationwide favored Bush, according to the report, which cited a survey of hunters and shooters. Fifty-two percent of respondents said they received a Vote Your Sport letter and supported the message.

The NSSF was now fully in the election business.

A Vote Your Sport advertisement created by the NSSF in 2004 (Downloaded from voteyoursport.com via web.archive.org)

Mark Joslyn, a professor of political science at the University of Kansas who has studied the influence of gun ownership on political behavior, said voter surveys show a massive shift occurred in 2000. Although registered Democrats and independents together account for the majority of gun owners, Bush won 66% of the gun owner vote, he said. And in every election since — even in 2008 and 2012 when the national electorate picked Barack Obama as president — the top choice of firearm owners remained the Republican Party, Joslyn said.

Ken Strasma, former national data director for John Kerry and Barack Obama, said rumors had swirled for years in Democratic circles that Republican campaigns were aided by some special database.

“There hasn’t been a publicly available list like that. We certainly haven’t gotten anything from the NSSF,” Strasma said. “They want to keep their advantage by only sharing it with the Republican side.”

“There Will Be No Looking Back”

Six months after the 2000 election, more than 100 executives from gun-makers and shooting sports organizations gathered for an invitation-only lunch in Kansas City, Missouri.

Addressing the crowd was Chris LaCivita, then the political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee who now serves as campaign manager for Trump. LaCivita praised the industry’s election work but warned the executives they would “face ferocious opposition” if they didn’t intensify.

“Without the support of the [industry] I think it’s safe to say that we would be suffering through a continuation of the most anti-gun administration in the history of our nation,” LaCivita said. “If you can repeat your success in 2002 and 2004, there will be no looking back.”

(In response to questions from ProPublica, LaCivita did not say whether he knew about the database when he gave his speech but said he does not support “a database of gun owners, but rather 2nd Amendment supporters. There is a difference.”)

In the months after Bush’s razor-thin victory, the NSSF expanded the database. Boxes of warranty cards were regularly delivered to NSSF headquarters at the time in Newtown, Connecticut, a white colonial-style, multilevel building that rested on top of a hilly road, according to interviews with several former NSSF employees who worked on the project.

On the first floor was a huge stuffed bear, shot and killed by an NSSF president during an Alaskan hunt. A vault that once belonged to a bank doubled as a records room and a shrine to guns, displaying a vast assortment of old and new pistols, rifles and shotguns.

At times, the NSSF hired college-aged temporary workers to enter data. Posted up in a small, nondescript room on the second floor, they sat at flashing LCD computer screens on long tables. Nearby, boxes full of aged, fading warranty cards were stacked high. An NSSF staffer sometimes watched to ensure the temps didn’t goof off.

Violating their promises of strict confidentiality on warranty cards or failing to mention that consumer information could be given to the NSSF may qualify as a deceptive practice under the Federal Trade Commission Act, privacy and legal experts said. Under the law, companies must follow their privacy policies and be clear with consumers about how they will use their information.

Typically, the FTC focuses enforcement on companies that profit from their misuse of consumer information. Leibowitz, the former chair of the commission, said gun-makers could claim they didn’t share the data for a commercial purpose or to make money. But, he said, sharing the information with a third party in a way that would mislead a reasonable person could still violate the law, regardless of the motive.

The database contained 3.4 million records by May 2001, according to an NSSF board document. Of those, 523,000 came from warranty cards supplied by the group’s members. The additional names were acquired from lists of voters and hunting licenses.

By February 2002, the database, now called Data Hunter, had grown to include 5.5 million names of hunters, shooters, outdoor enthusiasts and other voters, according to another NSSF board record. Manufacturers contributing names included Glock, Marlin Firearms, Mossberg, Savage, Sigarms and Smith & Wesson. The document said other sources included Remington, Hornady, Alliant Powder and USA Shooting, which has trained Olympic sharpshooters since the 1970s and oversees local, state and national rifle, pistol and shotgun competitions.

An update on NSSF’s database in 2002 Excerpt from documents given to NSSF Board members for a Feb. 28, 2002, meeting in Orlando. The selected text reads, “In 2001, NSSF developed a master relational database of hunters, shooters, outdoor enthusiasts and voters called Data Hunter. Our database now includes 5.5 million names, many of which have been enriched with appended data.” (Obtained by ProPublica)

Alliant Powder said it had “not provided personal information to the NSSF or any of its vendors.” Glock, Mossberg, Savage, Smith & Wesson, Olin Winchester and Hornady did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Sig Sauer, which now owns Sigarms. An executive with Sturm, Ruger & Co., which bought Marlin Firearms in 2020, said “we cannot, and will not, comment on something Marlin may or may not have done 20 years ago.”

Remington has since been split into two companies and sold. Remarms, which owns the old firearms division, said it was unaware of the company’s workings at the time. The other portion of the company is now owned by Remington Ammunition, which said it had “not provided personal information to the NSSF or any of its vendors.” Two other gun companies identified in the NSSF board document either no longer exist or did not respond to a request for comment.

The records reviewed by ProPublica do not say where the NSSF focused its Vote Your Sport campaign in 2002 or provide exact insight about how the customer data was deployed.

But an email written by a Cambridge Analytica executive in 2016 mentioned that an NSSF contractor had been running the trade group’s voter education campaign “since 2002 and it has been almost entirely direct mail.” The contractor, he wrote, “was leveraging a database of fire arms manufacturing warranty cards (collected by the fire arms companies) to determine his targeting in key states (millions of people, if they bought a gun, and what kind of gun they bought).”

The 2002 midterm elections saw Republicans pick up seats in the Senate and House to control both chambers. Two years later, Bush won reelection and Republicans gained another four seats in the Senate as staunch supporters of the gun industry were swept to victory.

The new Congress and the White House rolled back many of the gains gun control advocates had made in the 1990s.

Despite preelection promises to support a renewal of the assault weapons ban, Bush took no action as the ban expired in 2004 and was silent as Republicans stymied reauthorization attempts.

His appointment of John Ashcroft — an ally of the gun industry and the NRA — as attorney general led to a reversal of the federal government’s philosophy and regulatory approach toward guns. Under Ashcroft, the Department of Justice for the first time interpreted the Second Amendment as guaranteeing an individual right to gun ownership, and not a state militia privilege, as had been its position since the 1970s.

Ashcroft stopped FBI agents investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks from comparing the names of suspected terrorists against federal gun purchase records. And citing the privacy of law-abiding gun purchasers, he reduced how long the FBI could retain background check records from 90 days to a single business day.

Bush and Republican leaders in Congress also championed and passed a landmark bill that gave the gun industry broad immunity from the litigation that threatened its survival. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act wiped out virtually all of the remaining city lawsuits filed against the industry in the late 1990s.

George W. Bush signs the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act on Oct. 26, 2005. (White House photo by Paul Morse, via the George W. Bush Presidential Library & Museum)

In the years since, lawmakers backed by the gun companies have squashed attempts to ban assault-style weapons and expand background checks, even after high-profile mass shootings. Emboldened by legal immunity, some manufacturers aggressively marketed assault weapons like the AR-15. In the last decade, AR-15-style rifles have generated more than $1 billion in sales, according to a 2022 review by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

Assault weapons are used in less than a third of mass shootings but account for a much higher portion of their deaths and injuries.

In 2012, less than 3 miles from the NSSF’s Connecticut headquarters at the time, a 20-year-old man armed with an assault rifle killed 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Four years later, 49 people were slain and 53 wounded at a Florida nightclub by a man shooting an assault rifle who had pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State group.

The next year, a gunman at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas opened fire on a crowd attending a country music festival, killing 60 and wounding more than 400. Authorities said he used 14 assault rifles to carry out the slaughter.

On Valentine’s Day 2018, a former student of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School walked onto the Parkland, Florida, campus armed with an AR-15-style rifle and murdered 14 students and three faculty members. He had legally purchased the weapon a year earlier at the age of 18.

The mass killing — the deadliest shooting at a U.S. high school to this day — focused a spotlight on federal law and the laws in many states allowing teenagers to buy rifles modeled on weapons of war. Within weeks, two congressional bills proposed raising the federal minimum age to buy an assault weapon from 18 to 21. Federal law already requires that handgun buyers be 21. Both proposals died quietly in committee.

Over the next few years, at least three more attempts in Congress to raise the minimum age failed to make it as far as a floor vote. Polls taken at the time show an overwhelming majority of Americans supported such a proposal.

Then, in May 2022, an 18-year-old white supremacist who had legally bought an AR-15-style assault rifle killed 10 Black Americans at a market in Buffalo, New York. At the time, the state restricted owning or buying a handgun to people 21 or older, but the law didn’t apply to rifles.

Ten days after the mass killings in Buffalo, another 18-year-old slaughtered 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The shooter had purchased two AR-15-style rifles and carried out the attack within days of his 18th birthday.

A Pew Research Center survey last year again found overwhelming support among both Democrats and Republicans for raising the minimum age to buy a firearm. But since 2022, at least five more proposals to enact such a change in Congress have gone nowhere.

Last month at a high school in Georgia, a 14-year-old used an assault rifle to kill two students and two teachers and wound seven more people. Law enforcement sources told news outlets that the child’s father purchased the weapon for his son as a gift. Georgia law generally forbids anyone under 18 from possessing a handgun, but the age limit does not apply to rifles. Federal law similarly sets the minimum age to possess a handgun at 18 but has no restriction for possessing long guns.

Today’s gun landscape looks nothing like it did in 1994. Then, Americans owned 192 million firearms. The most recent best estimate now puts the number at 393 million, more than one firearm for every person in the U.S.

For the first time in history, guns are the No. 1 killer of children and teens. And, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more people died from gunshots in a single year in 2021 than ever before.

In June, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared gun violence a public health crisis. He recommended assault weapon bans and universal background checks as strategies to bring down the death toll.

Collage image of Trump: Photo by Brooks Kraft/Getty Images. Collage image of Bush: Photo by John Edwards. Warranty cards obtained by ProPublica.

Gun images and other magazine archival imagery: Shooting Industry Magazine (August 1999); The Small Arms Review (April 2000, October 2001); Guns & Ammo (May 2000); Shooting Times (February 2000, April 2000, June 2000, August 2000, October 2000, November 2000).

Design and development by Anna Donlan.

by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel, photography by Sofia Aldinio, special to ProPublica

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

Dan Meyer, the police chief in Whitewater, Wisconsin, had been worried for months about the seemingly sudden arrival of hundreds of Nicaraguan immigrants to this quiet university town. But he rarely got to hear from any of them directly; most of what he knew, he had learned from his officers.

Then one afternoon in November 2022, a man named Ariel walked into the police station.

Meyer, 35 at the time, had been trying to get a handle on what was happening since the last week of January, when his officers responded to a series of unusual incidents involving the recent immigrants: Young children found alone in an apartment while their mothers were at work. A family living in a shed in below-freezing weather. A 14-year-old girl who said her father was making her work in a factory instead of going to school.

As the year went on, police responded to a rise in calls from an apartment complex that once was filled with college students and now housed immigrant families, including some who doubled and tripled up to save on rent. Meyer and other city officials met with people all over town, including the apartment building managers, to look for ways to address overcrowding and some of the other challenges they saw the new immigrants facing.

What kept his officers busiest were the Nicaraguans driving without licenses, often without car insurance or even much driving experience. Few of them spoke English, and many had no government identification at all or handed officers fake IDs. As a result, traffic stops that should take 15 minutes stretched into hours long investigations as officers used translation apps to find out the drivers’ real identities.

In the middle of all this, Ariel showed up at the station. He had moved to Whitewater in 2020 and had been building a new life for himself and his family. He’d found a job in town sorting recycling and trash, and he brought his wife and son up from Nicaragua. They went to church, spent time with their extended family and reconnected with friends who’d also made the move from the same mountain villages to Whitewater.

Ariel, 43 at the time, was one of the licenseless drivers the chief had heard so much about. He hadn’t gotten his license because he couldn’t: While Wisconsin offers a path for asylum-seekers to get a license, Ariel didn’t have all the paperwork he needed, including his Nicaraguan passport, to apply.

He drove anyway. It seemed impossible to do everything he needed to do — get to work and his son’s school and the grocery store — without driving, and he’d mostly managed to get away with it. Ariel had only been ticketed once for driving without a license. Then, about a month earlier, he got behind the wheel after stopping at a bar for a few drinks and drove his car into a ditch.

Ariel had presented officers the fake Nicaraguan ID he’d used to get a job. It was the only one he had, as his work permit hadn’t yet arrived. His wife had gently chided him after his arrest for drunk driving, saying she hoped it would straighten him out. Then, just a few weeks later, she was run down by a 21-year-old American motorist as she tried to cross a street at night.

His work permit arrived a week or so after her death. That’s what led Ariel to take the day off that November afternoon and walk the mile from his home to the police station. He wanted to set the record straight. He hoped doing so would help him start to put life in order for him and his son.

Meyer stopped what he was doing to meet with Ariel. There was a lot he liked about running the police department in this city of about 15,000 people, but he missed talking to residents. He did his best to introduce himself to Ariel in Spanish, a language he’d tried to pick up in college but never felt comfortable speaking. He asked a bilingual county employee who works at the station to join them.

Police Chief Dan Meyer has spent his career in Whitewater, a town of 15,000 in southeast Wisconsin.

The chief listened, taken aback as Ariel apologized for showing officers a fake ID. He had been a police officer for more than 12 years and had just recently been named chief, but even he still got nervous at the sight of flashing blue and red lights in his rearview mirror. He’d felt there was a trust gap between his department and the Nicaraguans who’d been arriving in Whitewater, but here was Ariel, voluntarily walking into a police station to admit wrongdoing.

The conversation between Meyer and Ariel didn’t last much more than 15 minutes. Before he left, Ariel asked whether there was anything the chief could do to help him drive without getting in trouble. Meyer told him he needed to get a license. Ariel thanked him and walked back home to the young son he now had to care for on his own.

Meyer wondered about Ariel and what brought him to Whitewater, but he didn’t ask. He went back to work, back to trying to figure out how his officers should best respond to the town’s newest residents. And, over the next year, he talked to city council members and anybody who would listen about the challenges his short-staffed department was facing.

The chief thought about what responsibility Washington bore for what was happening in Whitewater; after all, the federal government operated the nation’s immigration system. With the encouragement of city council members, Meyer wrote a letter to President Joe Biden asking for help.

Meyer, who had spent his career in Whitewater, would be the first to say he didn’t know much about immigration, though he was trying to learn. He’d never had to pay attention to immigration policy before the Nicaraguans came to town. For one, it wasn't his responsibility. And he knew how polarizing the issue could be.

At least he thought he did.

“President Biden,” the letter begins. “I am writing to inform you of significant challenges the City of Whitewater faces related to ongoing demographic change, and I am asking for your assistance in obtaining resources to address the situation.”

It was late December 2023. By then, the chief estimated that between 800 and 1,000 new immigrants from Nicaragua and Venezuela had settled in town. “Some are fleeing from a corrupt government, others are simply looking for a better opportunity to prosper,” he wrote. “Regardless of the individual situations, these people need resources like anyone else, and their arrival has put great strain on our existing resources.”

Meyer wrote about how officers had issued close to three times as many tickets to licenseless drivers as before. Wisconsin had long banned undocumented immigrants from getting licenses. Many Nicaraguan immigrants in Whitewater had permission to be in the country, but they didn’t have the documentation they needed to apply for a license — such as a passport and proof of an ongoing asylum case. Others couldn’t read well enough in Spanish to pass the written test.

In his letter, Meyer wrote about how language barriers, the prevalence of fake IDs and distrust between immigrants and the police made investigating cases more time-consuming. The chief said the city wasn’t focused on immigrants’ legal status. What mattered was public safety. Meyer wrote about the family found living in the shed and other incidents, including the death of an infant, sexual assaults and a kidnapping. He considered those cases serious enough to merit extra attention.

The case involving the dead infant had, in particular, left many residents shaken. A Nicaraguan woman had given birth in her trailer, and some teenagers later found the body in a field. The woman was charged with neglect leading to a child’s death and hiding the corpse.

“None of this information is shared as a means of denigrating or vilifying this group of people,” Meyer wrote. “We simply need to ensure that we can continue to properly serve this group, and the entirety of the City of Whitewater.”

Signs in Spanish advertise money transfers in downtown Whitewater.

Meyer asked for funding to hire more police officers and for the city to hire somebody to work directly with the new immigrants. The chief signed the letter, as did other city officials, and they sent it off. Within days, Meyer’s phone started to ring. Reporters from all over were calling for interviews. Breitbart, a conservative national media outlet, had written about how “Biden’s migrants” had “flooded” Whitewater in a story that went viral on social media.

Then former President Donald Trump picked up on it and began talking about the city at his campaign rallies in Wisconsin. His Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, “has flooded the town with an estimated 2,000 migrants from Venezuela and Nicaragua,” he said during a rally last month in Prairie du Chien, in southwestern Wisconsin. “The police say they cannot handle the surge in crime,” he added. “The town’s in big trouble.”

He described what was going on in towns like Whitewater as an “invasion,” the way he would later talk about Venezuelan street gangs taking over apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado. Both examples took kernels of truth and blew them out of proportion to inflame voters’ fears about immigration. Trump promised to “seal the border” and to conduct “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

The Biden administration, meanwhile, didn’t respond to Meyer’s letter for almost two months. When it did, officials told Meyer about a program that had sent hundreds of millions of dollars to local governments and nonprofits providing humanitarian services to new immigrants. At the time, though, none of that money was available to smaller cities like Whitewater.

Meyer hadn’t asked for mass deportations. He just wanted more resources. And he said he never intended his words to become political ammunition for anyone. “It irritates me to no end because when I hear that, I know that there’s no actual desire to fix the issue here,” he said. “It’s a desire to use it for their own political gain.”

The city and its police chief were left on their own to figure out what to do next.

There are cities and towns like Whitewater all across America, places where hundreds or thousands of new immigrants have shown up in recent years. Their arrival has divided residents, fueled resentment and spread fear about dwindling resources and rising crime, prompting local officials to ask the federal government for help providing humanitarian relief. In large cities like New York, Chicago and Denver, Venezuelan immigrants have filled homeless shelters and slept on the streets. In smaller cities like Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants became the subject of disinformation repeated by Trump and other Republicans who say the Biden administration has let too many people in.

Whitewater is a quiet, liberal city with an outsize university presence, a blue dot tucked between two red counties in a swing state. Nobody knows how many new immigrants have actually arrived, though the chief’s guess is about as good as anybody’s. Federal immigration court data shows that about 475 people with cases that were initiated since the start of 2021 have listed a Whitewater address. The vast majority are Nicaraguan, with only a handful from Venezuela. This count leaves out many immigrants, including those who came before 2021, like Ariel, and those who avoided getting caught by Border Patrol and are now undocumented, like some of Ariel’s relatives.

Two Nicaraguan immigrants, who rent an apartment in this building downtown, say they miss their home country but don’t see a future there. A Nicaraguan immigrant smokes outside his apartment building. He dreams of one day owning property.

ProPublica reporters began visiting Whitewater in January and have returned more than a dozen times since. We’ve conducted about 100 interviews, reviewed hundreds of pages of records, and spent hours riding alongside Meyer’s patrol officers as they did their jobs. We’ve talked with many longtime Whitewater residents, including some who have gone out of their way to welcome the newcomers and others who worry that immigrant students are bringing down test scores in schools. We spoke to undocumented Mexican immigrants who settled in Whitewater three decades ago and are resentful that the Nicaraguan asylum-seekers moving into their neighborhoods have access to government privileges such as work permits and driver’s licenses — privileges that undocumented people do not have. We talked with a landlord in town who says the new immigrants are paying more in rent than his previous tenants, and we spent time at a tiny grocery store where Nicaraguans send home more than $100,000 each weekend to remote communities such as Murra, Jalapa, El Jícaro and Somoto.

Finally, we’ve interviewed more than three dozen Nicaraguans who live in Whitewater. Most arrived in the U.S. after Biden took office in 2021, crossing the border illegally between ports of entry, turning themselves in to authorities and asking for asylum. Ariel asked that we not write about his decision to emigrate to the U.S. and seek political asylum or use his full name; he worries about hurting his case and putting relatives back home at risk.

Most of the Nicaraguans we spoke to said they left their country because of a lack of economic opportunities and because it seemed like they would be allowed to enter the U.S. and would find jobs. A few said they had suffered political repression or violence at the hands of Nicaragua’s authoritarian government. Others came in undetected years earlier and had been quietly working in Wisconsin’s dairy industry before they learned of jobs in Whitewater.

And there are jobs. Steven Deller, an applied economics professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies smaller, rural communities in the state, said there have been many more job openings than unemployed Wisconsinites since the spring of 2021. “There was a real, real severe labor shortage,” he said. “A lot of employers were getting desperate.”

Enter immigrants, many of whom arrived with thousands of dollars in debts to the smugglers who shepherded them to the U.S.-Mexico border. Deller described the new immigrants as being willing to work for little money, in roles with few if any benefits, and in jobs that are “hard work, dirty work, perhaps not safe work.” And employers are happy to have them, he said. “That’s happening across the country.”

The Nicaraguans in Whitewater work at a range of food-processing facilities, factories and egg farms in and around town, places they refer to by nicknames in Spanish: “los pollos” for a meat-processing plant, “las pompas” for a rubber and plastic parts factory, “los huevos” for an egg farm. Many get hired through temporary staffing agencies. In recent decades, American factories have increasingly turned to staffing agencies to fill their jobs, an issue ProPublica has reported on. These agencies offer flexibility and can help shield companies from legal issues related to employees’ questionable immigration status or workers’ compensation claims because the agencies are the direct employer. We called companies we knew of that rely on the labor of new immigrants. Over and over, these businesses declined to talk to us or ignored our interview requests.

Not all of the newcomers in Whitewater have work permits, at least not at first. Many use fake papers to get hired. Records from traffic stops of Nicaraguan immigrants sometimes show officers discovering fraudulent IDs alongside work badges from prominent factories in town.

When Trump talks about immigration, he says immigrants are destroying communities with their “migrant crime.” But the reality in places like Whitewater is more complex. The city is not overrun with violent crime. For example, Whitewater hadn’t seen a homicide — one of the most reliable measures of violent crime — since 2016, predating the arrival of hundreds of Nicaraguan families. That changed this summer, when police arrested a University of Wisconsin, Whitewater student for the murder of another student.

“I don’t use the term ‘migrant crime,’” Meyer said. The new immigrants, he said, aren’t committing crimes at a greater rate than other Whitewater residents — and research from around the country backs him up. But police have struggled with other very real challenges tied to the arrival of so many people from another country. The new immigrants arrived in Whitewater with limited resources. They didn’t speak English. They were unfamiliar with local laws and norms. And, he said, they had no driver’s licenses and “no real opportunity to get one.”

Families gathered at St. Patrick Catholic Church for a confirmation. The mass was in Spanish and English.

Ariel got his first ticket for driving without a license in Whitewater in January 2022. Two relatives had come by to visit on foot in below-freezing weather. Ariel offered to drive them home in an old Chevy Trailblazer he’d bought used a few months earlier. On his way back home, Ariel found himself in a left-turn lane by mistake. He let the cars around him pass, then drove straight through the intersection.

“I didn’t know I couldn’t do that,” he said.

Ariel had come to the U.S. not knowing how to drive. He never had the opportunity to learn in his village in Murra, a province in Nicaragua’s mountainous north. Though Murra had a similar number of residents to Whitewater, life there was very different. Few people even owned cars or could use them on the winding, pockmarked roads that turned into mud in the rain.

Ariel, a farmer with a second-grade education, got around on foot and by horse or mule. He enjoyed riding around his land, about 35 acres, to survey his coffee plants, corn and beans.

He lived in a one-room adobe block house with no electricity and a growing family: Maricela, the girl with a crown of dark curls he’d fallen in love with years earlier, and their young son. Ariel and Maricela had put off a church wedding but had a long-term, common-law marriage.

Ariel left Murra in April 2019, at a moment when Nicaragua was seeing an exodus due to political repression and economic insecurity. Trump, meanwhile, was in the White House and looking for ways to deliver on campaign promises to keep immigrants out. Border Patrol agents hadn’t seen so many crossings in years, including from countries like Nicaragua that hadn’t previously sent many immigrants to the U.S. In the 2019 fiscal year, when Ariel arrived, authorities at the southern border encountered more than 13,000 Nicaraguans — nearly as many as in the previous decade.

Ariel said authorities confiscated his passport and ID and detained him for about four months in Texas. Then he was given a notice to appear at a later date in court and released on bond.

He knew where he was headed. Ariel had friends and relatives from Murra who had migrated north years earlier to work on Wisconsin dairy farms, establishing a path that would eventually make the state a top destination for Nicaraguans. Some nephews in Wisconsin bought him a bus ticket to Madison and helped him find his first dairy farm job nearby.

Ariel was comfortable working with animals but said “the work was brutal.” He milked cows and scraped away their excrement 12 hours a day, seven days a week. He worked at three farms in different parts of the state.

Then one day, early in the pandemic, he heard that factories and food-processing facilities in the Whitewater area, between Madison and Milwaukee, were hiring essential workers through staffing agencies. Unlike the farms, factories paid overtime. And Ariel needed every dollar he could get to pay back the $20,000 he’d borrowed to make the trek from Nicaragua and to bond out of detention. He also wanted to save up to bring Maricela and their son to the U.S.

In April 2020, he moved to Whitewater. He didn’t have work authorization yet; that would come later, after he found an attorney and filed for asylum. In the meantime, he used a fake work permit and fake Nicaraguan ID to get a job making $10.50 an hour sorting trash and recycling at a facility in town.

Ariel was one of the first Nicaraguans to arrive in Whitewater. As he told more and more people he knew about the job opportunities there, other Nicaraguans followed. First came one of his brothers, who had been working on a farm near Green Bay.

More family and friends arrived after Biden took office in January 2021 with the promise of a more humane approach to immigration. Border Patrol agents encountered more than 50,000 Nicaraguans at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2021, nearly four times as many as the year that Ariel crossed.

That February, Ariel sent for Maricela and their 3-year-old son. He missed them. Ariel and Maricela had spent nearly every day together in Murra for years, and it had been difficult to live apart. “She did everything with me,” he said.

Maricela, then 28, had rarely left their community before — had never even visited the capital city of Managua or flown on a plane. Now she was making a two-week, 1,600-mile trek to the U.S.-Mexico border. She called Ariel along the way when she could and told him they were tired and barely eating.

They made their way across the Rio Grande on an inflatable raft, then surrendered themselves to authorities. They were quickly released. Ariel borrowed a credit card from a friend to buy them plane tickets to Milwaukee and got a ride to pick them up at the airport. Maricela appeared in the lobby, their son in her arms. The cheerful, healthy pair Ariel had known now looked exhausted and emaciated from their journey. He wept as he embraced them.

Meyer’s job as police chief is nonpartisan and unelected. He prefers it that way.

In his letter to the president, the chief had tried to focus attention on the police department’s need for resources without staking out a political position on immigration. But his message kept getting lost. It felt like every time somebody, whether on the left or the right, spoke about Whitewater, they were talking about a more extreme, exaggerated version of the city that he knew.

“You’re kind of just like holding your breath, like, ‘What are they gonna say?’” Meyer said. “Because you know there’s gonna be major blowback for us here locally, questions from the people that live here. ‘Why are these people talking about us?’”

Even before he wrote the letter to Biden, he had seen how his comments on the new immigrants in town could stir fierce criticism. It happened last November when he took part in a press conference with Republican lawmakers. At that event, officials from a local sheriff’s department said Whitewater had seen significant drug cartel activity — though Meyer was unaware of any direct connection between the Nicaraguan immigrants and cartels. It happened again a few days later when Meyer spoke to the UW Whitewater College Republicans and his picture appeared on a poster that read: “Explore the safety concerns tied to illegal immigration in our community.”

Some residents were furious, saying Meyer was highlighting isolated crimes to make immigrants look bad. Others thought he was right to raise concerns about what they believed was evidence of Biden’s failed border policies.

After his letter went viral, Meyer’s inbox filled with messages from people in Whitewater and beyond who had something to say about the newcomers in town. One Whitewater resident offered to send $500 to help pay for the immigrant liaison Meyer wanted to hire. Another said she no longer felt “safe in my own yard or even to run to Walmart.” A man who said he was a retired police officer called Meyer a “pansy ass coward chief” for asking for help “instead of telling Biden to F-OFF and close the damn border.”

Meyer tried to not take his frustrations about the political spectacle home with him. It followed him anyway. Meyer, who is married and has three children, began hearing from friends and relatives from Eau Claire, the city in western Wisconsin where he’d grown up. They had seen Whitewater in the news and were curious about what was happening and how he was doing. “Why are we hearing about Whitewater?” they’d ask him. “Are you OK?” He’d explain that Whitewater had become a hot spot for new immigrants, which presented some challenges for his department — but that they were working through it. “We’re just trying to do our job,” he said.

The Guanajuato Produce grocery store caters to recent immigrants. Eva Aranda points at foreign currency kept under glass at the register at La Preferida, a grocery store and restaurant patronized by recent immigrants. Nicaraguan men unwind on a Friday night at La Preferida.

Liberal residents who had worked hard to promote positive stories about immigrants were disappointed that Whitewater kept showing up in the news. Kristine Zaballos, a longtime resident and UW Whitewater employee, said she wished Trump and other conservative politicians would stop spreading misinformation and see Whitewater for themselves. “I was frustrated that all of the efforts of so many people in town, all of our voices, really seemed to come to nothing,” said Zaballos, who co-founded a local food and clothing pantry called The Community Space that serves many recent immigrants.

She and other residents who were already volunteering their time to help the newcomers were motivated to do even more. Recently they worked with city officials to make videos aimed at teaching immigrants about American social norms and offering tips for living in Whitewater — from why parents should send their children to school to the difference between the recycling and trash bins.

Conservative residents were glad to hear Trump talking about their community.

“Even little old Whitewater is important to President Trump,” said Chuck Mills, who runs a local towing company.

Chuck Mills, owner of a towing and car repair shop in Whitewater, was initially apprehensive about the arrival of so many immigrants from Nicaragua, but he warmed up as he learned more about them.

In his opinion, the Biden administration has failed to control the border and abandoned communities like his. But Mills doesn’t believe the city is less safe because of the new immigrants, though he worried about that a few years ago. His feelings changed once he got to know his new neighbors. He went to Spanish-language church services and learned that immigrants were filling menial factory jobs he thought locals didn’t want. He liked seeing families move into his neighborhood and seeing children riding their tricycles on the sidewalk in places where he once saw drunk college students.

“I managed to get my shit together and accept them,” Mills said. “We got lucky here in Whitewater. … These people came here to work and raise their families.”

After Maricela arrived, more of Ariel’s relatives and friends followed, including his brother’s wife and their children, a sister, nephews, nieces, former teachers and neighbors. Sometimes, it felt like all of Murra had come to Whitewater.

Nicaraguan flags started appearing on apartment windows. Mexican immigrants who’d settled in the city decades earlier rented out rooms to the new arrivals. On Sunday afternoons, a few dozen men began getting together at a city park to play baseball — Nicaragua’s national sport.

On Sundays, Nicaraguans gather to play baseball at Starin Park. (First photo by Samantha Friend Cabrera for ProPublica)

Maricela found work at a few facilities in town before getting a job power washing machinery at the meat-processing plant. She worked the night shift while Ariel worked days; that way, they could switch off for their son’s care. On Sundays, they attended Spanish-language mass at St. Patrick Catholic Church.

They were building a new life together in Whitewater, though Maricela missed her family in Nicaragua. She called her mother almost daily and talked about returning one day.

Ariel took on extra shifts to make more money and pay down their debts. He got rides when he could after his first ticket for driving without a license in January 2022. He wanted to get a driver’s license, but he couldn’t even apply until he made progress on his immigration case and retrieved his Nicaraguan passport. A friend put him in touch with an attorney in Milwaukee who filed his asylum application and requested that the government return his passport.

That October, Ariel got behind the wheel after drinking at a bar with friends. He quickly realized he was drunk and decided to sleep it off at the home of some relatives nearby. As he pulled into the driveway, he drove into a ditch.

Ariel said he waited 20 minutes or so to see if another driver might stop to help him. The next vehicle that drove by was a patrol car. In a police report, an officer noted Ariel’s glassy, bloodshot eyes and the smell of beer. A Breathalyzer test found that his blood alcohol content was more than twice the legal limit.

Maricela took his arrest and tickets in stride. “Maybe this will straighten you out,” she told him.

Chastened, Ariel stayed off the road.

A few weeks later, he asked a friend for a ride to a quinceañera party that his family was invited to outside of the city. It was dark when they left the party and headed home. There are no streetlights, crosswalks or sidewalks on that stretch of road, and barely enough room for a car to squeeze onto the shoulder.

As they pulled up outside, Ariel’s friend asked if he could drop the family off on the side of the road, across from their house, instead of pulling into the driveway. “No problem,” Ariel said.

He stepped out of the car, carrying his son, who’d fallen asleep in the back seat. Maricela grabbed the booster seat and followed as Ariel started crossing the road.

At a distance, he could see headlights. A car was coming, but it looked far away. Ariel remembered telling Maricela to hurry and then feeling a whoosh and hearing a thump behind him. He reached back, but Maricela was gone. She lay on the pavement, gasping for breath. A neighbor heard Ariel’s screams.

Maricela died the next day.

Ariel shows a photo of himself with his wife, Maricela.

Last month, Meyer watched the first debate between Trump and Harris. Meyer was curious what the candidates would say about immigration. He heard Trump repeat right-wing talking points about immigrants in another American city. The former president claimed that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs.

Meyer said he felt sorry for the people of Springfield and their leaders.

“I know how tough that is to have the spotlight on you,” he said.

He was relieved the spotlight was off Whitewater and that he could focus on doing his job. Over the summer he took a Spanish class that the city offered its municipal employees. Some of the Spanish he learned in college came back.

And he kept looking for money for his department, which has 24 sworn officers but will need another eight within the next four years, according to a recent study commissioned by the city. This spring, after he received the Biden administration’s response to his letter, he looked into federal funding for cities providing humanitarian services to new immigrants, but Whitewater wasn’t eligible. The program has since been expanded, but Meyer didn’t apply. Instead he applied for a federal community policing grant he learned about from lawmakers after his letter went viral. Last month, he learned his department would be awarded $375,000 to help cover the salaries of three additional officers.

In an interview, a senior Biden administration official said the government has done a lot to help communities receiving large numbers of new immigrants, but recognizes that the “funding that Congress has provided is really just a drop in the bucket and is not sufficient.” The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Ariel was unaware of the political controversy surrounding immigrants like him in Whitewater. He was too busy trying to keep his head above water as a sole parent. He and his son moved out of their apartment. They didn’t want to have to see the stretch of road where Maricela had gotten killed every day. The tire marks were visible for weeks.

Ariel and his 7-year-old son walk down to the woods next to their home. Ariel’s son wears a chain strung with his mother’s jewelry.

The driver, a former UW-Whitewater student, had been drinking and smoking marijuana at a football game tailgate, according to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office investigation. Marijuana was later detected in his blood, but no alcohol. The man was ticketed for possession of marijuana and driving with it in his system.

A sheriff’s official said there wasn’t enough evidence to seek criminal charges in Maricela’s death, in part because she was crossing the road in dark clothes. Ariel couldn’t help but wonder if the outcome would have been different had the roles been reversed — if an immigrant like him had run over a U.S. citizen.

Since his wife’s death, Ariel has tried to stay out of trouble. But he still sometimes drove without a license. The tickets he received when he got caught have cost him thousands of dollars.

He now works at a recycling facility in Janesville, a half hour from Whitewater, and relies on a friend for a ride. He struggles to get his son, now in second grade, to school and to buy groceries. Some Sundays, they miss church when they can’t get a lift.

Ariel and his son share a bathroom with their extended family at a duplex in Whitewater.

One morning in August, Ariel took another rare day off work and got a ride from a nephew to the Department of Motor Vehicles in Janesville. He smoked a cigarette in the parking lot. He said he was more tired than usual; his son had been sick and up all night, vomiting.

Inside the DMV, Ariel got in line and waited his turn. He finally had all the paperwork he needed to apply for a license. But he’d taken the written test in Spanish twice and failed both times. Even though he’d studied, he still had a hard time understanding the questions.

“I don’t know how to read very well,” he said. “I know the letters, but I don’t practice.”

Ariel was motioned to a computer terminal. He stared at the initial screen, unable to figure out what button he needed to press to begin. About five minutes passed before he advanced to the actual test.

A few people took seats at other terminals and completed their exams while Ariel remained at his computer, working his way through the questions for another 90 minutes.

Then the screen showed him his results. Ariel stood, walked over to his nephew and shook his head. He had failed again.

Ariel ties his son’s shoe.

Help ProPublica Reporters Investigate the Immigration System

Mariam Elba, Jeff Ernsthausen and Mica Rosenberg contributed research.

by T. Christian Miller, ProPublica; Patrick Rucker, The Capitol Forum; and David Armstrong, ProPublica

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

Every day, patients across America crack open envelopes with bad news. Yet another health insurer has decided not to pay for a treatment that their doctor has recommended. Sometimes it’s a no for an MRI for a high school wrestler with a strained back. Sometimes for a cancer procedure that will help a grandmother with a throat tumor. Sometimes for a heart scan for a truck driver feeling short of breath.

But the insurance companies don’t always make these decisions. Instead, they often outsource medical reviews to a largely hidden industry that makes money by turning down doctors’ requests for payments, known as prior authorizations. Call it the denials for dollars business.

The biggest player is a company called EviCore by Evernorth, which is hired by major American insurance companies and provides coverage to 100 million consumers — about 1 in 3 insured people. It is owned by the insurance giant Cigna.

A ProPublica and Capitol Forum investigation found that EviCore uses an algorithm backed by artificial intelligence, which some insiders call “the dial,” that it can adjust to lead to higher denials. Some contracts ensure the company makes more money the more it cuts health spending. And it issues medical guidelines that doctors have said delay and deny care for patients.

EviCore and companies like it approve prior authorizations “based on the decision that is more profitable for them,” said Barbara McAneny, a former president of the American Medical Association and a practicing oncologist. “They love to deny things.”

EviCore says it scrutinizes requests to make sure that procedures recommended by doctors are safe, necessary and cost-effective. “We are improving the quality of health care, the safety of health care and, by very happy coincidence, we’re also decreasing a significant amount of unnecessary cost,” an EviCore medical officer explains in a video produced by the company.

But EviCore’s cost-cutting is far from coincidental, according to the investigation.

EviCore markets itself to insurance companies by promising a 3-to-1 return on investment — that is, for every $1 spent on EviCore, the insurer would pay out $3 less on medical care and other costs. EviCore salespeople have boasted of a 15% increase in denials, according to the investigation, which is based on internal documents, corporate data and dozens of interviews with former employees, doctors, industry experts, health care regulators and insurance executives. Almost everybody interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity because they continue to work in the industry.

An analysis of the company’s own data shows that, since 2021, EviCore turned down prior authorization requests, in full or in part, almost 20% of the time in Arkansas, which requires the publication of denial rates. By comparison, the equivalent figure for federal Medicare Advantage plans was about 7% in 2022.

They love to deny things.

—Barbara McAneny, former president of the American Medical Association

EviCore has several ways to cut costs for insurers. Chief among them is the dial, the proprietary algorithm that’s the first stop in evaluating a prior authorization. Based on data entered by a doctor’s office, it can automatically approve a request.

The algorithm cannot say no, however. If it finds problems, it sends the request for review to a team of in-house nurses and doctors who consult company medical guidelines. Only doctors can issue a final denial.

This is where tweaking the dial comes in. EviCore can adjust the algorithm to increase the number of requests sent for review, according to five former employees. The more reviews, the higher the chance of denials.

Here’s how it works, the former employees said: The algorithm reviews a request and gives it a score. For example, it may judge one request to have a 75% chance of approval, while another to have a 95% chance. If EviCore wants more denials, it can send on for review anything that scores lower than a 95%. If it wants fewer, it can set the threshold for reviews at scores lower than 75%.

“We could control that,” said one former EviCore executive involved in technology issues. “That’s the game we would play.”

Over the years, medical groups have repeatedly complained that EviCore’s guidelines were outdated and rigid, resulting in inappropriate denials or delays in care. Frustration with the rules has led some doctors to refer to the company as EvilCore. There is even a parody account on X.

The guidelines are also used as a tool to cut costs, the investigation found. Company executives “would say, ‘Keep a closer eye on the guidelines for reviews for a particular company because we’re not showing savings,’” said a former EviCore employee involved in the radiation oncology program.

EviCore says that it develops its guidelines with the input of peer-reviewed medical studies and professional societies, and that they are routinely updated to stay current with the latest evidence-backed practices. It said its decisions are based solely on the guidelines and are not interpreted differently for different clients.

EviCore is not alone in engaging in the denials-for-dollars business. The second-biggest player is Carelon Medical Benefits Management, a subsidiary of Elevance Health, the health insurer formerly known as Anthem. It has been accused in court of wrongfully denying legitimate requests for coverage. The company has denied all charges. Several smaller companies do the same kind of work.

Simply put, EviCore uses the latest evidence-based medicine to ensure that patients receive the care they need and avoid the services they do not.

—A Cigna spokesperson in a statement provided on behalf of EviCore

There is no question that prior authorizations play an important role in modern medicine. They serve to guard against doctors who recommend unnecessary and even potentially harmful treatments. They also protect insurers from fraudulent physicians who overbill for services.

In a response to questions, a Cigna spokesperson provided a statement on behalf of EviCore. “Simply put, EviCore uses the latest evidence-based medicine to ensure that patients receive the care they need and avoid the services they do not,” it said.

The statement acknowledged that EviCore used algorithms for some clinical programs, but “ONLY to accelerate approval of appropriate care and reduce the administrative burden on providers.”

The statement noted that doctors have the ability to appeal prior authorization denials, and that the company routinely monitors the outcomes “as part of our continuous quality improvement to ensure accurate and timely medical necessity decision-making.”

Prior authorization reviews provided by EviCore save money for the entire health insurance system, the statement said. “The natural product of improved care quality and reduced waste is savings for our clients, lower out-of-pocket costs for patients, and fewer health care premium increases for Americans.”

Turning the Dial

In the fall of 2021, when the air grew crisp and the leaves reddened in central Ohio, Little John Cupp began feeling short of breath. He gasped while pushing a shopping cart. His feet and ankles swelled. He could only sleep while sitting up.

An echocardiogram revealed that his heart was having trouble pumping blood. Cupp’s doctor suggested more testing, including the insertion of a catheter to examine whether his arteries were blocked.

A few days after the doctor made the request, Cupp received a letter from his insurance company, UnitedHealthcare. The procedure, it said, was “not medically necessary.”

Little John Cupp provided support for his family, including buying a new four-bedroom trailer. (Courtesy of Chris Cupp)

One sentence in 8-point type revealed that the insurer had outsourced the decision to EviCore.

Cupp’s doctor put him on medications to reduce swelling and high blood pressure and tried a second time to win approval for a left heart catheter examination. EviCore turned it down again. He revealed his disappointment in shorthand in Cupp’s medical records: “ideally he needs LHC (denied twice by insurance).”

Cupp was 5-foot-7 and 282 pounds, with a wedding ring the size of a quarter. He had a white beard, his face wide and warm. He wore blue jean overalls and scuffed leather work boots. He had spent most of his life as a welder, working at metal fabrication shops in and around his hometown of Circleville, Ohio, population 14,063. He was 61, nearly the same age as his father when he died from a massive heart attack. Cupp was a stoic, his daughter Chris said, but the denial worried him.

“Well, I have to call the doctor and see what we’re going to do,” he told her after the second rejection.

The doctor decided to give up on getting an approval for the catheter exam. In challenging EviCore, he was fighting not just a company but an industry.

EviCore is the product of a massive, decadeslong push by insurance companies to control health care costs. They point to studies that show 20% to 45% of some medical treatments are wasteful or ineffective. To decrease such spending, insurers began requiring doctors to seek permission for medical care before agreeing to pay for it — a process known as “utilization review.” As treatments became more complex, the reviews proved costly in themselves.

Created from a 2014 merger of two smaller companies, EviCore offered a solution: It allowed insurers to outsource prior authorization decisions for the most specialized and expensive procedures. EviCore today issues recommendations for imaging, oncology, cardiology, gastroenterology, sleep problems and many other fields.

It works with more than 100 insurers across the country, including industry titans such as UnitedHealthcare, Aetna and Blue Cross Blue Shield and some Medicare and Medicaid contractors. Cigna took over the company in 2018, but EviCore maintains its independence by blocking insurers from prying into one another’s proprietary data.

In responses to inquiries, the large insurance companies said they hired EviCore as a way to make sure that customers received safe and necessary medical treatments, while holding down costs for inappropriate care.

EviCore built its business by relying on different types of contracts. In one, a health insurance company pays EviCore a flat rate to review coverage requests.

Another type is more lucrative, providing an incentive for EviCore to cut costs, former employees said. Known as risk contracts, EviCore takes on the responsibility for paying claims. As an example, say an insurer spends $10 million a year on MRIs. If EviCore keeps costs below that figure, it pockets the difference. In some cases, it splits the savings with the insurance company.

“Where you really made your money was on a risk model,” a former EviCore executive said. “Their margins were exponentially higher.”

EviCore teams involved in developing the algorithms and contracting with clients “operate separately” from reviewers “to prevent any potential conflicts of interest,” according to the statement from Cigna’s spokesperson.

Insurers do not make explicit demands for more denials, a former EviCore sales executive said, Instead, they asked about “controlling the spend” — the amount of money paid out on certain procedures, he said. Nor would EviCore always use the word “denials” — they employed circumlocutions like “inappropriate determinations.”

Aetna and Cigna are two of the companies that have requested “high touch” plans — those that would send more cases to clinical review and thus generate more denials, according to the former employee involved in data issues.

Aetna did not directly respond to whether it used “high touch” plans. “Although we never automate medical necessity denials, we automate and provide real-time approval of some services to ease administrative burden and allow providers to focus on patient care,” the insurer said in a statement. Cigna did not respond to questions about its use of such plans.

The fact that these big companies focused on profits and can play all these games is quite disturbing to me.

—Martin Lustick, a former insurance executive

“When you have human eyes on something, you can pick up where there might be a gray area where the algorithm might not pick up,” a former EviCore account executive said. “That is how you would increase the denial rate.”

EviCore can also adjust the algorithm to achieve its internal goals, without the knowledge of clients, former employees said. This happened when EviCore was not generating enough savings to demonstrate its value to insurers, several former employees told ProPublica.

“The pressure from our business leaders was to make sure that we were able to provide evidence of a strong enough impact to justify the contracts with clients,” said the former employee involved with technology.

The system also runs in reverse. When doctors or employer health plans complain about high rejection rates, insurance companies can ask EviCore to back off. The company simply adjusts its algorithm to approve more prior authorization requests.

Dave Jones, a former California insurance commissioner and now director of the climate risk initiative at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, said arbitrarily increasing or decreasing manual reviews didn’t appear to violate any standards. Still, he questioned whether a payment structure or contract for EviCore based on reducing claims payments or authorizations would result in objective and thorough evaluations of prior authorization requests, as required by law.

“That to me is troubling,” Jones said. “It suggests that the claim settlement procedure is not objective, right?” He added, “It calls into question everything that’s occurring.”

Other industry experts found the manipulation of denial rates upsetting.

“The fact that these big companies focused on profits and can play all these games is quite disturbing to me,” said Martin Lustick, a former insurance executive and the author of a book on industry practices. “They know the more reviews they do, the more denials they get.”

Disputed Guidelines

On March 2, 2022, Cupp and his daughter entered the Adena Regional Medical Center, a gray and glass building surrounded by central Ohio’s low rolling hills.

It had been almost three months since EviCore first turned down coverage for the catheterization. Changing tack, Cupp’s doctor ordered a new exam, which EviCore approved, called a nuclear stress test. It shows how well blood flows through your heart.

A heart catheterization generally costs around $3,500 when done in network, according to Fair Health, a nonprofit that tracks health care prices. A nuclear stress test runs about $315.

Afterward, Cupp greeted Chris in the waiting room. He told her he felt fine. They went for lunch at a favorite hamburger spot. At the time, they did not know the results of the stress test, which showed that his heart was pumping even less blood than indicated by his echocardiogram.

At each step of the way, EviCore had steered Cupp’s medical treatment by denying or approving his doctor’s coverage requests based on its own internal guidelines.

Those guidelines have long been the subject of complaints from doctors. Over the past five years, organizations ranging from the American College of Cardiology to the Society for Vascular Surgery to ASTRO, the American Society for Radiation Oncology, have written to EviCore or regulators that the guidelines are flawed and can interfere with delivering the right care for patients. Benjamin Durkee, a doctor who chairs ASTRO’s payor relations committee, said EviCore had generally made “a good faith” effort to respond to the society’s concerns. But, he noted, the company continues to consistently deny a radiation treatment called proton beam therapy for some pelvic tumors that is more costly but supported by ASTRO’s recommendations.

In a 2019 letter to EviCore, the Society for Vascular Surgery expressed concern about the company’s medical guidelines. (Obtained by ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

A 2023 academic study examined the criteria EviCore used to approve payment for imaging of the lower spine in cases of extreme pain. It found the guidelines deficient. Two of five medical experts who reviewed the guidelines even recommended not using them.

A 2018 audit by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, found that Health Care Service Corporation, a Blue Cross Blue Shield insurer, had hired EviCore to review prior authorizations. EviCore, the audit found, played a role in making “inappropriate denials” for 30 patients because it failed to keep its cancer guidelines up to date. As a result, EviCore retrained its staff. HCSC did not respond for comment.

Former employees have also questioned how the guidelines were put to use.

A maternal-fetal medicine physician in Colorado, Gail Miller, took a job as a doctor at EviCore in 2018. The idea of ensuring safe medical practices appealed to her. But she soon grew convinced that EviCore was more interested in saving money.

EviCore rejected her suggestions for improving its maternal fetal health guidelines. Her supervisor required her to decide at least 15 cases an hour — or one every four minutes. She often reviewed requests by physicians outside her specialty.

Nine months after starting at EviCore, Miller quit, disappointed by the attitudes of some of her colleagues. “Most of the physicians who work at these places just don’t care,” she said. “Any empathy they had is gone.”

EviCore noted its clinical staff had “high engagement, satisfaction and retention rates.” It said the most common reason for denying a prior authorization is because doctors neglect to include necessary information.

Results

EviCore meets regularly with insurers and state Medicaid programs. It is a critical part of the business. The company has to demonstrate savings or clients will have little reason to continue their contracts.

Typical was a 2019 meeting with Vermont’s Medicaid program, which for years had used EviCore to review coverage requests for advanced radiology and cardiology scans. A slide show demonstrated how the company had helped lower costs for cardiac imaging through denials. Rates had zigzagged, from a high of almost 15% of requests in one three-month period to a low of 6.1% in another.

But the presentation, obtained through Vermont’s Public Records Act, revealed another way that EviCore saved money for insurers. Prior authorization requests for radiology imaging services had dropped to 3,629, a decline of 16%. Cardiology requests had plummeted even more — down 38% in a little more than a year. Doctors had simply stopped asking for procedures for their patients.

An EviCore executive called this the “sentinel effect” at a legislative hearing in Kansas. It is like the sheriff coming to town. Once doctors know EviCore is watching, they make fewer inappropriate prior authorization requests, he said.

Doctors, however, say that such decreases reflect how difficult it is to fight EviCore and similar companies. Their entrance into the market frustrates doctors from making otherwise legitimate requests.

In its statement, Cigna described the sentinel effect differently. The company said that it helps doctors stay up to date on best practices. “Sentinel effect refers to the reduction in frequency with which physicians order inappropriate services because they are now aware of the latest clinical evidence,” the statement read.

A spokesperson for Vermont’s Medicaid program said the state does not believe that EviCore made unfair or unsound coverage recommendations. Instead, EviCore helped Vermont make “sound decisions from both a fiscal and patient care perspective.”

“It is never a goal for the state of Vermont or our third-party contractors to deny service,” said Alex McCracken, spokesperson of Department of Vermont Health Access. “We are committed to delivery of service for our customers.”

Vermont eventually ended its contract with EviCore because it decided to no longer require prior authorization for advanced imaging scans in its Medicaid program.

“Too Much Say”

The day after his stress test, Cupp drove to his granddaughter’s high school to drop off her archery bow — it had been left behind in the morning rush. He and his wife went shopping at the grocery store. That evening, he watched as his grandkids showed off some baby frogs they had purchased at a pet store.

He went to bed at 8:30 p.m. in order to wake at 2:30 a.m. for the hourlong drive to his job as a maintenance worker at a medical supplies warehouse just south of Columbus.

At about 10:30 p.m., Cupp’s wife, Vivian, shook Chris awake. “Your dad’s breathing funny,” she told her. Chris ran into their bedroom. Her father was gasping for air. Suddenly, he stopped. Chris began CPR. She told her mom to call 911.

By the time the ambulance arrived at Adena Regional Medical Center, where he had received his nuclear stress test 36 hours earlier, his body was mottled and cool. He had suffered cardiac arrest. The time of death was 11:39 p.m.

Chris Cupp, in the home she shared with her family in Bainbridge, Ohio, has been devastated by her father’s death. (Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica) Cupp looks through photos of her parents. (Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica)

ProPublica asked four cardiology experts to review Cupp’s medical situation. One cardiologist said she would not have recommended a heart catheterization. Given his symptoms, which did not include complaints about chest pain, the best diagnostic tool would have been the stress test, she said.

Three others said the heart catheterization was appropriate. One cardiologist noted that Cupp was diabetic, overweight and showed signs of having suffered a prior heart attack. “It’s very reasonable to say we’ll just go straight to a heart catheterization,” the cardiologist said.

If Cupp had received the procedure when first ordered, his life may have been saved, one expert said. “The doctor was absolutely right to order the catheterization. It was certainly necessary,” said Jonni Cooper, president of American Board of Cardiovascular Medicine and a board certified cardiovascular nurse practitioner.

State and federal regulators rarely impose onerous penalties on companies like EviCore.

Connecticut’s Insurance Department recently reviewed EviCore and Carelon. It found no problems with Carelon. EviCore was fined $16,000 this year for more than 77 violations found in a review of 196 files. EviCore is also accredited by two trade associations, which review companies periodically for compliance with industry standards.

Holding the companies legally responsible for their decisions is also difficult. In 2022, Carelon settled a lawsuit for $13 million that alleged the company, then called AIM, had used a variety of techniques to avoid approving coverage requests. Among them: The company set its fax machines to receive only 5 to 10 pages. When doctors faxed prior authorization requests longer than the limit, company representatives would deny them for failing to have enough documentation. Carelon denied the allegations in court and admitted no fault. A spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Elevance, Carelon’s parent company, said its subsidiary “is focused on improving health outcomes while also lowering the cost of care.”

This year, Chris, representing Cupp’s estate, sued United Healthcare, EviCore, the Adena Regional Medical Center and Cupp’s doctor, accusing them of malpractice, among other allegations. Cupp’s attorney, John Markus, later decided to drop United and EviCore. Lawsuits against employer-funded health plans, like the one Cupp had with United, must be tried in federal court, where case law favors insurance companies. For instance, insurers found at fault do not pay punitive damages, only the cost of treatment. The medical center and the doctor declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation. In court, both denied any wrongdoing. United and EviCore declined to discuss Cupp’s case, despite an offer from Chris to sign a waiver of medical privacy rights.

Her father’s death wracked Chris. He had been her best friend. He helped raise her three kids. He provided for the family. Two years before his death, he purchased a new double-wide trailer to replace a rusting single-wide the family had lived in for years. It had four bedrooms, enough for everyone. It stood on the side of a hill, surrounded by oak and maple, a leafy retreat with a view of the valley below.

Cupp was buried at a cemetery across from a cornfield on March 9. A gray granite headstone marks his date of death.

Chris Cupp drives a school bus to make ends meet. For extra pay, she picks up a lot of the trips for night games. She says she hopes that no one else has to go through what she did.

“Insurance has too much say over something that can save your life,” she said. “When it comes to your heart, something that’s going to kill you, they have too much say in that. That’s my thought about it.”

Do You Have Insights Into Dental and Health Insurance Denials? Help Us Report on the System.

Agnel Philip contributed reporting.

by Mark Olalde

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 2019, the administration of then-President Donald Trump announced plans to relocate the federal government’s largest land management agency from the nation’s capital to Grand Junction, Colorado, a city of about 65,000 people a four-hour drive from the nearest major airport.

Trump had campaigned on a vow to “drain the swamp” and throughout his time in office voiced suspicions about the federal bureaucracy. Moving the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters out of Washington, which officially happened in August 2020, was a step toward fulfilling that promise.

The bureau, known as the BLM, manages mining, hunting, recreation, timber harvesting, oil drilling and more across an area more than 50 times larger than New Jersey, nearly all of it in the West. Though most of the agency’s staffers were already in the West, the administration argued that the bureaucrats in the agency’s headquarters should also be closer to the land they oversee.

A total of 176 employees working in the BLM headquarters were told to move; 135 declined, with many leaving the agency to take positions elsewhere in the federal bureaucracy, according to the Government Accountability Office, an independent federal research agency. The office’s research also found that disruptions caused by the relocation delayed the BLM finalizing policies governing the use of federal public lands.

Looking to undo the previous administration’s “upheaval,” President Joe Biden’s administration quickly moved the headquarters back to Washington and proposed increasing the agency’s funding. The BLM’s fiscal year 2024 budget represented a more than 30% increase from fiscal year 2021, the last year the Trump administration prepared the budget request.

But if Trump wins in November, he has signaled he’ll pick up where he left off with the BLM as part of a broader strategy to shrink the federal government and create a bureaucracy more beholden to him.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the 900-plus page blueprint for a potential second Trump term, recommends sending the BLM headquarters back to Colorado and relocating other agencies, ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency’s regional offices to the Air Traffic Organization and the American Indian Environmental Office.

Trump has publicly distanced himself from Project 2025, and a senior campaign adviser told ProPublica in a statement that the document does not set policy for a potential second term. During the presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump said of the document: “I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposely. I’m not going to read it. This was a group of people that got together, they came up with some ideas. I guess some good, some bad.”

But scores of people who worked in the Trump administration helped draft Project 2025. They include William Perry Pendley, his former pick to helm the BLM. Pendley oversaw the headquarters relocation to Grand Junction and authored the Project 2025 chapter on the Department of the Interior, which includes the recommendation to move the BLM’s headquarters back to the West.

Separate from Project 2025, Trump has doubled down on his plan to take aim at the federal bureaucracy as part of Agenda47, his campaign’s outline for a second term. “Just as I moved the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado,” he said in March 2023, “as many as 100,000 government positions can be moved out, and I mean immediately, of Washington to places filled with patriots who love America, and they really do love America.”

BLM employees who watched the relocation told ProPublica that the 2020 move out of Washington felt like naked politicking and the latest swing of the pendulum between administrations that has pointed the agency in wildly different directions. Rather than move, many in leadership left the agency. Those who remained were scattered, making collaboration with other divisions of the federal government more difficult and disrupting the continuity of internal programs.

Get in Touch

ProPublica is reporting on public land, the agencies that oversee it and the industries that profit off of it. Do you work with public land, such as for a federal, state or tribal land management agency? Reach out directly at mark.olalde@propublica.org, or find details on how to send us tips securely here.

“They ran the career people out,” said Steve Ellis, who spent nearly 40 years working for the federal government, rising to the level of BLM’s deputy director during the Obama administration. “This business about politicizing the civil service, that’s a problem. It’s something that should concern all Americans.”

Mick Mulvaney, then Trump’s acting chief of staff, insinuated during a 2019 speech that downsizing was the intent of the move, calling the relocation of agency offices “a wonderful way to streamline government.”

Employees in other bureaus and departments worry that what happened at the BLM will come to them in a second Trump administration.

Project 2025 advocates reinstituting the so-called Schedule F classification for federal employees that Trump created via a 2020 executive order to remove job protections and make such workers easier to fire. As part of Project 2025, backers created a database of potential replacement hires who share Trump’s mission.

Jeremy Symons, a former climate policy adviser with the EPA, is concerned that such changes would undermine his ex-employer’s ability to protect the environment and public health, in part by relocating or entirely dissolving government offices.

“What they plan on doing this time around was learned from that BLM experience,” he said.

“The Reorganization Will Functionally Dismantle the BLM”

Months before the Trump administration moved the BLM’s headquarters to Grand Junction, James Caswell, the agency’s director during President George W. Bush’s administration, warned Congress that “the reorganization will functionally dismantle the BLM.” It would remove the agency from having a voice in major decisions made in the capital, he said, and “effectively take the BLM off the playing field.”

Indeed, an exodus followed from the roughly 500-person headquarters, with numerous employees taking jobs elsewhere in the federal government to avoid leaving the Washington area, where they had put down roots. Vacancies in the office jumped to 326 from 121, according to the GAO.

The administration imposed hiring restrictions, including a freeze on filling certain senior positions to gauge whether they were necessary. “All of the BLM staff we interviewed told us about challenges in completing their duties because of headquarters vacancies after 2016,” the GAO report found. Vacancies matter because the BLM oversees an estimated 30% of all the mineral value in the country.

Pendley, the man selected to oversee the agency at the time of its relocation, is a self-avowed “sagebrush rebel,” part of the anti-federal government movement that wants public lands handed to states or sold off. (While functioning as the agency head, Pendley only officially held the title of deputy director for policy and programs and was never confirmed by the Senate. A court eventually ordered him to step aside, finding he had served unlawfully for more than a year.)

Pendley argued in Project 2025 that the BLM’s relocation was necessary and still is because a vast majority of the bureau’s staff and its jurisdiction remain in the West.

In an interview with ProPublica, Pendley said, “It makes much more sense to have the top people who are managing those lands and managing those people closer to the lands and the people themselves.”

He called the move a success, pointing to the COVID-19 pandemic as the reason the Grand Junction office building — where the agency leased space and which also hosted oil and gas companies — was never fully used. He argued that the point was not to drive away career employees.

In a potential second Trump administration, he said, there would be a “clear carve-out that things that are budget-related remain in Washington, things that are Capitol Hill-related remain in Washington.”

But the bureau is already decentralized, according to former BLM leadership, with the headquarters — what staff refer to as the Washington Office — located there to collaborate with the rest of the federal government.

“Part of the goal” of relocating the BLM’s headquarters “is for it to be disruptive,” said Mary Jo Rugwell, who was the BLM’s Wyoming state director until her 2019 retirement and now serves as president of the Public Lands Foundation, a nonprofit made up mainly of retired BLM employees. “We’ve got to stop this back-and-forth thing. It’s just not good for an organization. It’s not a healthy way to operate.”

Giving even more power to political appointees to fire career staff is a frightening proposition to Rugwell. “Putting people in place because of their loyalty to a person puts people in place that are not qualified to do the job,” she said.

“Less Effective and Less Efficient”

Project 2025 not only calls for the relocation of agencies’ offices but also goes further in promoting an industry wish list for lighter regulations. In some cases, the leaders of trade groups or industry advocates wrote chapters proposing how to redirect agencies regulating their member companies.

Among their environmental proposals: delist key species from protections under the Endangered Species Act; vacate Biden’s goal of conserving 30% of the country’s land and water by 2030; walk back protections for large swaths of the West in order to offer lease sales to the oil industry; and dismantle policies meant to combat climate change.

If such environmental and public health proposals move forward, “it would be a mistake to underestimate the scale of the demolition,” said Symons, the former EPA employee.

Under Trump, the EPA shrank to its smallest size in decades.

Symons now works with the Environmental Protection Network, a nonprofit composed of former EPA staff, and believes the Biden administration has begun turning around the agency. He co-authored a recent report that estimated rules the agency wrote on topics such as air pollution since Biden took office will save more than 200,000 lives through 2050.

Project 2025 proposes disbanding multiple offices within the agency, halting millions of dollars of grant funding for universities that “produce radical environmental research” and pausing Biden-era rules.

“The EPA needs to be realigned away from attempts to make it an all-powerful energy and land use policymaker and returned to its congressionally sanctioned role as environmental regulator,” Project 2025’s authors wrote.

“By putting polluters in control over our air and water instead of EPA scientists,” Symons said, “Project 2025 would put the lives of millions of Americans needlessly at risk from asthma attacks, cancer, lung disease and heart disease.”

In Project 2025, Pendley also focused on the obscure agency tasked with regulating coal mining: the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. He proposes moving its headquarters from Washington to Pittsburgh to be “in the coal field.”

The number of coal mine inspectors should be cut, Pendley wrote, pointing to the industry’s falling production. “The people that I talked to thought there were enough people out there to do the job,” Pendley told ProPublica.

Former agency staff questioned his logic. Moving the headquarters would only serve to make the agency “less effective and less efficient,” argued Joe Pizarchik, the agency’s longest-tenured director, who served until the day Trump was inaugurated.

The largest coal-producing state by far is Wyoming, not Pennsylvania, and historical coal mines in need of cleanup are scattered across Appalachia. As with the BLM, the employees who need to physically be in mines are already stationed in coal country, from offices in Charleston, West Virginia, to Casper, Wyoming. Headquarters staff, meanwhile, need to be in the capital to work alongside Interior Department leadership, Pizarchik said.

As for the agency’s inspectors, many mines that no longer produce have yet to be cleaned up, so the number of permits that the agency oversees has not fallen significantly, Pizarchik explained. Meanwhile, the number of coal mine inspections across the country, a 2018 study found, had already fallen more than 20% over the preceding decade.

“Frankly, it’s asinine,” Pizarchik said of Project 2025’s call to cut inspectors because of decreased production. “That statement is either made out of ignorance of the facts, or it is trying to mislead people.”

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Lisa Song

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Tucked into a green-sounding federal recycling bill filed last month is a wish list, not of tough new mandates to get a handle on the world’s plastic’s crisis, but of regulatory rollbacks and government assistance that would boost the plastics industry.

Endorsed by petrochemical lobbyists, the legislation is being criticized by environmentalists who are calling it the industry’s own Project 2025 — a playbook for a potential Trump administration to support an oil and gas industry that’s increasingly dependent on manufacturing plastic.

Among the bill’s supporters’ litany of wishes: They want taxpayers to help prop up “advanced” chemical recycling methods that companies have oversold as a solution for plastic-choked oceans and communities.

They want one of the plastic industry’s dirtiest and most inefficient technologies — one akin to incineration — to be redefined as manufacturing, which would make it exempt from air pollution laws.

They want to legitimize an accounting method that allows companies to exaggerate how much recycled plastic is in their products.

And they want to ensure secrecy around how companies process old plastic and prevent states from setting more stringent regulations for the industry.

Even though the bill itself is a legislative long shot, federal agencies under Donald Trump could adopt some of its most extreme provisions without congressional approval, said Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The previous Trump administration had already started the most consequential rollback — the exemption from air pollution regulations — before the Biden administration reversed it.

“The likelihood of really bad stuff happening is exponentially greater under a second Trump administration,” Rosenberg said. The Trump campaign didn’t return a request for comment.

Lobbyists could also break up the bill and try to push it through one piece at a time regardless of who wins the election, he added.

The American Chemistry Council, a prominent plastics lobby, praised the bill as “ground-breaking, solutions-oriented legislation aimed at increasing plastics recycling and preventing plastic from ending up in the environment.” The bill echoes key provisions from a 2022 ACC policy plan. Council spokesperson Andrea Albersheim pushed back on the “inflammatory” characterization that the bill is akin to Project 2025 and noted that it has bipartisan sponsorship.

Rep. Don Davis, a Democrat from North Carolina, and Dr. Larry Bucshon, a Republican congressman from Indiana, co-sponsored the bill, titled Accelerating a Circular Economy for Plastics and Recycling Innovation Act of 2024.

Bucshon is retiring at the end of the legislative session. Davis is in his first term in Congress and faces a competitive reelection race in November; he serves on congressional committees involving agriculture and the military, not science or the environment.

Neither congressman answered ProPublica’s questions about the bill’s creation or its contents. Davis’ press release about the legislation included a statement of support from the CEO of Berry Global, a major plastic packaging manufacturer with a facility in Davis’ district.

Berry supports the act “because it would help modernize the nation’s fragmented recycling infrastructure and significantly increase use of recycled material in new products,” CEO Kevin Kwilinski said in the statement.

Bucshon noted in the release that his district is “home to a number of plastic manufacturers.”

Albersheim, the industry spokesperson, lauded Bucshon’s “long track record of working in a bipartisan fashion on recycling infrastructure legislation.” Bucshon “reached out to a variety of stakeholders,” she said, “including ACC, for perspectives, information and feedback.”

The bill doesn’t include any of the fixes that researchers have found would be most effective in curbing the plastics crisis: capping plastic production, limiting single-use plastic and removing toxic chemicals from plastic products.

The pro-recycling claim hides the bill’s true intent, which is to increase the use of chemical recycling, said Cynthia Palmer, senior analyst for petrochemicals at Moms Clean Air Force. “If you don’t nerd it out and spend your nights and weekends studying these details, then it sounds really good.”

Expanding a Mirage

The plastics industry, which plans to double production over the next few decades, prefers to tackle the plastics crisis through waste management rather than reducing its output. It has long heralded recycling as a cure, despite knowing that traditional methods can barely make a dent in the problem. More recently, the industry has touted new forms of chemical recycling as the solution.

ProPublica explored the most popular form of chemical recycling, pyrolysis; we found it is so inefficient that it yields products with almost no actual recycled content. Companies use a kind of mathematical sleight of hand called mass balance to inflate the recycledness of their most lucrative products by taking credit for the recycled content of other, less lucrative products. It allows a plastic cup with less than 1% recycled plastic to be advertised as 30% recycled.

The Environmental Protection Agency recently issued the first federal policy against mass balance and the California attorney general has sued ExxonMobil for “deceptive” plastic recycling practices, including mass balance. An ExxonMobil spokesperson recently told ProPublica that the company’s chemical recycling process works, and that it has “processed more than 60 million pounds of plastic waste into usable raw materials, keeping it out of landfills.”

The bill would reverse course and require the EPA to authorize various forms of mass balance for recycled plastic packaging. A federal rule along these lines would override state laws and prevent states like California from placing restrictions on mass balance or chemical recycling within their borders, according to the bill.

If an industry-friendly administration takes over, Rosenberg said, the EPA could easily legitimize mass balance. Further changes could come from the Federal Trade Commission, which issues the Green Guides — national guidelines on how companies can advertise environmentally friendly products without deceiving the public. The Biden administration has spent nearly two years working on an updated version of the Green Guides that will likely define what counts as recycling and whether companies can use mass balance to advertise their products.

The nation’s chemical recycling capacity is extremely limited right now. The few American facilities — including one owned by ExxonMobil — can only handle a tiny fraction of the nation’s plastic waste.

The ACC recently told ProPublica that it is lobbying for mandates that would require more recycled plastic in packaging; this would create more demand for the technologies, which would spur growth.

The bill calls for a national standard to increase recycled content in plastic packaging by up to 30% by 2030. To meet that goal, “it will be necessary for the recycling market in the United States to expand its deployment of advanced recycling technologies,” the bill states.

It dedicates a significant chunk of federal resources toward expanding plastic recycling infrastructure and smoothing the way for new chemical recycling facilities. There are few details on the scope and cost of these initiatives, or whether they could work at scale.

Some of the funding would come from fines against companies that don’t comply with the new recycling standard. The bill also requires considerable labor and time from government employees who are tasked with setting up guidelines and requirements to standardize and expand plastic recycling. For instance, regulators must create “data collection procedures” to calculate the annual amount of plastic waste that chemical recyclers could process into new plastic. Another provision points to federal support for using plastic as a construction material, possibly for seawalls that protect communities from sea-level rise and storm surges.

Plastic production was responsible for roughly 5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 — the very thing driving climate change and severe flooding. The industry’s emissions could double or triple by 2050.

A study authorized by the bill sets the stage for even more government spending. The report, which requires input from plastic and chemical recycling industry representatives, will provide recommendations on financial incentives for improved collection and sorting of recyclables — a necessity for chemical recycling — and potentially expanding the EPA’s National Recycling Strategy to incorporate mass balance. Under a Trump administration, the EPA could update the strategy with that change, Rosenberg said.

Prior news investigations have found that plastic bag dropoff programs, like this one in Thorndale, Pennsylvania, have a spotty record, with much of the plastic ending up in landfills. (Hannah Beier/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Up in Smoke

During pyrolysis, materials like plastic are heated in a low-oxygen environment until they break down into other chemicals. The process produces hazardous waste and releases carcinogens like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are toxic at very low concentrations.

The EPA has defined pyrolysis facilities as incinerators for decades, and the Clean Air Act defines anything that combusts any solid waste — including discarded plastic — as an incinerator, said Jim Pew, an attorney at the advocacy group Earthjustice.

This bill would count pyrolysis as manufacturing, not incineration. That bureaucratic shuffle would remove federal air pollution regulations that govern the facilities’ toxic air emissions, Pew said. There are no manufacturing regulations that would automatically apply, so the EPA would need to create brand-new rules, among other changes, he added, which is unlikely to occur because it would take sustained efforts over multiple administrations.

“It is not accurate to suggest that the bill would exempt or remove pyrolysis regulation under the Clean Air Act or other environmental laws,” Albersheim, the ACC spokesperson, said. “Instead, the bill aims to address uncertainty under the current laws and correct a misunderstanding about how the technology works.”

When ProPublica asked which federal air pollution laws would apply if pyrolysis is no longer considered incineration, Albersheim said some facilities would not release enough pollutants to meet certain EPA regulation thresholds.

After lobbying from the ACC and others, about half of all U.S. states have passed laws classifying pyrolysis as manufacturing. But the federal government has ultimate authority to enforce the Clean Air Act.

Under then-President Trump, the EPA began the process of redefining pyrolysis as manufacturing. The Biden administration later reversed that decision but “left the door open” for a future attempt, Rosenberg said. If Trump wins, he said, it would be even easier for a Republican administration to remove pyrolysis from the Clean Air Act.

The bill gives regulators authority to audit companies’ recycling practices, but the results could be kept from the public. Any “proprietary information” uncovered during these investigations would not be subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Journalists and researchers routinely use FOIA to access government records and inform the public about corporate wrongdoing or public health threats.

Trade secrets are already protected under FOIA; Rosenberg fears the wording of the bill could broaden the definition of what’s exempt from public disclosure. The bill’s co-sponsors didn’t respond to questions seeking clarification.

Palmer of Moms Clean Air Force said the bill gives the industry cover as it tries to triple plastic production over the next few decades. All these efforts to increase recycling through whatever means possible are meant to “divert our attention” from the “sinister” effects that plastic has on the environment and our communities, she said.

by Nicole Foy

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On the morning of Jan. 22, 2024, Elmer De León Pérez descended deep into the bowels of a ship that he was helping to build in Houma, Louisiana. Pérez was a welder, working to construct one of the U.S. government’s most sophisticated ships, an $89 million vessel for tracking hurricanes and conducting oceanographic research. It was funded by President Joe Biden’s signature climate legislation.

Pérez’s assignment had him working at the bottom of a nearly 12-foot ballast tank, according to a subsequent police report; the walls were just 4 feet apart. That meant standing inside a metal cylinder, roughly twice the size of a household water heater, using an argon-gas torch whose flame can burn as hot as 20,000 degrees.

Something went very wrong that day. In the afternoon, workers noticed that Pérez, 20, had not come up for lunch. Friends and family began calling, with no answer.

His coworkers found him slumped over in the tank. “I couldn’t get to him because the gas was too strong,” one of them told ProPublica. “I started screaming, ‘Help! Help! Help!’”

When emergency workers found his body, Pérez was already showing signs of rigor mortis. A coroner’s report would note that he was wearing a red hoodie, plaid pajama pants and brown steel-toed boots, and that a “copious amount of clear fluid was noted to the mouth and nose,” as well as on the sleeve of his shirt. The coroner concluded that Pérez “died as a result of bilateral severe pulmonary consolidation and edema” — fluid in the lungs — and “copper and nickel intoxication.” (The ship, like many, used copper-nickel alloys as a coating because they resist corrosion from salt water.)

Pérez had worked for roughly the previous two years at the shipyard, which is owned by Thoma-Sea, a large employer with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal defense contracts. If employees are hurt or killed at work, they and their families are eligible for significant financial help. If one dies in an accident, for example, federal law requires companies such as Thoma-Sea to pay any surviving children. For an employee who perished the way Pérez did, that would have meant payments until his toddler son was at least 18, which could approach a total of $500,000.

But Pérez wasn’t working directly for Thoma-Sea; he was employed by a contractor. So when he died, Thoma-Sea paid nothing. Not to his family, including the partner that survived him. Not to his toddler son. Not even to help send Pérez’s body home to Guatemala. Instead, his family borrowed money and desperately tried to raise the rest online. Family members said they haven’t heard anything from Thoma-Sea since Pérez died.

When Pérez’s partner sought death benefits from G-4 Services, the local staffing contractor that had hired him to work for Thoma-Sea, G-4 rebuffed her. “Pérez was a self-employed independent contractor and thus a claim for death benefits is not compensable,” a lawyer for the company wrote in May. G-4 contends that Pérez “wasn’t working at the time of his death” even though his corpse was found in the ship with his welding equipment.

Investigators from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration concluded in a September report that Thoma-Sea committed multiple safety violations. “An employee was allowed to weld in a confined space that was not monitored for atmospheric changes while hot work was being done,” OSHA’s report stated. The site supervisor, the findings continued, “did not verify that the ventilation ductwork … was set up properly to maintain a safe atmosphere.”

The agency imposed a fine of $41,480 and then, after Thoma-Sea appealed, reduced it to $31,340. As with potential death benefits, none of that money went to Pérez’s family.

For decades, U.S. politicians have blamed immigrants for all manner of national woes, particularly taking American jobs. These days, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump agree on the need for a border clampdown.

But the truth about jobs is more complicated. There is a dire shortage of blue-collar workers in the United States. Skilled tradespeople have been aging out of the workforce for years now, with fewer people to replace them, as students have prioritized four-year college degrees. The Biden administration has pumped millions into development programs to lure young people into trades, but it’ll take years to see any effects.

Today the lack of welders is acute. The U.S. needs at least 300,000 more of them in the next few years. Shipyards have been hit particularly hard by the gap, which has contributed to a shortfall in warship production.

As in many other industries, immigrants are filling that gap.

Pérez embodied many aspects of the immigration debate. He had exactly the skills that American companies are desperate for. He was an expert welder, willing to work in the cramped, dangerous spaces inside ships. And Pérez was able to earn $23 an hour at a shipyard in Houma, many times more than he could in his home country. Slightly built with jet-black hair, Pérez was funny, diligent and eager to succeed. He had begun building a life in the U.S.

But, like millions of others, Perez had not been able to do that legally. This spring, the secretary of Navy, Carlos del Toro, called for creating exactly such a pathway, to help construct the ships the Navy needs. “What we’ve got to do is open up the spigot a bit,” he said. “Allow blue-collar workers to come here.”

Without a work permit, Pérez was vulnerable. He worked at the shipyard but not for it, a contractor for a subcontractor.

Pérez’s story is emblematic of a system that relies ever more on immigrants, even as employers and politicians vilify the very people doing work that generates profits and serves the nation. Employers use subcontractors and independent contractors to pass the risks and costs on to the workers, said Laura Padin, director of work structures at the National Employment Law Project. “These companies, particularly in occupations and industries with high rates of health and safety violations, use this to shield themselves from responsibility,” she said. “We also see that they do this with workers who are immigrants if they think they’re undocumented so that they can avoid responsibility for hiring someone who’s undocumented.” The point, Padin said, is to “protect the entity at the top.”

Elmer De León Pérez was welding in a ship’s tank, which he entered through this hole, before his body was found slumped over inside. (Occupational Safety and Health Administration)

Houma, about an hour southwest of New Orleans, lies at the heart of bayous and wetlands that draw tourists for swamp tours, crawfish boils and Cajun music festivals. Hollywood film crews occasionally visit for the historic plantation houses that dot the surrounding towns and the wooden structures where enslaved people first lived and labored, and where Black sharecroppers later crowded in.

It’s a region in decline. Damage from 2021’s Hurricane Ida is still visible, and decades of oil and gas extraction, combined with the rapidly worsening effects of climate change, have caused an entire island to disappear into the Gulf of Mexico. Last month, another hurricane, Francine, slammed into the parish, and longtime residents are fleeing soaring insurance costs as much as the next storm.

Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes (Houma is located near the line between the two) are sparsely populated and majority white, but with sizable Black and tribal nations communities whose ancestral homelands have been ravaged by climate change. Roughly three-quarters of the region’s voters supported Trump in 2020, and there’s a strain of anti-immigrant sentiment. In the small town of Golden Meadow, one family still has the sign they erected more than 15 years ago, after their son died in a workplace accident. “An illegal alien working at Port Fourchon killed Nicholas. 5-11-06.” (That sentiment is hardly limited to these two parishes: In June, Louisiana enacted a law that threatens prison terms for any “alien” found to have entered the state unlawfully.)

A bridge, open to allow a ship to pass, on the Intracoastal Waterway in Houma. Bottom: A family in Golden Meadow, Louisiana, holds an immigrant responsible for their son’s death in a workplace accident. (Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica)

Like much of coastal Louisiana, the region has long drawn migratory labor, such as workers who come for the jobs linked to the giant oil-services installation at Port Fourchon or Filipino visa workers who commonly labor in seafood processing plants.

Latino immigration to southern Louisiana began increasing nearly 20 years ago, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. A pattern has developed: After a storm wreaks devastation, Louisianans move north while immigrants come to do disaster cleanup and other jobs deemed too dangerous or difficult even for members of a community built around grueling labor on oil rigs and the like. Hispanic residents barely register on the Census counts outside the New Orleans suburbs. But Latino immigrants are steadily becoming a stronger presence where their labor is needed. About a third of all Latino immigrants in Louisiana arrived within the last several years, according to the Pew Research Center.

The Thomassie family, owners of Thoma-Sea, have run businesses in the region’s trademark industries, first with family shrimping operations, and then with shipbuilding in 1990. The company initially built tugboats to tow offshore oil rigs and barges through the criss-cross of bayous and canals.

Walter Thomassie took over in the early 2000s and expanded the business and its ambitions. “My father set a good example for us, as owners of the company,” Thomassie told The Houma Times in 2014. “We live comfortably, but not lavishly. We re-invest heavily into the company as it is the mechanism that feeds us and it is our job to do all within our power to maintain its stability.”

Thomassie lives in Raceland, minutes from a billboard advertising workers’ compensation claims for maritime injuries. A half-mile drive leads from the blend of bayou towns and sugarcane fields to his home, partially hidden from view by a garage that blocks the path.

Thomassie didn’t respond to multiple email and phone requests for an interview for this article, and he declined again when ProPublica approached him outside his home in June. He had emerged with a smile, wiping his hand with a rag, from the shop where he was working. But his face dropped at the mention of ProPublica. Thomassie said he had looked up the website and didn’t want to talk about his company or Pérez’s death. “You really shouldn’t come to people’s homes,” he said. (The company also didn’t respond to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica.)

The Thomassie family’s political involvement has grown steadily in recent years. Walter Thomassie is a significant supporter of congressional Republicans, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who have been harshly critical of immigrants. “You’re seeing countries emptying out prisons to send people here,” Scalise claimed this year, citing brutal crimes he said had been committed by “someone here illegally” in his own district, which includes part of Houma. How many immigrants or terrorists, he asked, “are here in America planning to do us harm because Joe Biden opened the southern border?” Thomassie made roughly $35,000 in political contributions over the past year. He and his brother, who is also a member of Thoma-Sea’s board, have also donated to local Louisiana Republican candidates.

Several Louisiana Republican politicians have made appearances at the shipyards. In October 2022, Thoma-Sea executives gathered with local Republican representatives and federal officials to etch one of the ships the company was building for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Discoverer, with the signature of its ceremonial sponsor, second gentleman Doug Emhoff (who didn’t attend). Its sister ship, Oceanographer, where Pérez worked and eventually died, had received its ceremony and fanfare a few months earlier.

Over the past several years, Thoma-Sea has secured hundreds of millions of dollars to construct and repair everything from Coast Guard cutters and Army Corps of Engineers barges to parts for Navy submarines. In 2022, Thomassie said that building the NOAA ship and a second similar one, both designed to collect climate change data that would encourage coastal resilience, would bring more than 600 jobs to the Houma shipyard.

By all appearances, Thomassie’s company is thriving. Thoma-Sea has another, much larger contract to build two more ships for NOAA. (Asked about Pérez’s death, a NOAA spokesperson expressed “our condolences to the employee’s family and our appreciation for everyone working on these vessels” and followed up to note that it was the U.S. Navy that selected Thoma-Sea to build the ship that Pérez worked on.) Thoma-Sea was awarded millions in new federal contracts in the months after Pérez died.

A rough divide in Thoma-Sea’s shipyard is visible, according to workers who spoke to ProPublica. Non-Latino — mostly white — employees tend to be on staff, with many in supervisory positions. Some Latino immigrant workers are employed directly for the company and in supervisory positions, but they are more likely to work as independent contractors with no benefits.

The phenomenon is not limited to Thoma-Sea. Around Houma, Spanish advertisements for contratistas litter the windows and bulletin boards of Hispanic businesses on the long commercial and industrial strips leading to the shipyards and the Port of Terrebonne, offering positions for pipe fitters, riggers, deckhands, painters and tug welders. Some Houma-based agencies recruit for jobs in other Southern port towns in Mississippi, Alabama or South Carolina. Employers with federal contracts are supposed to ascertain workers’ eligibility — and ensure subcontractors do the same — using the government’s online E-Verify system, which checks identity information like Social Security numbers against federal databases. But experts say E-Verify makes it easy for workers to provide false information, and government agencies rarely monitor compliance with these rules.

Top: Ships lined up across the Thoma-Sea repair yard in Houma. Bottom: Flyers advertising contracting jobs have been hung in Latino businesses in the area. (Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica)

Other shipyards working on federal contracts have also hired undocumented workers. At Detyens Shipyards in Charleston, South Carolina, three Mexican immigrants died between 2019 and 2023 in gruesome accidents while repairing the same Navy cargo ship. An investigation by Charleston’s Post and Courier discovered that two of the men were working under assumed names and both had been recruited by a contractor agency based in Houma.

A federal investigation found an abysmal safety record at the shipyard. But the Navy awarded Detyens several more contracts to repair ships soon after those deaths. A company representative declined to comment other than to say that it confirms every employee’s eligibility to work.

The same day OSHA fined Detyens for its safety record, a House Armed Services Committee hearing discussed the struggle to properly staff shipyards. Rep. Adam Smith, a Democrat from Washington, gingerly broached the idea of relying more on immigrants. “This is not a great place to bring up an immigration debate, but you know immigration is potentially one place where we could find some of those workers,” Smith said. “And as we are all painfully aware, there are a lot of people who want to come here. Seems to me that we ought to be able to match up those two problems a little bit better than we are.”

Smith’s suggestion, which was echoed by del Toro, the Navy secretary, never gained momentum. It withered away nearly as soon as it was mentioned. Smith’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

Pérez and his father, Erick De León, left their hometown of San Miguel Ixtahuacán, Guatemala, at the tail end of 2019, but they crossed into the U.S. separately. According to an account provided by his father, the 15-year-old Pérez gave himself up to U.S. authorities, leading to a brief detention, while his father crossed the border in the desert. Father and son reunited, then settled with family in Houston, where Peréz picked up jobs in restaurants and contracting jobs with his father. But by 2021, they had relocated to Houma, where several of Pérez’s aunts lived with their extended families.

Pérez’s father eventually returned to Guatemala when his wife got sick. But Pérez stayed, finding that the welding skills he’d learned on a job in Houston were coveted in Houma.

Pérez’s partner, another Guatemalan immigrant, moved with him to Houma. Their son was born on Christmas Day in 2022 at the hospital in Houma, making him a U.S. citizen. They relied on his aunt and uncle, who viewed Pérez like a son, to get established in Louisiana, and his aunt remembered how his son’s birth had shifted his priorities. He focused even more on building a life for his family and spent his limited free time with his son. (ProPublica interviewed several members of Pérez’s family in Houma, but agreed not to name them due to the legal and employment threats that immigrants face right now.)

Elmer De León Pérez, right, with his father, Erick De León, in Houma (Photo courtesy of Erick De León)

By the time Pérez signed an independent contractor agreement with G-4 Services to work at Thoma-Sea just a few weeks later, photos of the proud father and son were filling Facebook feeds from Houma to Guatemala. “Tenerte como hijo siempre será el mejor regalo del mundo,” Pérez wrote beneath a photo with his son on Nov. 19, 2023, just two months before his death. “To have you as a son will always be the best gift in the world.”

In the days before Pérez’s death, he was pulled into extra work shifts on Saturday and Sunday. It meant he missed the service at the small Spanish-speaking church near the shipyard, but he arrived home in time to join family dinner with his aunt, uncle and cousins. Eating a huge Sunday meal they had cooked together was one of the most treasured traditions for their busy extended family in Houma, his aunt told ProPublica. Pérez had requested carne asada, one of his favorites. He wanted to bring the leftovers to work that week.

The next day, Monday, marked the beginning of a harrowing ordeal for Pérez’s family. It started around 3 p.m., when relatives who also worked at the shipyard received a worrisome message via Facebook: Something had happened to Pérez.

Family started messaging friends and calling each other frantically, trying to figure out what was going on. When they couldn’t get answers, a handful went to the shipyard itself. As they arrived at the Thoma-Sea parking lot and rushed to the security gate, one of Pérez’s aunts remembers seeing a small caravan of emergency vehicles, including a coroner’s van, driving in the opposite direction.

The company didn’t tell them anything at first, leaving them to wait in increasing despair outside the security gate. It wasn’t until later, after someone emerged to break the news, that Pérez’s aunt realized that it was his body that had passed them. “It was like the world came crashing down on me,” she told ProPublica.

Standing in the shadow of the ship where he had died hours earlier, Pérez’s family clutched each other and cried. Distraught, confused and angry, they returned home to break the news to Pérez’s partner.

Word of Pérez’s death spread quickly across Facebook, mostly thanks to the tight-knit evangelical Christian community of his hometown in Guatemala. His U.S. family hosted bake sales and started a GoFundMe page, which raised just $470 toward the $8,689 undertaker’s bill and other funeral costs. Pérez’s hometown church in Guatemala, as well as a local evangelical Facebook page, raised much more through posted calls for financial assistance across their network.

Neither Pérez’s partner nor the rest of his family in the U.S. could attend the funeral in Guatemala. But they watched a Facebook livestream from the Guatemalan radio station. It showed his coffin arriving in San Miguel Ixtahuacán, a caravan of cars following the hearse down the winding mountain road as the sun set. They watched his younger siblings and cousins weep over his open casket, then weep again as his family and neighbors buried him in San Miguel’s cemetery.

Watch video ➜

Pérez’s family members in Houma are still reeling from his death. None of his relatives who worked at Thoma-Sea could stomach staying there any longer. They eventually quit and moved to different jobs in the region.

His partner still keeps his phone exactly how he left it, the recent call list full of missed calls from family and coworkers who were looking for him that day. His son still wakes up crying for him in the middle of the night. A cousin made a TikTok of Pérez dancing with his son, the overlaid text promising that they’ll find him justice.

There’s a chance Pérez’s family could obtain financial compensation, but it’s a long shot. Federal law does create a path for a workers’ compensation lawsuit, even for a shipyard contractor or an undocumented immigrant. Steve Wanko, a Houma workers’ compensation lawyer, said he won such a case in 2015.

Another lawyer filed a claim on behalf of Peréz’s partner against the contractor, G-4 Services. G-4 is disputing the benefits claim, citing Peréz’s ineligibility as an independent contractor, saying his partner was ineligible because they were not legally married, and claiming the sudden death of a healthy 20-year-old was not caused by his job. His death, a medical review conducted at the request of G-4 argued, “occurred while he was working but was not caused by workplace related factors or activities.”

Reached in May outside his home, Ricky Guidroz, one of the owners of G-4 Services, declined to discuss Pérez’s death, citing the advice of his lawyers. Guidroz said he had tried to reach out to Pérez’s family. Guidroz’s wife came by the house crying at one point, Pérez’s aunt said, but they didn’t really know what to say to her. “It’s so unfortunate,” he told ProPublica. “Just know that my heart hurts, really.” (ProPublica also sent a detailed list of questions to G-4 Services, which didn’t respond.)

This October, ProPublica visited Thoma-Sea again, one month after the OSHA report excoriated the company for not protecting Pérez. At the end of the day’s shift, the workers, mostly Latino, passed an Army Corps of Engineers barge, under repair just behind the shipyard’s security guard shack, in groups and pairs to reach cars in the muddy parking lot.

The workers filtered out to the handful of Hispanic businesses near the Port of Terrebonne to buy tortillas for the weekend and to wire money home. Some drove upwards of an hour to reach homes scattered from the New Orleans suburbs to small towns hugging Bayou Lafourche and the Atchafalaya River. Most of them would be back the next morning, to resume building America’s ships.

Two National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration vessels are under construction at Thoma-Sea’s shipyard. Pérez died while working on one of them. (Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica)

Help ProPublica Reporters Investigate the Immigration System

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Mica Rosenberg and Jeff Ernsthausen

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The chief of police in Whitewater, Wisconsin, didn’t ask for the moon in late 2023 when he wrote to President Joe Biden about the hundreds of new Nicaraguan migrants who’d arrived in his city over a whirlwind span of two years. All of a sudden, he wrote, his 23 sworn officers were dealing with three times the number of drivers without licenses on local roads.

Biden administration officials didn’t get back to the chief for almost two months. And when former President Donald Trump learned about Whitewater’s predicament, he seized on it as further evidence that the United States was being overrun by “migrant crime” and promised voters he would conduct the “largest deportation in American history,” though that’s not at all what the chief was asking for, much less how he saw his city.

The small Wisconsin town is one of a number of American communities that have experienced the strains of a new phase of immigration whose origins and meaning have been obscured during this year’s presidential election by Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and the reluctance of his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, to clearly address the Biden administration’s track record on the issue.

In the coming days, ProPublica will publish a series of stories that we hope will be of use to voters, especially those focused on immigration as a key issue. We aim to provide a more complete picture of what’s happening on the border and in cities and towns across the United States. Amid the misleading bombast of the campaigns, our reporting on the ground and analysis of government data will explain the real challenges — as opposed to the ones being made up to scare you — posed by immigration trends at the Southwest border over the past decade.

We’ve found that what’s changed most about the border isn’t just the number of migrants coming across. It’s who’s coming and how. Many of today’s migrants are coming from new places and in new ways that make their arrivals more visible and, at times, more costly to the communities where they settle. And those changes are coinciding with, if not helping drive, a hardening in public opinion.

Our analysis of immigration court and census data found that while the number of times U.S. officials encountered migrants at the border spiked in the past three years, only a small share of Americans live in neighborhoods that saw a significant number of new arrivals when compared with their populations. We found that migrants were concentrated in relatively few places around the country.

In places like Whitewater that were ill-prepared for those increases, the new arrivals created small pockets of upheaval that, thanks to television and the internet, spilled into the public consciousness. Meanwhile in large Democratically controlled urban centers like New York and Chicago, where migrants have settled for generations, the new arrivals _— including some bused north by Republican governors seeking to make political points — strained resources in ways that set off flashes of resentment.

In Denver last year, taxpayers watched their city government provide months of free housing to Venezuelan migrants, while many in its long-standing homeless population languished on the streets. In Belle Glade, Florida, a farmer who’d long depended on immigrant labor had a change of heart after he became a state lawmaker, helping pass restrictions against hiring undocumented workers.

And at the border, in Del Rio, Texas, residents who had long been accustomed to the rhythms of crossings between the U.S. and Mexico were shaken by the swift and sudden arrival of nearly 20,000 predominantly Haitian migrants — a number that amounts to more than half the local population. Three years later, residents fear that such a destabilizing event could happen again. One Democratic candidate for sheriff there has taken positions so openly critical of his own party that local Republicans invited him to join their side.

The Biggest Change at the Border Isn’t Just How Many People Are Crossing — It’s Who’s Crossing and How

More migrants crossed the border without getting caught in the early 2000s. But today’s migrants are more likely to turn themselves in to authorities, often seeking asylum.

Note: 2022 and 2023 unapprehended crossings are based on unpublished government estimates.

Public opinion polls show that concern and confusion about immigration persist among Americans beyond Del Rio. To understand why, consider the chart Trump shared with his supporters during a rally in July in Butler, Pennsylvania. It showed the numbers of migrants encountered at the Southwest border over the past decade. Trump turned to it in the split second a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his ear. He says he loves the chart, even gushing about sleeping with it, because it probably saved his life. But the reason he’s continued to display it at subsequent rallies is that it shows the record jump in encounters that occurred under Biden and Harris, which he says is evidence of the administration’s failure.

What Trump doesn’t say is that the increase actually began while he was still in office. Meanwhile, Harris has touted the tough asylum restrictions the Biden administration has imposed this election year that have led to dramatic decreases in the number of illegal crossings. But she doesn’t talk about why it took so long to do so. And she says even less about how some of her own allies accuse her of adopting immigration proposals they say are similar to Trump’s.

Voters could be forgiven for not knowing whom to believe, for feeling there is an unprecedented crisis at the border. But in past years, according to government estimates, there were many more migrants who crossed into the U.S. illegally and didn’t get caught. It might not come through in Republican talking points, but those of us over 20 have probably lived through periods of higher rates of border crossings before.

Shifting Demographics

The migrants arriving in the past few years came from a broader array of countries, including some that either can’t or won’t take them back. In some cases they’ve landed here without established networks of relatives who could support them. Those let in to pursue asylum claims are allowed to stay until their cases are resolved by the woefully backlogged immigration courts, a process that can take years. Many won’t ultimately qualify, but in the meantime they can apply for work permits and for some public benefits. There are now around 3.5 million pending cases in the immigration court system, up from some 400,000 a decade ago.

Former President Barack Obama oversaw the beginning of these major shifts when he took office in 2009. It was the end of a decade when over 90% of the millions arrested trying to illegally cross the border were from Mexico, and most were single adults. His administration actively pursued border crossers at a rate that outraged immigration advocates, who derisively dubbed him the “deporter-in-chief.”

In his second term, an increasing number of Central American children and families began coming mostly from a region known as the Northern Triangle: El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. This was the first sign of the trend in which more people started crossing the border and didn’t attempt to avoid Border Patrol, but instead turned themselves in to ask for asylum. Under U.S. and international laws, they couldn’t be sent back to a place where they could face persecution.

Obama couldn’t easily deport them, but detaining children and families became a losing logistical, humanitarian and political proposition. The numbers of people arriving were at the lowest levels since the 1970s, partly because of the administration’s crackdown on many border crossers and because the country was recovering from a recession, when fewer jobs were available.

Enter Donald Trump, gliding down an escalator to announce his first presidential bid in 2015. The years of low numbers of border crossings didn’t stop him from casting the situation as a crisis and making the construction of a border wall one of the pillars of his campaign platform.

After taking office in 2017, Trump didn’t make much progress on building a wall, but he made strides overhauling the country’s asylum system. He argued that because so many migrants are ultimately found to be ineligible for asylum in court, they were using the process as a loophole to gain entry to the U.S. His administration moved swiftly to enact new restrictions, including forcing tens of thousands of asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for court hearings and separating parents from their children at the border.

Crossings still rose sharply in 2019, going so high that Trump officials said the system was at a “breaking point” and, in turn, released hundreds of thousands of migrants into the U.S. After the pandemic began in March 2020, the Trump administration used a public health policy known as Title 42 to allow border agents to expel migrants to Mexico without giving them a chance to seek asylum.

Trump’s policy helped usher in another shift in new migration patterns. Mexico initially only agreed to accept expulsions of its own nationals and those from some Central American countries under Title 42. Almost everyone else couldn’t be expelled, and many who hoped to claim asylum were released into the United States. Thanks in part to social media, word got out among migrants in nations that were being convulsed by conflict, political turmoil and natural disasters, and people from other countries began coming to the border in larger numbers.

When Biden took office promising a more humane approach to immigration, that trend exploded. He initially kept his word and quickly overturned many of Trump’s policies. But he left Title 42 in place even after the pandemic began subsiding.

Media reports showed thousands of men, women and children making perilous journeys through the inhospitable jungle region between Colombia and Panama known as the Darien Gap. People from China, India and West Africa were paying smugglers tens of thousands of dollars in some cases to fly them to Nicaragua and deliver them to the Southwest border. News stories then showed them illegally crossing the U.S. border by clamoring under razor wire and wading across the Rio Grande but then immediately turning themselves in to officials.

By 2023, when encounters at the Southwest border reached an unprecedented 2.5 million, just 29% were from Mexico, 20% were from northern Central America and the rest came from dozens of nations around the world.

As more Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Cubans arrived, those countries’ poor diplomatic relations with the United States made it difficult to quickly remove them. Haitians also came in large numbers, including many who had already left their country and were living in South America.

Much like what happened in 2019 under Trump, the soaring numbers of families and migrants coming in large groups overwhelmed the border’s infrastructure. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents didn’t have the capacity to either detain or deport the migrants they were apprehending, so they began releasing more of them into the United States.

Legal, but in Limbo

Removals and Releases by U.S. Customs and Border Protection

With no clear place to go, migrants gathered on the streets of U.S. border cities. The Republican governor of Texas paid to bus people north to Democratically controlled cities like Chicago, where families ended up sleeping on the floors of police stations.

New York’s laws, which guarantee shelter to everyone, made the city a particularly attractive destination. As the numbers of migrants arriving there swelled beyond the capacity of the shelter system, Mayor Eric Adams sided with Republicans in criticizing his own party’s management of the border.

Recent data shows that more than 200,000 asylum-seekers have accessed the city’s shelter system since 2022. As of August, tens of thousands were Venezuelans, who had a relatively thin network of relatives and friends to help integrate them into the city. Their arrival stands in stark contrast to Chinese immigrants who came to New York in similar numbers as Venezuelans. But, due in part to the city’s large Chinese population, they did not depend anywhere near as much on the city shelter system.

Facing criticism from both parties, the Biden administration tried to deter migrants from risking their lives to cross the border illegally and turn themselves in. Instead, it wanted them to go to a legal port of entry. In May 2023, when Title 42 was lifted, officials implemented a new rule that barred most migrants from requesting asylum unless they made an appointment to approach the border using a government app called CBP One. The app allows only 1,450 slots per day, causing thousands of people to wait in Mexico, where they routinely fall prey to criminal groups.

Beyond those migrants released into the country at the border through CBP One, around 828,000 have been allowed to enter through new temporary humanitarian parole programs. Most of those people applied from abroad and have a U.S. sponsor.

In June, the Biden administration took the restrictions further. It barred most people from requesting asylum at the border when crossings reached a certain threshold, but it set that limit so low it essentially made the ban permanent. In addition, Mexico agreed to work with the Biden administration to keep migrants from reaching the border by stepping up its own enforcement. The administration says the efforts have allowed the government to vastly speed up screenings and deportations and have reduced releases, while allowing exceptions for unaccompanied children and trafficking victims. Advocates for immigrants slammed the rule as mirroring measures put in place by Trump and said it is putting people with legitimate claims at risk. But the measures have had an impact. The number of people crossing illegally in July and August, after the rule went into effect, dropped to the lowest levels in four years.

Demand for Workers

Whether they cross the border undetected, turn themselves in and ask for asylum or are granted parole, migrants are drawn to our southern border by the opportunity to work. When businesses across the country were shuttered in early 2020 by the pandemic, border encounters briefly plummeted. In the recovery, American companies created more jobs than there were unemployed people to fill them.

“There’s the elephant in the room: There’s just a lot of jobs, and people want to come,” said Dany Bahar, an economist at the Washington-based Center for Global Development who has researched border crossings and labor market tightness. He said that as the U.S. population ages, the need for workers from elsewhere is only going to grow. “I haven’t seen any politician talk about this, neither Democrats or Republicans.”

Only a limited number of temporary visas and green cards are made available each year for those wanting to migrate to the U.S. legally for work, while refugee admissions — which can lead to U.S. citizenship — are also capped. “Those numbers are ridiculous when considered alongside the size of our economy and U.S. workforce,” said Leon Rodriguez, who directed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Obama administration.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, said the unemployment rate — which has remained low despite the increase in recent immigrant arrivals — did not account for the millions of disaffected and disabled American workers who had dropped out of the labor force because they couldn’t compete with migrants who were willing to accept “below-the-table wages.”

But what Vance didn’t say was that Republicans and conservative groups have opposed efforts to significantly raise the federal minimum wage. Meanwhile both campaigns offer many more proposals for expanding border security than they do realistic ones to address our country’s dependence on migrant labor. Nor do they talk about plans for cracking down on employers who exploit immigrant workers.

In Houma, Louisiana, a shipbuilding company with millions in federal contracts embodies the debate. Campaign finance records indicate that the company’s chief was giving tens of thousands of dollars in contributions to politicians who call for shutting down illegal immigration even as the shipbuilder struggled to deal with a nationwide shortage of welders. Through a contractor, it employed a young, undocumented man from Guatemala, according to his family, to do the dangerous work of helping to build one of the country’s most sophisticated ships. After he died on the job, the worker’s family said, the company gave them nothing, nor is it required by law.

The company did not respond to requests for comment.

Hardening Attitudes

Americans’ Views on Whether Immigration Should Decrease, Increase or Stay the Same

Going into this election, recent Gallup polls have shown that across party lines, a growing number of Democrats, Republicans and independents believe immigration levels should be decreased. Another recent poll found a majority of Americans support some form of mass deportation.

Mike Madrid, a Republican pollster, said immigration is an emotional issue for voters rather than a rational one. He said it “literally defines who we are as a people,” adding, “It’s how we perceive the world through our racial and national identity and, at the same time, plays to our worst fears as human beings when people who are not like us end up in our neighborhoods and communities.”

It’s no surprise that the findings of those polls are reflected in the presidential campaigns. Just like he did when he ran against Hillary Clinton, Trump makes every effort to keep the issue high on voters’ minds, resorting to nativist rhetoric when talking about immigrants and their impact on the country. The Biden administration has imposed restrictions on asylum much like Trump’s, and Harris makes clear that she will embrace them. At every opportunity that she has to speak about the issue, Harris promises that if she’s elected president she will push for the passage of a bipartisan border deal that includes enforcement provisions demanded by Republicans.

It’s unclear whether she’d be successful. Congress hasn’t passed a comprehensive immigration reform package in decades, and Republicans aren’t likely to give Harris such an important political victory.

Trump’s sweeping campaign promises revolve largely around using executive authority to “seal the border” and forcibly remove masses of undocumented immigrants from the country. It’s highly likely that those actions would be challenged in court, much like many measures were in his first term.

What isn’t being talked about on the campaign trail is how all the changes in the past decade are affecting communities like Whitewater today. While we won’t have a complete picture of the impact of the post-pandemic spike in border crossings until next year, census data shows that — even with all the people who crossed the border in the first years of the Biden administration — the foreign-born share of the U.S. population only increased from 13.7% in 2019 to 14.3% in 2023.

The chief of police in Whitewater wasn’t asking for the border to shut down, or for all the Nicaraguans who worked in local factories to be deported. But with so many new Nicaraguan drivers on the roads without licenses, he just hoped the federal government might kick in some money so he could hire more staff to help manage the added workload. His concerns are more typical of how people are experiencing the new effects of immigration today. And if you’re looking to make sense of the issue before you cast your ballot, then you need to hear from them.

About the Data

Total Southwest Border Encounters Chart

Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security data. Encounters include both U.S. Border Patrol arrests and Office of Field Operations apprehensions, which can result in release, detention or removal. Only includes full fiscal years.

Unapprehended Crossings Chart

Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimates of unapprehended crossing rates at the Southwest border. For 2022 and 2023, we used an unpublished government estimate.

Southwest Border Encounters by Nationality Chart

Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security data. Includes encounters by U.S. Border Patrol and Office of Field Operations. Only includes full fiscal year data.

Individual nationality charts are only U.S. Border Patrol arrests. Monthly data updated through June 2024.

Removals and Releases Chart

Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Only includes full fiscal year data, which was updated through June 2024.

Note: Removals include total deportations, expulsions and returns by U.S. Customs and Border Protection as counted by: Title 8 repatriations, Title 42 expulsions and Migrant Protection Protocols. Releases include: U.S. Border Patrol releases, Office of Field Operations paroles and transfers to Health and Human Services. Data does not include transfers to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention, which can result in deportation or release.

Data does not include other uncategorized outcomes, which are usually less than 1% of total encounters.

Data also does not include humanitarian parole programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, Afghans and Ukrainians, which are not counted in this CBP dataset.

Americans’ Views on Immigration Chart

Source: Gallup

Job Openings Over Time Chart

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Immigration Court Data and U.S. Census Data Analysis

For this story, ProPublica used immigration court records from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review and population figures from the U.S. Census Bureau to analyze how many Americans live in neighborhoods that saw a significant number of new arrivals when compared with their populations. We relied on address information listed on about 4 million immigration court cases initiated since the start of 2021 for nondetained migrants. We did not screen cases out based on their charge or the result of the case, if they reached one (though we examined those in checking our work). Note that migrants entering under humanitarian parole programs and those who successfully evaded border officials likely do not appear in the court data unless they later encountered law enforcement or were placed in immigration proceedings for other reasons. Migrants could also have moved without updating their addresses. For overall population figures, we relied on the 2020 decennial census, while for foreign-born population figures, we relied on the 2019 5-year American Communities Survey. We compared the court data to the population at several geographies: census ZIP code tabulation areas, counties and — in the case of New York — cities.

Graphics, design and development by Lucas Waldron, Zisiga Mukulu and Lena Groeger. Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel contributed reporting.

by Jennifer Smith Richards and Megan O’Matz

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.

One by one, Catholic dioceses in key presidential swing states are putting out unusual statements: Newspapers whose titles include the word Catholic that are showing up in people’s mailboxes aren’t what they seem and aren’t connected to the church.

With a classic typeface and traditional newspaper design, the mass-mailed Catholic Tribune newspapers carry signposts of legitimacy. But most of the articles in the papers are inflammatory and overtly partisan, focusing on culture-war issues that resonate with conservative voters.

A headline in the Wisconsin Catholic Tribune, and repurposed in other states’ versions, provocatively asks, “How many ‘sex change’ mutilation surgeries occurred on Wisconsin kids?” Another: “Haitian illegal aliens in America: What are Harris supporters saying?”

At the same time, they undermine Vice President Kamala Harris and prop up former President Donald Trump by, for instance, reminding readers on the front page that anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — whose father and uncle were among the most prominent Catholics in the country — has endorsed Trump.

Dioceses and parishes in Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin have issued warnings about the publications. “It gives the impression that the Diocese of Grand Rapids or the Catholic Church is behind this newspaper,” diocese spokesperson Annalise Laumeyer said of the Michigan Catholic Tribune.

She reached out to local media to flag parishioners so they won’t be misled. And because of the clearly partisan content, non-Catholics might be left with an impression of the Catholic Church that is “worrisome,” she said.

The papers, which have also appeared in Arizona and Pennsylvania, are what academics call “pink slime.” The name comes from a filler in processed meat — or a product that is not entirely what it seems.

Using tax documents and business filings, ProPublica traced the papers to a Chicago-based publishing network led by former TV reporter Brian Timpone. His enterprises, including Metric Media, are known among researchers for peddling misinformation and slanted coverage. The network has received money from right-wing super PACs funded by conservative billionaire Richard Uihlein, founder of the mammoth shipping supply company Uline.

The Catholic Church does not endorse candidates or call for their defeat but does speak out on moral issues and participates in debates over public policies. Many dioceses publish newspapers, but they are not partisan.

In distancing itself from the Michigan Catholic Tribune, the Archdiocese of Detroit noted that tax-exempt churches are not permitted under the Internal Revenue Code to be involved in partisan politics. The Archdiocese of Milwaukee directed Catholics to a Wisconsin Catholic Conference document setting out guidelines for church involvement in electoral politics.

Jason Bourget, a Catholic in the Diocese of La Crosse, Wisconsin, received a copy of the Wisconsin Catholic Tribune in the mail and immediately thought it was suspicious. He had never asked to receive the paper or paid to subscribe.

“I put it with all the other political ads, right in the garbage,” he said.

A portion of the front page of the Wisconsin Catholic Tribune’s October 2024 issue. The return address in Chicago matches the business mailing address of companies within the Metric Media network.

Similar papers were mailed to swing-state residents ahead of the 2020 and 2022 election cycles. They’ve been spotted in past elections in Arizona and Iowa, too. There are Catholic Tribune websites registered for all 50 states, plus one national version, but most don’t appear to have published anything for months, if ever. It’s unclear how many papers have been mailed this year.

Timpone did not respond to requests for comment or to questions from ProPublica.

In an era of prolific “pink slime” sites, sophisticated, AI-concocted fakes and outlandish conspiracy theories engulfing social media, the papers are a throwback to a low-tech disinformation tactic.

But they are not unusual in the Metric Media universe. ProPublica, in collaboration with the nonprofit news organization Floodlight and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, recently reported on a misinformation campaign against solar energy in Ohio aided by Metric Media that included distribution of a similar unfamiliar newspaper, the Ohio Energy Reporter. It has the same mailing address as the Catholic Tribune papers.

Metric Media and its sister companies operate more than 1,100 local news websites across the country. The return address for the Michigan and Wisconsin Catholic Tribunes matches the business mailing address of companies within the Metric Media network, ProPublica found.

Timpone, who lives in Illinois and has contributed to conservative campaigns and causes, leads Metric Media. His brother, Michael Timpone, also leads a media company at the address listed on the Catholic Tribune papers, and he led the Metric Media affiliate that published similar papers in previous election cycles. Michael Timpone also did not respond to a request for comment.

An analysis by ProPublica shows the stories in the Catholic newspapers also were published on websites operated by Metric Media. Nearly every story lacks a reporter byline, so it’s impossible to tell who authored them.

Metric Media’s sister companies were paid nearly $6.4 million in 2021 and 2022 by the nonprofit Restoration of America and its Restoration PAC, campaign finance and tax records show. Uihlein has donated about $125 million to Restoration PAC since 2020. Uihlein did not respond to questions from ProPublica or a request for comment.

Restoration also has funded CatholicVote, another nonprofit with a super PAC that operates on behalf of laity and not the church. It supports conservative political causes. Tax records show that CatholicVote in turn has paid companies in the Metric network about $827,000 since 2020.

In August, Restoration PAC sent $2.5 million to another right-wing PAC called Turnout for America, according to recent campaign finance filings. And then in September, Turnout for America paid CatholicVote $200,000 and one of Brian Timpone’s companies $250,000 for “media services.”

Officials at CatholicVote did not respond to questions for this story. The organization makes prominent appearances in Catholic Tribune stories. The paper circulating in Michigan includes three stories quoting Jacky Eubanks, cited as CatholicVote’s regional field director for the state. Eubanks ran unsuccessfully for the Michigan House in 2022 in a campaign calling for a ban on contraception and gay marriage. Trump endorsed her.

Eubanks told ProPublica she was not familiar with the Catholic Tribune newspapers and never spoke to a reporter for them. She said the quotes were ones that she gave to her employer, CatholicVote, including one in which she said “nothing good” could come from Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz being elected vice president. “My employer probably put it in some kind of press release, or email or text message,” she said.

A devout Catholic, Eubanks said her politics derive straight from her faith. “If the Catholic Church teaches it,” she said, “that’s my belief.”

The paper left some Catholic parishioners confused until church leadership issued statements.

“Thank you, I thought it was rather strange. Will be shredding it,” said one Facebook commenter in Reno, Nevada, responding to her parish’s confirmation that the Nevada Catholic Tribune wasn’t affiliated.

In other households, including non-Catholic ones, the papers provoked annoyance and ire.

Ingrid Fournier, a Lutheran, was perplexed when it arrived at her home.

“We live in no-man’s-land Michigan,” she said of their home in Branch, some 90 minutes northwest of Grand Rapids.

She reached out on Facebook to find out if anyone else in her circle had gotten a copy.

“It’s a pro-DJT Propaganda nightmare of pages,” she wrote. “I was offended on Every. Single. Page. Actually, every single article was wild.”

Some who received the papers have questioned why the Catholic Church has not been more forceful in denouncing lies and hateful rhetoric in the publication, which includes assertions that Democrats are responsible for the Trump assassination attempts. A full page seems intended to stoke hostility by purportedly quoting Harris supporters praising Haitians while referring to Midwesterners as “white trash” and “whiny lazy fentanyl addicts.”

A spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Detroit told ProPublica: “We don’t want to bring undue attention to the publication by discussing specific content, other than to reiterate that we do not endorse it.”

The fact that the Catholic Tribune mimics the appearance of a traditional newspaper means it may catch more attention than online “pink slime” outlets, said Ben Lyons, an assistant professor at the University of Utah who studies partisan misinformation. It is, in a way, “hacking credibility” by appearing to be a local news source tied to the Catholic Church, he said.

Online “pink slime” sites tend to reach few readers, Lyons said. Mailing the papers to homes makes it more likely they’ll be noticed, particularly by older voters. The tactic “could be potentially more influential than a lot of the random stuff we see floating around,” he said.

While most evangelical Christians are firmly in Trump’s corner, the Catholic vote is less bankable. In the 2020 presidential election, Catholic voters were about evenly divided: 49% backed Trump and 50% voted for Joe Biden, according to the Pew Research Center. It notes that 1 out of every 5 U.S. adults identifies as Catholic. Biden is the second Catholic president in U.S. history. The Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, converted to Catholicism five years ago.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s role as a Trump supporter is emphasized in the Catholic Tribunes. The end of a story in the Michigan edition notes: “His Catholic background and policy positions might motivate Catholic voters who are undecided or seeking candidates that reflect a”

The sentence ends abruptly, with no period, and the story never continues to another page.

by Justin Elliott, Robert Faturechi and Alex Mierjeski

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

An internal whistleblower complaint at Trump Media calls for CEO Devin Nunes to be fired, alleging he has “severely” mismanaged the company and opened it to “substantial risk of legal action” from regulators, according to a copy reviewed by ProPublica.

The letter also says that former President Donald Trump’s company is hiring “America Last” — alleging that Nunes imposed a directive to hire only foreign contractors at the expense of “American workers who are deeply committed to our mission.”

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

Trump’s promise to “stop outsourcing” and “punish” companies that send jobs abroad has been a centerpiece of his political career, including his current campaign for president.

The letter also accuses Nunes, a former Republican congressman, of hiring unqualified members of his inner circle and being dishonest with employees at the company, which runs the social media platform Truth Social.

ProPublica reported this month that several executives and staffers had been forced out of the company, and people involved with Trump Media believed the ousters were retaliation in the wake of a whistleblower complaint. The complaint has been the subject of intense interest among former employees, according to interviews and records of communications among former employees. Several people with knowledge of the company had told ProPublica the concerns revolve around alleged mismanagement by Nunes.

Get in Touch

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

No specific employee signed the letter that was reviewed by ProPublica. It claims to represent “over half” of the company’s staff, including “multiple department heads and C-level officers.” The copy reviewed by ProPublica has been circulating among people connected to the company, and it’s unclear whether there are any differences between it and the version recently submitted to Trump Media’s board.

The copy reviewed by ProPublica is addressed to the audit committee of the board and says it was submitted through the company’s anonymous whistleblower channel.

Trump Media declined to answer detailed questions about the whistleblower complaint or provide comment from the board. But the company’s lawyer in a letter accused ProPublica of writing another in a “series of hit pieces” and “once again basing it upon unreliable sources, attempting to paint a picture of internal turmoil.”

In a previous statement, the company’s lawyer said in a letter that Trump Media “strictly adheres to all laws and applicable regulations.”

Nunes and the Trump campaign did not respond to questions.

The whistleblower complaint paints a picture of turmoil and profound problems in the company at a time when Trump Media’s stock has soared nearly 150% in less than a month, pushing the company’s market value to roughly $6 billion. Even though Truth Social generates virtually no revenue, the company’s stock has attracted enormous interest from Trump fans and speculators.

The stock’s rally has generated a windfall, at least on paper, for Trump, whose majority ownership stake in the company is now worth more than $3 billion. (He recently said he has no plans to sell.)

Among the company’s board members are Trump’s son Don Jr. and two of his former cabinet members: Robert Lighthizer, the former U.S. trade representative, and Linda McMahon, who headed the Small Business Administration and is a major donor and current co-chair of Trump’s transition planning committee.

After the ProPublica story was published this month, an attorney representing Trump Media, Jason Greaves of Binnall Law Group, sent ProPublica a letter demanding an “immediate retraction.” The letter described the article as “false and defamatory” but provided no evidence showing anything in the story was inaccurate.

Following the whistleblower complaint to the board, the company enlisted an outside lawyer to investigate and interview staffers, a person with knowledge of the company had told ProPublica. It’s not clear what the result of that review was or whether it’s ongoing. Governance experts told ProPublica that company boards have a duty to address red flags that suggest corporate wrongdoing.

In perhaps the most serious charge, the letter alleges that Nunes’ “missteps have put us at substantial risk of legal action with our regulators, vendors, shareholders, and employees, and have already resulted in litigation.”

The letter does not give examples of what Nunes has done that could risk action by regulators.

The letter says that not only is Trump Media understaffed — with just “20 technical employees” — but that Nunes has blocked the hiring of Americans. LinkedIn profiles and an invoice obtained by ProPublica show about half a dozen people listed as based in the Balkans doing work for Trump Media, in tasks including software engineering and customer support.

The front page of Truth Social contains the tagline: “Proudly made in the United States of America. 🇺🇸”

The whistleblower letter portrays Nunes, who left a two-decade career as a California congressman in 2022 to become CEO of Trump Media, as ill-equipped to run a tech company.

“Mr. Nunes has consistently lied, targeted employees, and mishandled company resources by placing critical functions in the hands of unqualified members of his inner circle,” it says.

The letter doesn’t give examples of Nunes’ alleged lies or identify the members of his inner circle.

The tone of the letter is more in sorrow than in anger.

“We have approached this with patience, kindness, and grace, hoping for improvement, but the situation has only deteriorated,” the letter states, adding, “We remain fully committed to the mission of restoring and defending free speech on social media.”

Another concern in the letter is about money. Employees were pressured to sell their shares of the company at $20 before it went public, leaving them without a stake in the enterprise and costing them financially, according to the letter. The company’s stock was briefly trading at more than three times that price after it went public in March. After dipping as low as $12 in September, it closed this week above $29.

The letter includes a warning: If the board does not act, the problems could spill into public view and Trump Media could be gravely damaged.

“The more these internal failures — ranging from leadership mismanagement and broken promises to legal vulnerabilities — remain unaddressed, the more likely they are to leak out, likely triggering a PR crisis,” the letter says. “If these issues become public, they will severely tarnish Truth Social’s reputation, erode public trust, and draw negative media attention.”

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

by Abrahm Lustgarten

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Patrick Crusius worried that Texas — hot and dry and facing climate calamity — was being overrun by immigrants. For his entire life he’d watched as Allen, Texas, the upper-middle-class Dallas suburb where he grew up, more than doubled in size, with quick-built mansions and car-choked freeways. Crusius, 21 years old, with wavy dark brown hair, sparse stubble collecting on his round chin, was awkward and introverted. He spent eight hours a day on his computer. He learned to hate the influence of megacorporations and the culture of consuming cheap goods that he thought they fostered, and he detested the waste and pollution that came with it. He brooded over the dwindling supplies of clean water and that too many people were competing for too little of it. But more than anything he had come to hate Hispanic migrants, who had turned his overwhelmingly white town into a nearly-half ethnic one. He wanted to keep them out. “#BuildTheWall is the best way that @POTUS has worked to secure our country so far!” he tweeted in 2017. In a world of constraints and an environment under stress, why should he have to share with them?

Crusius bought a semiautomatic rifle online and 1,000 rounds of hollow-point 7.62 x 39 mm ammunition. On Aug. 3, 2019, he got into his gray Honda Civic and drove nearly 10 hours toward El Paso, Texas. Entering the city, he turned into the Cielo Vista Walmart Supercenter parking lot. By some accounts, he wanted a snack, but after briefly going into the store filled with Hispanic shoppers, he returned to his car, posted a vitriolic 2,400-word manifesto to the extremist social media site 8chan and got the gun. He shot 45 people, ultimately killing 23, eight of them Mexican citizens. “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” Crusius wrote. “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”

In his manifesto, which he titled “The Inconvenient Truth” — a seeming nod to Al Gore’s documentary about the climate crisis — he wrote that “water sheds around the country, especially in agricultural areas, are being depleted.” Americans would never change their habits of consumption, he asserted, but new immigrants would only consume more, rising to this country’s standard of living and expanding the net environmental burden on the world. “Urban sprawl creates inefficient cities which unnecessarily destroys millions of acres of land,” he continued. “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”

I arrived at the Cielo Vista Walmart three weeks later to find flowers and pictures and memorials adorning a quarter-mile chain-link fence erected around the store’s perimeter and a city still in shock. I had been investigating climate change as a new driver of both large-scale migration around the world and of potential conflict. Traveling through the mountains of Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico, I heard accounts of migrants suffering shortages of food and climate-driven despair that had forced them to move. Worldwide, the number of displaced people has been climbing alongside what appears to be the rising severity of disasters, and research suggests that by later this century as much as one-third of civilization — billions of people — could be facing the kind of heat and drought that had prohibited most human settlement for thousands of years. If humankind’s uncharted venture into the hottest and most unpredictably chaotic environment in history was to be marked by a new era of global migration, how would never-ending pressure on the U.S. border weigh on the politics and divisions of this country?

Crusius’ manifesto was striking because he considered the crushing squeeze of environmental degradation — the very changes that would be amplified by climate change — on communities, but from the opposite perspective. His fear that white Americans were being replaced by an army of invaders who must be repelled seemed to me symptoms of a reactive white supremacy, exacerbated by worries over scarcity brought on by the radically changing environment.

But there was something even more significant: For a generation, conservatives — not just the far right, which Crusius appeared to identify with — had propelled the notion that climate change was a hoax fabricated so the government could impose new restrictions on the economy and society. Yet Crusius hadn’t denied climate change at all. Instead, he seemed to claim its impacts were themselves arguments justifying his violence. I wanted to understand why and, by extension, what it said about the rise and threat of American extremism as the world warms.

After El Paso I began investigating how a border crisis, rising temperatures, disasters and the swirling political reactions to them were affecting the agendas and vigilante campaigns of the far right. I spoke with dozens of actors, militia leaders, secessionists, gun-rights advocates, immigration control activists and self-identified white nationalists. I reviewed more than 14,000 pages of letters and internal documents from the anti-immigration movement.

What I found suggested that Crusius’ grievances were neither isolated nor unique. Across the country, fear and tension about environmental threats were boiling beneath the surface. The people I spoke with largely said that climate change was real and urgent. In their hands it became a weapon to justify their agendas — or at least a useful tool to expand their movements. Some were struggling under the concussions of wildfires and drought. They believe that water and land are becoming scarcer, forcing them to hoard and defend those resources. And they hold onto a nostalgic view for the way American life was in the 1950s, when there were half as many people, and nearly 90% of them were white.

One thing stood out: The roots of their sentiments lay in concerns that the United States has become overpopulated. Almost everyone I spoke with placed the blame on immigrants, holding the view, as Crusius did, that dark-skinned people from the global south are surging northward to overwhelm white Christians, what’s become known as the “great replacement theory.” For many, this argument over population and immigration had become a battle over whether Americans want to live in a diverse society.

This fall, the great replacement theory and the immigration crisis at the border have vaulted to the top of many voters’ concerns. While violence and persecution and economic opportunity remain the primary drivers pushing migrants into the U.S., the evidence increasingly also points to climate change as a growing factor. Yet immigration is still largely seen as separate from the environmental stresses contributing to it, and scrutiny of the far right has largely missed its intertwining with the climate crisis.

The gaps hint that a critical flash point of America’s political impasse may be misunderstood. The intensifying economic and environmental pressures of the warming climate are now beginning to drive new wedges into old divisions. That flash point foretells an America becoming more polarized the hotter things get, more sharply divided between its rural and urban communities and more hateful and more dangerous. It suggests we’re entering an era of climate nationalism, where the right could be poised to reclaim climate change as an issue of its own. As Jared Taylor, the white supremacist and founder of the New Century Foundation, put it when we met this year, a new wave of “eco-supremacists” is emerging.

Crusius’ manifesto, though, wasn’t just evidence of that shift. His declarations were also eerily familiar. I realized I’d read them in the archives of one man — a man who died less than three weeks before Crusius’ crime but who, decades before, foresaw this collision of climate change and nativist fears coming and used it to set the country on its precarious course, creating the most powerful anti-immigrant organizations in the country today. It was through this history — and the story of this man, a Sierra Club environmentalist, a doctor, a father — that I suspected the clues to future strife in a hotter world might be found, because the conflicts unfolding now seemed to be the fruition of his work. The more I studied Crusius’ manifesto, the more I realized that I was also reading the imprints of a ghost, the ghost of John Tanton.

John Tanton grew up as an all-American farm boy in an almost mythologically quaint version of America. He was tall and brawny, with leafy brown hair. In a picture probably from the late 1940s he wears a flannel shirt tucked into trousers. He played football and baseball and was a top scorer on his district-champion basketball team and took his life lessons about the natural limits of the world from the challenges of managing crop rotations in the family fields near Saginaw Bay. Tanton gravitated to science — not to the fundamentalist Evangelical United Brethren Church of his mother — and eventually studied medicine. He met his wife, Mary Lou, in 1956, brunette and pretty, wearing bobby socks at a fraternity mixer at Michigan State.

John Tanton as a young man. His family moved to a farm in Michigan near Saginaw Bay in the 1940s, where he lived a classically quaint American life and said he learned his first lessons about ecological limits. (Via johntanton.org)

As Tanton aged, his face would square, his dark hair turning white. He often wore wire-rimmed glasses, and his jaw jutted forward, as if clenched. It was a hint of the sternness of the ideas that became his hallmark, if not his personality, which his friends described as gentle. In one interview a videographer follows him outside the home he moved to with his wife in the tiny northern Michigan town of Petoskey, where he had begun to practice as an eye surgeon. Tanton kindles a small fire of twigs inside a metal pitcher, while expounding for the camera about ecology and overpopulation. Then he gently squeezes a bellow, pouring smoke into the hives of honeybees in his garden. He took a similarly methodical approach to dismantling the notion that the United States should continue to be a beacon for immigrants.

Tanton wasn’t just a malignant force against immigration. Virtually unknown is that Tanton also had an early and lucid understanding that climate change would exacerbate the country’s immigration conundrum, and it ultimately framed his life’s work. In 1989, when climate politics was still fledgling, he warned that the effects of warming were going to prove explosive along America’s borders — and that, left unresolved, communities could disintegrate into violence. Global warming would “put strictures on the economic growth that has been the great social salve that has kept some groups, in some measure, from each other’s throats,” he told his close friend Otis Graham, the University of California, Santa Barbara, historian. “We’re entering a time when the pie is not going to enlarge as rapidly … a time when there is going to be heightened group conflict.”

Tanton received his medical degree from the University of Michigan and practiced as an ophthalmologist in Petoskey, Michigan. (Alan R. Kamuda/Detroit Free Press/Zuma)

Later, he declared outright that climate change, among other reasons, would require the United States to rethink its immigration policy. Deforestation and flooding in Bangladesh, the collapse of Black Sea fisheries, the desertification of sub-Saharan Africa and “a nearly endless list” of other issues, he said, would drive human migration. He imagined a future in which “resources and livable conditions are scarce. Scarcity is the rule, and requires a degree of self-interest. Population problems are beyond solution by migration. No habitable unclaimed lands remain.”

Tanton cultivated these views as patiently as he cultivated his garden. From the time he moved to remote Michigan, he brought the world to him, amassing thousands of books and corresponding with the savants who resonated the most — Garrett Hardin, the ecologist from University of California, Santa Barbara, and Richard Lamm, the environmentalist and three-term governor of Colorado, among them. They found him intellectually engaging, admired his provocative curiosity and became his friends. Some would visit Tanton, joining him on long walks in the wooded hills above the Lake Michigan shoreline and talking for hours. He organized salons. In many ways, nature became Tanton’s religion, and the mission to protect it consumed him. He co-founded one of the state’s first conservation organizations, the Little Traverse Conservancy. His friends describe him as a charismatic orator, who spoke softly and possessed wells of energy for the issues he cared about most.

Early on, the cause was reining in the world’s population — the United States’ population, in particular. Tanton began working with the group Zero Population Growth, which posited that stabilizing the number of people on the planet was the best way to save the environment, and became its national president. (With his wife, Tanton also started a local chapter of Planned Parenthood.) In 1968, Hardin wrote his essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which warned that population growth will outpace the gains of conservation as people overuse the planet’s resources. The same year, the Sierra Club helped publish the bestseller “The Population Bomb” by Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, a Stanford scientific researcher, which argued that saving the planet was a numbers game.

Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, a Stanford scientific researcher, published “The Population Bomb” in 1970, arguing that saving the planet was a numbers game.

Much of the American environmental movement shared this sense of urgency. The Union of Concerned Scientists, the National Wildlife Federation, Earth First and The Wilderness Society, among others, all published articles or ran campaigns against runaway population growth well into the late 1990s. But it was the Sierra Club, influenced by its first executive director, David Brower, that emerged as a leading proponent of the notion that the earth had a carrying capacity — that there was an optimum number for the planet’s population to be held at. Tanton, a long-standing member of the Sierra Club’s Michigan chapter, became the head of the organization’s national population committee.

Here’s where Tanton’s personal history becomes essential to understanding America’s recent resurgence of immigrant hate. Even as he built an environmental legacy, Tanton was privately thinking more and more not just about the size of the population but about how to preserve what he described as the distinctiveness of European people. In 1975, he wrote a paper titled “The Case for Passive Eugenics” and would later, in a letter to eugenicist Robert Graham, a millionaire businessman known for starting a sperm bank for geniuses, clarify his goals. “Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids?” he asked. “More troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less?”

Around this time, a fundamental demographic shift occurred: New births no longer exceeded deaths in the United States. The population should have begun to stabilize, except there was a new form of growth: immigration. The population, then at around 211 million, continued to expand, and many who at first worried for the carrying capacity of the planet became preoccupied with walling off the country and keeping the global population at bay. For Tanton, “population” became a euphemism for “immigration.” With time, “immigrant” would become a euphemism for “nonwhite.” Long before the great replacement theory became a dominant strain among mainstream conservatives — nearly 7 out of 10 Republicans have said the theory had merit — Tanton, while not using those words, began to define the term. We’ve been thinking so much about “how many” come to this country, he would write, it’s time to think about “who.”

When Tanton blended ecology with eugenics and immigration, he was digging up the two-century-old principles of Thomas Malthus, who first theorized that human population growth would lead to poverty and suffering. Tanton drew on the views of some of America’s most influential environmentalists. Sierra Club founder John Muir rhapsodized about the purity of wilderness, supporting the push to protect Yosemite’s lands from the “dirty” influence of the native tribes who inhabited it. In the early 1900s, the conservationist and anthropologist Madison Grant, who helped establish Glacier National Park and the Bronx Zoo, wrote pseudoscientific tomes about the coming extinction of white people. The Nazis used some of the same references, braiding environmental purity and racial purity. Hitler himself is said to have called Grant’s book, “The Passing of the Great Race,” about European racial superiority, “my bible.”

Tanton resurrected these sentiments and dressed them in liberal arguments about sustainability. It was an environmental appeal he crafted not just in earnest — which he certainly was — but also because he thought it was one of the strongest rationales that the United States should remain predominantly white.

All of this might have remained in the realm of intellectual exploit had Tanton not begun to formalize and evangelize his beliefs. Between 1979 and 1997, Tanton launched or helped create more than eight organizations aimed at curtailing immigration or preserving English-speaking culture, building an unparalleled modern force for shaping the debate about who should and should not be allowed into the United States. Among the most prominent is the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, which has since become one of the nation’s largest and most influential immigration control advocacy groups. In 1982, Tanton started U.S. Inc., an umbrella nonprofit created to fundraise for his initiatives. Three years later the Center for Immigration Studies was spun off from FAIR in the hope of creating a nonpartisan immigration think tank. Tanton also published and, for many years, edited The Social Contract, a magazine that served as a clearinghouse for his ideas.

Tanton co-founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform in 1979, launching what has become one of the nation’s largest and most influential groups that advocates for curtailing immigration. (Michigan Daily Digital Archives)

He diligently befriended Cordelia Scaife May, an heiress to Andrew Mellon’s fortunes who funded forest preservation across Pennsylvania and believed in curtailing population growth, endearing himself to her with gauzy appeals. “Dear Cordy,” he wrote to her. “We should foster diversity between nations, not within them.” She gave him hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then, after her death, her Colcom Foundation, named after the bleak and satirical novel “Cold Comfort Farm,” continued to donate to Tanton’s organizations — more than $150 million.

Tanton’s belief that mass immigration would supplant white America had one particular focus: He saw it as a threat to the country’s ecology and ultimately to the consensus among environmentalists about preserving the purity of that ecology. That’s why, he thought, the immigration fight had to be taken up inside the conservation movement itself, by what is viewed as America’s most prominent environmental organization, an organization that would have the moral authority to bring difficult messages to the public. “The Sierra Club may not want to touch the immigration issue,” he wrote in a 1986 memo. “But the immigration issue is going to touch the Sierra Club!”

On a spring morning in 2002, the Sierra Club’s leaders gathered at the historic Ralston White Retreat, tucked between towering redwood trees on the side of Mount Tamalpais, high above the San Francisco Bay. Carl Pope, the club’s longtime executive director, was present, as was Robert Cox, the club’s former president, who still served on the board. The board had just sworn in its newest members, including an astronomy professor from the University of California, Los Angeles, named Ben Zuckerman. With curly hair receding above his broad forehead and an energetic grin, Zuckerman was effectively Tanton’s Trojan horse.

Six years earlier, the club’s board had declared the club neutral on issues of immigration. To a sizable portion of members, the decision was an abomination, and it provoked a mutiny. A faction formed a splinter group called Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization, or SUSPS, and assembled a roster of notable supporters including the Harvard evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson. Tanton offered thousands of dollars to fund the group’s efforts, but it was Zuckerman who led the charge. In 1998, he and the SUSPS members pushed an initiative that would be put to a membership vote: Should the Sierra Club formally stand against immigration, because it was a stand against population growth and environmental decline? “They wanted to be able to say, ‘This is not just a conservative cause, this is a liberal cause as well,’” Pope told me.

The Sierra Club fractured under the weight of the debate. Sixty percent of the club’s members rejected the initiative, but tens of thousands of members voted for it, demonstrating the reach of Tanton’s worldview. Brower himself soon resigned from the Sierra Club board in protest over what he saw as its refusal to consider immigration’s effect on population growth.

One afternoon shortly after the vote, members of the splinter group gathered outside of San Francisco, hiking through the chaparrals of the San Bruno hills, and plotted what to do next. They recognized that the club’s direct democratic process — and its annual elections of three members of its 15-person board — was a vulnerability, and they assembled the first stages of a plan: a hostile takeover. It would take several years of quiet, painstaking work, and it would begin with Zuckerman’s ascent.

Zuckerman maintains that Tanton was not the mastermind behind the Sierra Club effort. But he worked closely with Tanton’s protégé Roy Beck and attended national gatherings of Tanton-affiliated groups. He even visited Tanton at his Michigan home. Through these years, Zuckerman was also the vice president of a separate Tanton-aligned organization called Californians for Population Stabilization, which had received funding from the Pioneer Fund, a far-right political group known for its support of eugenics.

That morning in Mill Valley in 2002 was the moment of Zuckerman’s success. Throughout his campaign, Cox told me, Zuckerman had downplayed his anti-immigration views, and he had succeeded in quieting his opponents. But once Zuckerman was sworn in, Cox said, he began pressing the immigration question again. “He hid his agenda,” Cox told me. Just weeks later — despite a new board policy forbidding him from advocating on immigration issues — Zuckerman railed against the club’s co-directors in an interview with the Los Angeles Times Magazine, saying they can’t “save species and wetlands and so on when there are a billion Americans.” Later that summer he led a discussion about population and the border at a board retreat in Michigan, and at the next board meeting, according to the minutes, he continued to press the issue, saying that “immigration drives us to higher fertility.”

Zuckerman, like others involved with the early argument that population growth was a threat to the environment, vehemently denied prejudice against immigrants and did not advocate violence. He maintains that his work always arose from a genuine concern that more people will place an unsustainable burden on the planet. “You should not stop doing the right thing for the right reasons because somebody else is doing the right thing for the wrong reasons,” he told me. Nonetheless, he found common cause with people who prioritized race and eugenics.

The following year more board members were elected who were sympathetic to the anti-immigration cause, and the SUSPS members found themselves within reach of the votes to command the organization. The plan was for Lamm, who was chair of FAIR’s advisory board, and Frank Morris, who was on the Center for Immigration Studies board, to run for seats in 2004, along with a Cornell University environmental scientist named David Pimentel, who had written extensively for The Social Contract.

The 2002-04 fight over the Sierra Club’s stance on immigration generated intense media coverage. (Mother Jones, Marin Independent Journal, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report and The Denver Post)

This was a period in which Tanton himself was veering in an increasingly extremist and overtly racist direction. He published an English translation of “The Camp of the Saints,” a French novel written by Jean Raspail. The plot centers on thousands of impoverished Indian farmers who commandeer a fleet and sail, dirty, uncivilized and desperate, to France, where a small resistance is all that stands in the way from their overrunning the country. It would become a treatise for the far right and help solidify the great replacement theory into popular discourse.

U.S. Inc. provided financial support for Peter Brimelow, a former Forbes journalist, to write “Alien Nation” — a book Tanton helped edit and that would go on to shape the white supremacy movement. Brimelow, who refers to himself as a civic nationalist, then launched a website devoted to discussions of racial identity, which he called VDare, after Virginia Dare, supposedly the first English baby to be born on American soil. Brimelow received a list of questions for this article but declined to comment.

Tanton was also drawing closer to Jared Taylor, whose writings about the superiority of white people had earned him a zealous following. Taylor had become a regular at Tanton’s salons, which were growing into an annual conference with dozens of prominent anti-immigration activists meeting at a Marriott hotel outside of Washington, D.C. Tanton admired Taylor’s 1992 book about the failure of affirmative action to fix race relations. When Taylor would later publish “White Identity,” warning that white people will be marginalized by other races if they do not defend themselves, Tanton would write to him: “You are saying a lot of things that need to be said.”

As the campaign for the votes of the Sierra Club’s 750,000 members grew more rancorous, Zuckerman sent board members an article from Brimelow’s VDare, about how Latinos were spreading disease and crime and that “Hispandering” politicians were encouraging it, Cox recalled. (Zuckerman acknowledged the article was from “a right-wing” site but told me he did not recall it being racist.) Cox, who had never heard of VDare, dove into the site, finding a trove of pseudoscientific articles on such subjects as measuring skull sizes and comparing Northern European and African head shapes to determine intelligence. He began recognizing connections: FAIR and the Center for Immigration Studies had links to Brimelow; Lamm chaired the advisory board of FAIR, and Morris sat on the board of the center. A letter the Sierra Club received from the Southern Poverty Law Center alerted him that they all had ties to Tanton. For the first time, Cox and Pope both saw that the internecine battle appeared coordinated. “It was like, ‘Oh my fucking God.’” Pope told me. “I mean it moved from a five-alarm fire to nuclear war.”

Old guard members of the board began to campaign against Tanton’s proxies. While the Southern Poverty Law Center publicly branded the takeover attempt as racist, news broke that a wealthy California investor, David Gelbaum, had pledged $100 million on the condition that the club never stand against immigration. The internal election spilled into public view, with an op-ed appearing in The New York Times, and 13 of the club’s past presidents wrote an open letter decrying the anti-immigrant candidates as bigots. Lamm and Pimentel are no longer alive. Morris, who is Black, called claims of racism preposterous and said it was a campaign of guilt by association. “They were trying to paint us with the Tanton stain,” he told me.

In a last-ditch effort, Tanton’s network began its own efforts to whip votes. In the fall of 2003, The Social Contract ran an ad encouraging its readers to join the Sierra Club so that they could help elect “leaders who will redirect this vital organization toward genuine environmental stewardship.” FAIR’s newsletter published the same ad. VDare encouraged its readers to “join the Sierra Club NOW and have your vote influence this debate. … The prize is enormous.”

It wasn’t enough. All three candidates lost — Lamm received just 13,000 votes — bringing an end to what Pope described as the first modern battle to bring white supremacy into mainstream America under the guise of environmentalism. It might have seemed an obscure, even parochial, battle, but America’s right wing was watching. For them, it was an epic loss, one that Ann Coulter, Tucker Carlson and others would still be mourning a decade later.

Having lost the backing of the Sierra Club, America’s anti-immigration movement turned more explicitly to climate change — and to one of Zuckerman’s Sierra Club colleagues, Leon Kolankiewicz, an environmental planner versed in sprawl and impact studies and a longtime proponent of the idea that the planet had a limited carrying capacity. Kolankiewicz took a job with Roy Beck, the Tanton protégé and former Washington editor of The Social Contract, who went on to found a slightly less strident “immigration reform” organization called NumbersUSA.

Kolankiewicz, for one, was fascinated by studies of the carbon legacy of families — the emerging notion that a person’s carbon footprint would multiply through generations and that the best way to reduce emissions was to have one less child. It got him thinking about the inverse: Could he quantify how much carbon increased with that extra child? If so, what was the difference between a new child born in the United States and someone arriving from abroad?

His answer helped the Tanton organizations reframe immigration squarely in global warming terms: Newcomers to the United States were making climate change worse, because as they increased their consumption here, their carbon emissions would increase, too.

It was a logical notion but shaky science. Other researchers cautioned that just because the country’s total emissions can be divided by the number of people inside its borders does not mean that each person contributes the same amount. In fact, America’s rich are responsible for an enormous proportion of the global emissions causing climate change, even as per capita emissions are rising in many other countries.

But the Tanton network pressed on anyway. In August 2008, the Center for Immigration Studies promoted Kolankiewicz’s research, publishing a joint study arguing that “immigration to the United States significantly increases world-wide CO2 emissions.” In a subsequent paper it argued that climate change was “the most important environmental challenge facing the world.” The reports began introducing the rhetoric of climate change straight into the heart of the far right’s vocabulary. Kolankiewicz told me he and Beck hoped to resurface issues of overpopulation and distinguish the fight against mass immigration from prejudice against immigrants. Both disavowed racism and violence.

But the movement seemed to be experimenting: What would happen if you took Tanton’s warnings about population and the climate and merged them with people’s fears of outsiders and paranoia about the limits of resources? What would happen if you truly turned the immigration debate into an environmental debate?

In February 2010, as Republicans gathered for the prestigious annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., the Center for Immigration Studies’ longtime executive director, Mark Krikorian, sat on a panel about immigration reform in front of a packed audience, along with Robert Rector from the Heritage Foundation and Steve King, the lightning-rod congressman from Iowa. Near the end of the session someone in the audience asked why the center was publishing reports about climate change if it was a hoax?

Krikorian, who declined to be interviewed for this story, offered the group a simple yet telling answer: The climate issue was a potent opportunity. He saw it as a wedge that could scare — and divide — the American left on immigration. The suggestion was that by doing so the Center for Immigration Studies would give liberals reason to support hard-line immigration controls and perhaps also offer conservatives an avenue to fold global warming into their narratives of a country under assault.

By then, the groups that Tanton had helped found had become larger than Tanton, who was in his mid-70s and diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and they had achieved mainstream power. FAIR created a political action committee and channeled money to up-and-coming Republicans. It hired Kellyanne Conway’s Washington firm, The Polling Company, to gauge nationwide sentiment about immigrants. NumbersUSA ran a grassroots robo-fax campaign that helped kill George W. Bush’s bipartisan immigration overhaul. FAIR’s affiliate legal organization worked to draft a bill in Arizona that gave law enforcement the right to stop people for proof of citizenship. In 2010, the Center for Immigration Studies helped torpedo the DREAM Act, forestalling the possibility that Congress might protect young people brought to the United States as children. And the groups gained a certain legitimacy — they were cited hundreds of times by six of the largest U.S. news outlets, including The New York Times.

All these efforts helped launch Tanton’s words and arguments into the flea market of American ideas. Now, politicians, newscasters, podcast hosts and white nationalists were picking up his ideas about pollution and scarcity, immigration and global warming, that fit their agendas, swirling them together with historical tropes about ecology and racist thought and conspiracy theories, not sure, necessarily, where the ideas had come from but eager to trade on their currency.

Some of those ideas could be found in the right-wing website Breitbart News, where Stephen Miller, the principal architect of President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, flooded editors with research from the Center for Immigration Studies. The site posted dozens of articles about climate-driven disasters each year, and while it often denied warming, it was full of stories about resource scarcity and food shortages and migrants, too, all published near numerous stories about the great replacement theory.

Tanton’s ideas could also be found in the proclamations of the prominent “alt-right” white nationalist leader Richard Spencer. In 2014, three years before he led the torchlight march at the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Spencer tweeted, “Is not population control and reduction the obvious solution to the ravages of climate change?” In his Charlottesville manifesto, he wrote, “We have the potential to become nature’s steward or its destroyer.” When I spoke with Spencer recently, his views had only firmed. “If we bring everyone on the planet into an American lifestyle,” he said, “there first off might not be much planet left, and at the very least, the kind of degradation that might entail would be tremendous and horrifying.”

And Tanton’s ideas could be heard on Fox News. “The left used to care about the environment, the land, the water, the animals,” Tucker Carlson said on his show on Dec. 17, 2018. “They understood that America is beautiful because it is open and uncrowded. Not so long ago, environmentalists opposed mass immigration. They knew what the costs were. They still know. But they don’t care.” He also talked about the great replacement theory on at least 400 shows, often citing FAIR reports and hosting Center for Immigration Studies staff as guests. Ann Coulter, lamenting the Sierra Club’s rejection of immigration issues, wrote an article headlined “Your Choice — A Green America Or A Brown America” for VDare in advance of Earth Day in 2017 and then tweeted that “I’m fine with pretending to believe in global warming if we can save our language, culture & borders.” She later told Fox’s Jeanine Pirro that “you can shoot invaders.”

Half a world away, Brenton Tarrant had been absorbing similar ideas and decided to act on them. On March 15, 2019, inspired in part by a 2011 shooting in Norway and frustrated by what he described as the overtaking of white people by immigrants in New Zealand, Tarrant entered two mosques in the city of Christchurch and shot 91 people, killing 51 of them. There is no evidence that Tarrant has read or even heard of Tanton, but in his 74-page manifesto, which he titled “The Great Replacement,” he was drawing on nearly identical notions.

He pointed to “White Genocide.” He described climate change and immigration as parts of the same problem and decried “rampant urbanization and industrialization, ever expanding cities and shrinking forests, a complete removal of man from nature.” To Tarrant, conserving the purity of lands was indistinguishable from conserving white European ideals and beliefs. And he was well aware of the particular pressures at the United States border. “When the white population of the USA realizes the truth of the situation, war will erupt,” he wrote. “Soon the replacement of the whites within Texas will hit its apogee.”

Patrick Crusius read Tarrant’s words and felt similarly. His attack in El Paso unfolded four and a half months later. In his manifesto he pointed to many of those same reasons, and they were familiar. John Tanton had said them, and the reasoning had been echoed by Leon Kolankiewicz and Roy Beck and NumbersUSA and Tanton’s other organizations. They were endorsed again the week after the massacre, as if they were not shocking but the logical evolution of four decades of messaging that, until that terrible August day, had failed to land. In an interview with The Washington Post, Mark Krikorian, the Center for Immigration Studies’ executive director, denounced Crusius’ killings, but he described his manifesto as “remarkably well-written for a 21-year-old loner.”

“If you have a guy who is going to be angry about immigration, have a killer offering reasons for shooting up immigrants,” he asked, “how could he not use reasons that have already been articulated by legitimate sources?”

Roy Beck, a longtime friend and protégé of Tanton’s, founded the prominent immigration control group NumbersUSA. (Matt Eich, special to ProPublica)

In January, I drove through an affluent community of country roads, hobby farms and sprawling hilly yards outside of Fairfax, Virginia, to the home of Jared Taylor. For three decades Taylor had worked to advance eugenicist ideas. He was both an old associate of Tanton’s and a leading proponent of the great replacement theory. Several years ago, when climate change was beginning to emerge in the vernacular of the extreme right, Taylor’s publications began to reflect his own thoughts on the implications of the warming world.

He wrote the foreword to a dystopian French climate-focused analysis called “Convergence of Catastrophes,” which predicts an era of unprecedented migration and political destabilization. In 2017, his magazine, American Renaissance, under an anonymous byline, ran an article titled “What Does it Mean for Whites if Climate Change is Real?” which asked, “Are we preparing for agricultural disruption in some areas and new opportunities in others? Do we have the legal framework to deal with ‘climate refugees’?” And the magazine had conducted a survey of 578 white Americans, finding that 38% of those who identified as “racial conservatives” said there was ample scientific evidence of climate change — a leap beyond the roughly 23% of Republicans who say they believe it is a threat.

If Tanton’s efforts had shaped the present — turning concerns about overpopulation and climate change into a proxy battle for defending a white majority on an imperiled continent — I hoped that Taylor might help me understand where this battle was headed.

Taylor is 73 years old and a graduate of Yale. He is fluent in French and Japanese. He has a monkish buzz cut, a mustache and a healthy stubble. He greeted me wearing gray felt slippers, green pants and a rust-colored down vest at the door of the large brick home that he had lived in for the past 22 years. Taylor had agreed to be interviewed, but he had some conditions: I could not describe the interior of his home, the books on his shelves, the pictures on his walls. He appeared relaxed, wrapping a white scarf around his neck and reclining with legs crossed and a hot mug of coffee.

“The climate is certainly changing,” he had told me when we’d first arranged to meet, and “it will certainly drive immigration.” Now, in person, he picked up where he had left off. He framed his highest priority — the preservation of the white race — in environmental, even ecological, terms. Immigration is a battle for habitat and species. White people are an endangered breed, fighting to delay their extinction. The great replacement theory is a statistical fact, being cemented into reality. Just look at the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Climate change, he added, “is just going to add to whatever pressures we already have.”

Then he offered a warning: What happened with Crusius was going to happen again and again. “I’m surprised they’re not more of these guys,” he said. Like Krikorian, Taylor described Crusius’ actions as “fantastically stupid.” But he can explain them. Crusius was like all the great preservationists “maintaining what is and what is beautiful for the benefit of future generations.” In this way, he was also like Tanton, Taylor said in a subsequent conversation, who found his own “quasi-racial consciousness” through his environmental enlightenment.

“This kind of completely unhinged, brutal and horrible reaction is inevitable in the conditions under which we live,” he said. The status quo has failed to protect Crusius’ community, and the logical response was vigilantism. That’s how Crusius must have felt. And the terrorists that came after him — like Payton Gendron, the self-declared “eco-fascist” who killed 10 Black shoppers in a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York, in 2022 and described his crime as a pursuit of “green nationalism.” And the terrorists who Taylor believes are still to come. They’re “a particularly virulent, violent form of white preservationists,” he said.

Jared Taylor, founder of the New Century Foundation and publisher of the magazine American Renaissance, argues for the preservation and separation of white Americans. (Matt Eich, special to ProPublica)

As we spoke, I thought about the surging activity I’d been seeing online. “The planet can be saved if non-Whites return to their countries, and if we can reduce their populations,” wrote Stephenm85 in 2020, on Stormfront, one of the largest and most influential global social media and publishing sites for Nazi sympathizers. “Let the savage non-Europeans die out without food and allow the intelligent non-Europeans [to] be close to each other away from us.” A 2022 study examining eco-fascist sentiments on Stormfront identified more than 10,000 similar comments across hundreds of threads, some of which had been viewed more than 4 million times. The research, published in the journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, found that in 70% of the posts deemed to be the most substantive, the writers “accepted or exploited climate change.”

Actual antagonistic and intimidating shows of force were increasing, too, if subtly. In July 2020, an alt-right group called the New Jersey European Heritage Association began tacking up posters in Pennsylvania warning that immigration would turn the first world into “the third”; the former was pictured as bucolic green hills, the latter as a smog-choked traffic jam. In 2023, White Lives Matter Network marched in Manlius, New York, holding pickets that read “Save the Swans, End Immigration.” This past February, the Wyoming Active Club, a white supremacist organization, plastered stickers around Campbell County in the northeast part of the state that pictured mountain forests and said, “Preserve Nature, End Immigration.” They were all part of what the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center described as a marked uptick in white supremacist activity, a small but growing portion of which is environmentally focused.

But however menacing, these were still just protests, and if Taylor was right about an approaching era of violence — something more widespread and systemic than the lone-wolf terrorism of a wayward man like Crusius — it was still unclear what the actual danger looked like. None of the academic and security experts I spoke with knew how to answer this. The rising threat is theoretical, until it isn’t.

I’d come across a guy named Mike Mahoney, a 20-something rising star in white nationalist circles who worked for Breitbart News and accompanied Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart’s firebrand tech editor, on his speaking tours. In 2019, going by his byline of “Mike Ma,” he self-published a novel called “Harassment Architecture,” which glorifies those lone-wolf acts of terror, picking up on strains of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who expressed fears about the future “greenhouse effect” and disavowed modernity and its consumerist culture.

The book drew a following, and Mahoney launched the “Pine Tree Party,” using the same symbol of a pine tree derived from the Christian Nationalist banner “An Appeal to Heaven” that could be seen during the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol and would later be flown outside the vacation home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. The Pine Tree Party’s mission is environmental, broad and violent. “We will teach ourselves to respect and rely on nature,” someone who identified himself as Mahoney wrote on Telegram. “We will beat up anime kids. … We will bring the American family back to the woods, back to self-sufficiency. … We will oust illegal immigrants with zero mercy.”

The national security journal Homeland Security Today warned that the Pine Tree Party “is quickly accelerating, recruiting, and pushing the ideological bounds to promote infrastructure damage and violence now directly.” Attempts to reach Mahoney by phone and through social media were not successful. As recently as May, a Telegram account ostensibly linked to the party posted a video calling for the violent toppling of electrical towers and the destruction of power grids.

The ideas represented an evolution. They were virulent and undeniably scary. Graham Macklin, a researcher at the Center for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo, has written that what connects these far-right groups is the view that liberals are disconnected from “wild nature” — a Kaczynski term. This is part of an emerging eco-fascist belief, he said, that the right must now take stewardship of the environment.

This is where Macklin and other counterterrorism experts warn the United States could be headed: The harsher and more challenging the environment gets and the more destructive and expensive the impacts become, the more climate change may be seized as the dominion of the right. Denialism is slowly being replaced by something more pragmatic — and a lot closer to what Taylor had described as eco-supremacy.

Put another way, Taylor explained to me, today’s acceptance of climate change on the far right — and, inevitably, he said, among conservatives writ large — is ushering in a more clear-eyed view of what lies ahead for America, one that accepts the possibility, even the necessity, of sacrifice. Consider those sacrifices a compromise in the name of self-preservation, he said. But the people most strident about protecting this version of America — the showered-with-abundance and historically white version — they will not accept sacrifices only to give away what is gained to outsiders, he told me.

In that way, the determination to keep outsiders from entering the country is, in fact, a truer and, Taylor offers, renewed form of environmentalism. That was, after all, Crusius’ original gambit. “Many people think that the fight for America is already lost,” Crusius wrote. “They couldn’t be more wrong. This is just the beginning.”

Clarification, Oct. 21, 2024: This article has been updated to clarify that Patrick Crusius used 7.62 x 39 mm ammunition.

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

Correction

Oct. 21, 2024: This story originally misstated the length of Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto. It was 74 pages, not 239.

by Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico

This article was produced in partnership with Source New Mexico, which was a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2023. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Victims of New Mexico’s biggest wildfire could receive hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government for the hardship they endured when the blaze roared across their land in 2022 after the U.S. Forest Service accidentally ignited it.

U.S. District Judge James Browning said at the end of a hearing in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Tuesday that he was “leaning” toward ruling for fire victims who sued the Federal Emergency Management Agency last year for limiting the types of damages it would pay for. Browning said he would issue a ruling as soon as possible, but likely not until next month.

The lawsuit centers on FEMA’s determination that a federal law allows it to pay victims for economic losses but not emotional harm, which Source New Mexico and ProPublica reported on in January. Lawyers for fire victims said some people who owned little of value would not get enough money to rebuild unless FEMA paid for emotional harm.

If Browning does side with victims, FEMA could be required to compensate them for the stress of fleeing the fire, the distress they felt as it burned their trees and the toll of losing their home and possessions — what victims’ lawyers describe in legal filings as “annoyance, discomfort and inconvenience.”

A few could get sizable payments for pain and suffering resulting from injuries, in addition to payments for the injuries themselves. So far, the only recourse for people who were injured or for the families of those who died in the fire or ensuing floods has been to sue the federal government — a long, uncertain process. One suit filed on behalf of three people who died in post-fire flooding is pending.

Gerald Singleton, whose San Diego-based firm is representing about 1,000 victims of the fire, said in an interview after the hearing that emotional harm losses could amount to about $400 million. Such payments could result in a more equitable distribution of funds than the current system, he said, because renters and people with little to their name would receive money beyond the dollar value of their possessions.

If victims win, it’s not clear how quickly they could be paid. Lawyers representing FEMA said the agency would have to go through the formal rulemaking process to allow for payments for emotional damages. That could take months.

The money would come out of a nearly $4 billion fund Congress established in September 2022 to, as President Joe Biden put it, “fully compensate” victims of the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire. It was triggered by two controlled burns that escaped to scorch a 534-square-mile area and destroy several hundred homes.

As of Friday, FEMA’s Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Claims Office has paid $1.5 billion to households, nonprofits, businesses and local and tribal governments.

Jay Mitchell, director of the claims office, watched the hearing Tuesday. In a brief interview afterward, Mitchell suggested it could be challenging and costly to dole out payments for emotional distress.

He said the ruling could open the door to a flood of claims seeking damages for “nuisance” or “trespass” from people whose properties were touched by wildfire smoke. “Smoke goes where it goes,” he said as he walked into a meeting with lawyers representing FEMA.

FEMA declined to comment further, citing the pending lawsuit, and encouraged anyone affected by the fire to file a claim by Dec. 20.

The crux of the legal fight is FEMA’s interpretation of the Hermits Peak-Calf Calf Canyon Fire Assistance Act, written and sponsored by U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez and U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján, Democrats from New Mexico. Plaintiffs argue that the agency improperly denied what are called “noneconomic damages” when it finalized the rules for how the $4 billion fund would be paid out. Those rules limited compensation to economic damages, those that come with a price tag: things like cars, homes, business expenses and cattle.

For months, lawyers for FEMA and four firms representing victims have exchanged briefs over what federal lawmakers intended when they wrote the bill. In Tuesday’s hearing, Browning questioned lawyers for both sides about that language.

For example, the law says payments “shall be limited to actual compensatory damages.” Victims’ lawyers argued, with numerous citations in New Mexico law and elsewhere, that “actual compensatory damages” historically means both economic and noneconomic damages. Lawyers representing FEMA interpreted the clause to mean that Congress was imposing a limitation: Only economic damages were allowed. Browning said he agreed with lawyers for the victims. “Plaintiffs have a better reading,” he said.

The dispute over intangible losses from the wildfire centers on the wording of a federal law. Officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency have pointed to language saying payments must be “limited to actual compensatory damages” (yellow highlighting). Victims’ lawyers and New Mexico officials point to language saying New Mexico law should apply and note that the law doesn’t exclude intangible losses (red highlighting). (Obtained by Source New Mexico and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

At the beginning of Tuesday’s hearing, Browning said he’d already made up his mind on one issue: He agreed that New Mexico law does allow noneconomic damages to be paid to victims in a scenario like the fire. That’s important because the federal law requires damages to be calculated in accordance with state law.

He cited an opinion issued this year from the New Mexico attorney general that concluded emotional hardship payments are allowed for victims of “nuisance and trespass.” Two state lawmakers requested that opinion shortly after Source and ProPublica reported on the issue.

Browning said he would try to rule quickly, citing previous delays in getting money to victims. “I don’t live under a rock,” he said. “I know that there has been a lot of criticism of how slow the process was.”

by Andy Kroll, ProPublica; Phoebe Petrovic, Wisconsin Watch; and Nick Surgey, Documented

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

Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance’s appearance at a far-right Christian revival tour last month may have broken tax and election laws, experts say.

On Sept. 28, Vance held an official campaign event in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, in partnership with the Courage Tour, a series of swing-state rallies hosted by a pro-Trump Christian influencer that combine prayer, public speakers, tutorials on how to become a poll worker and get-out-the-vote programming.

Ziklag, a secretive organization of wealthy Christians, funds the Courage Tour, according to previously unreported documents obtained by ProPublica and Documented. A private donor video produced by Ziklag said the group intended to spend $700,000 in 2024 to mobilize Christian voters by funding “targeted rallies in swing states” led by Lance Wallnau, the pro-Trump influencer.

Even before the Vance event, ProPublica previously reported that tax experts believed Ziklag’s 2024 election-related efforts could be in violation of tax law. The Vance event, they said, raised even more red flags about whether a tax-exempt charity had improperly benefited the Trump-Vance campaign.

According to Texas corporation records, the Courage Tour is a project of Lance Wallnau Ministries Inc., a 501(c)(3) charity led by Wallnau. There have been five Courage Tour events this year, and Vance is the only top-of-the-ticket candidate to appear at any of them.

Wallnau has said that Vice President Kamala Harris is possessed by “the spirit of Jezebel” and practices “witchcraft.” As ProPublica reported, Wallnau is also an adviser to Ziklag, whose long-term goal is to help conservative Christians “take dominion” over the most important areas of American society, such as education, government and entertainment.

The Vance campaign portion was tucked in between Courage Tour events, and organizers took pains to say that Wallnau’s podcast hosted the hourlong segment, not the Courage Tour. Two signs near the stage said Wallnau’s podcast was hosting Vance. And during Vance’s conversation with a local pastor, the Courage Tour’s logo was replaced by the Trump-Vance logo on the screen.

An email sent by the Courage Tour to prospective attendees promoted the rally and Vance’s appearance as distinct events but advertised them side by side:

An email promoted the Courage Tour and the town hall with Vance side by side. (Obtained and redacted by ProPublica)

But the lines between those events blurred in a way that tax-law experts said could create legal problems for Wallnau, the Courage Tour and Ziklag. The appearance took place at the same venue, on the same stage and with the same audience as the rest of the Courage Tour. That email to people who might attend assured them that they could remain in their same seats to watch Vance and that afterward, “We will seamlessly return to the Courage Tour programming.”

The Trump-Vance campaign promoted the event as “part of the Courage Tour” and said Vance’s remarks would take place “during the Courage Tour.” And although the appearance included a discussion of addiction and homelessness, Vance criticized President Joe Biden in his remarks and urged audience members to vote and get others to vote as well in November.

Later in the day, Wallnau took the stage and asked for donations from the crowd. As he did, he spoke of Vance’s appearance as if it were part of the Courage Tour. “People have been coming up to us, my staff, and saying we want to help you out, what can we do, how do we do this? I want you to know when we do a Courage Tour, which will be back in the area, when we’re in different parts of the country,” he said. Asking for a show of hands, Wallnau added: “How many of you would like to at least be knowing when we’re there? Who’s with us on the team? If we have another JD Vance or Donald Trump or somebody?”

An employee of Wallnau’s, Mercedes Sparks, peeked out from behind a curtain. “I just wanted to clarify: You said they came to the Courage Tour,” Sparks said. “They didn’t. For legal reasons, the podcast hosted that. It was very separate. I don’t need the IRS coming my way.”

Despite the disclaimers, Vance’s campaign appearance at the Courage Tour raises legal red flags for several reasons, according to experts in tax and election law.

Both Lance Wallnau Ministries and Ziklag are 501(c)(3) charities, the same legal designation as the Boys & Girls Club or the United Way. People who donate to charities like these can deduct their gift on their annual taxes. But under the law, such charities are “absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office,” according to the IRS.

Internal Ziklag records lay out how the Courage Tour could influence the 2024 election. “Our plan,” one private video states, “is to mobilize grassroots support in seven key swing states through large-scale rallies, each anticipated to attract between 5,000 and 15,000 participants. These ‘Fire and Glory’ rallies will primarily target counties critical to the 2024 election outcome.” Wallnau said he later changed the name of his swing-state tour from Fire and Glory to the Courage Tour, saying the original name “sounds like a Pentecostal rally.”

Four nonpartisan tax experts told ProPublica and Documented that a political campaign event hosted by one charitable group, which is in turn funded by another charitable group, could run afoul of the ban on direct or indirect campaign intervention by a charitable organization. They added that Wallnau’s attempt to carve out Vance’s appearance may not, in the eyes of the IRS, be sufficient to avoid creating tax-law problems.

“Here, the [Trump] campaign is getting the people in their seats, who have come to the c-3’s event,” Ellen Aprill, an expert on political activities by charitable groups and a retired law professor at Loyola Law School, wrote in an email. “I would say this is over the line into campaign intervention but that it is a close call — and that exempt organization lawyers generally advise clients NOT to get too close to the line!”

Roger Colinvaux, a professor at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law, said that regulators consider whether a consumer would be able to distinguish the charitable event from the political activity. Does the public know these are clearly separate entities, or is it difficult to distinguish whether it’s a charity or a for-profit company that’s hosting a political event?

“If it looks like the (c)(3) is creating the audience, then that again is potentially an issue,” he said.

Ziklag, Wallnau and the Vance campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

First image: Vance talks with Howard. Second image: Lance Wallnau gives a presentation. The Vance discussion was tucked in between Courage Tour events, and organizers took pains to say that Wallnau’s podcast, which is owned by his for-profit company, hosted the hourlong segment, not the Courage Tour. (Stephanie Strasburg for ProPublica)

Marcus Owens, a tax lawyer at Loeb and Loeb and a former director of the IRS’ exempt organizations division, said there were past examples of the agency cracking down on religious associations for political activity similar in nature to Vance’s Courage Tour appearance.

In the 1980s, the Pentecostal televangelist Jimmy Swaggart used his personal column in his ministry’s magazine to endorse evangelist Pat Robertson’s campaign for president. Even though the regular column, titled “From Me to You,” was billed as Swaggart’s personal opinion, the IRS said that it still crossed the line into illegal political campaign intervention. Swaggart had also endorsed Robertson’s campaign for president during a religious service.

In that case, the IRS audited Swaggart’s organization and, as a result, the organization publicly admitted that it had violated tax law.

Phil Hackney, a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh who spent five years in the IRS’ Office of Chief Counsel, said the fundamental question with Vance’s Courage Tour event is whether the 501(c)(3) charity that hosted the event covered the cost of Vance’s appearance.

“If the (c)(3) bore the cost, they’re in trouble,” Hackney said. “If they didn’t, they should be fine.” The whole arrangement, he added, has “got its problems. It’s really dicey.”

And even though Ziklag did not directly host the Vance event, tax experts say that its funding of the Courage Tour — as described in the group’s internal documents — could be seen as indirect campaign intervention, which federal tax law prohibits.

“The regulations make it clear that 501(c)(3) organizations cannot intervene in campaigns directly or indirectly,” Samuel Brunson, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago, said. “So the fact that it’s not Ziklag putting on the event doesn’t insulate Ziklag.”

Potential tax-law violations aren’t the only legal issue raised by Vance’s appearance.

Federal election law prohibits corporations from donating directly to political campaigns. For example, General Motors, as a company, cannot give money to a presidential campaign. That ban also applies to nonprofits that are legally organized as corporations.

Election experts said that if the funding for the Vance appearance did come from a corporation, whether for-profit or nonprofit, that could be viewed as an in-kind contribution to the Trump-Vance campaign.

Do you have any information about Ziklag or the Christian right’s plans for 2024 that we should know? Andy Kroll can be reached by email at andy.kroll@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 202-215-6203.

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.

The billboards have popped up along both Interstates 55 and 170 around St. Louis. They’re along I-70 between Columbia and St. Charles, in central Missouri. And there’s one across from a shopping center in Cape Girardeau, along the Mississippi River in the state’s southeast corner.

In fact, as the Nov. 5 election approaches, motorists can see the billboards all over Missouri.

Each one spreads claims designed to undermine support for an abortion rights amendment that was placed on next month’s ballot through the state’s initiative petition process. Some billboards warn voters to “STOP Child Gender Surgery,” even though the amendment doesn’t mention gender-affirming care. Other billboards say it would permit abortions in the ninth month of pregnancy, though a state appeals court ruling in a case challenging the wording of the amendment’s summary on the ballot said that was not true.

Missouri’s abortion law, which bans nearly all abortions except in cases of medical emergencies, with no exceptions for rape or incest, was put into effect in June 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Amendment 3 would enshrine reproductive freedom in the state constitution, nullifying any law that restricts abortion before fetal viability, typically around the 24th week of pregnancy. The amendment would also safeguard other reproductive rights, such as access to in vitro fertilization and birth control. Polls show the measure is likely to pass — a recent survey showed 52% in favor and 34% opposed.

But abortion opponents, saddled with poll numbers that show their argument is losing even with the state’s largely conservative voters, are taking steps to undermine support for the amendment.

“Abortion rights are broadly popular all across the country, even in red states,” said Matthew Harris, an associate professor of political science at Park University, just outside Kansas City. “If you’re going to lose on the substance of that issue, you sort of have to try to make it about something else.”

The opponents have poured about $1 million into a late-hour misinformation campaign that has paid for radio ads and at least some of the billboards. The goal appears to be to sink the effort, or at least to try to redefine what it means to support it. Among the biggest contributors are John Sauer, the Missouri solicitor general from 2017 to 2023 who has served as a lawyer for former President Donald Trump.

Sauer, who has a long history of anti-abortion activism and represented Trump before the U.S. Supreme Court in his immunity case, has put $100,000 into a new political action committee — Vote “No” on 3 — that is funding many of the billboards, according to campaign finance reports. Sauer did not respond to voice and text messages to his cellphone. The PAC’s treasurer, Jim Cole, a longtime official with Missouri Right to Life, declined to comment.

Opponents are trying to capitalize on polls showing that Missourians oppose gender-affirming medical care for minors, which is already illegal for transgender children in the state, and allowing athletes to compete outside their birth gender. By combining the issues, political observers say, opponents are banking on confusing voters and building a broader base against the amendment.

The anti-transgender messaging in Missouri is part of a national trend, where Republicans are leveraging cultural issues like transgender rights to rally conservative voters in the 2024 campaigns.

Opponents are also strategizing about next steps if they lose at the ballot box. They are ready to shift their efforts to a more receptive audience: a state legislature dominated by deeply conservative politicians who have frequently acted against public opinion.

The Missouri General Assembly has a history of using “ballot candy,” where lawmakers add politically charged language they support to amendments to undo voter-approved measures that they don’t like. Some legislators have vowed to keep on fighting the abortion-rights amendment if it passes.

In 2018, for instance, voters overwhelmingly approved the Clean Missouri initiative, which aimed to reform some of the worst abuses of legislative redistricting. Two years later, Republican lawmakers introduced new ballot language that reframed the issue, focusing on minor ethics reforms while quietly seeking to reverse many of the changes in the Clean Missouri initiative. That repeal effort narrowly passed.

A similar tactic is evident in Missouri’s Amendment 7, which the legislature placed on this year’s ballot. While it is dressed up as a measure to ensure that only U.S. citizens can vote, something already required by law, its real impact would be to ban ranked-choice voting in the state, a move strongly supported by Republicans in the General Assembly.

Benjamin Singer, the former communications director for the Clean Missouri campaign, called the legislature’s action to undo Clean Missouri “brazen” and said the effort on Amendment 7 is part of a pattern. Singer, now chief executive officer of Show Me Integrity, a group focused on promoting democracy reforms in Missouri, said voters shouldn’t underestimate the lengths legislators will go to reverse popular measures.

“Think of the dirtiest trick in Missouri political history,” Singer said, “and plan for worse.”

State Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Branson, said abortion-rights proponents were the ones playing tricks by trying to protect transgender men playing women’s sports and sex changes for minors. “What is Amendment 3 actually talking about? I say it’s a multisubject amendment that should not even be on the ballot. So might we look at those individual subjects? Of course, we will.”

Seitz said that if conservative lawmakers weren’t adequately representing the will of the people, “Why are we continuously elected?”

But while Missouri voters tend to elect conservative leaders into a legislative majority, many of the issues that resonate with voters tell a different story. Voters have rejected a law that would have allowed employees to opt out of paying union dues, legalized recreational marijuana and expanded Medicaid — policies at odds with the priorities those lawmakers have championed.

Those leaders this year tried to limit the ability of citizens to file amendments to directly change the constitution. Republicans wanted to include ballot candy in the measure that would have added unrelated issues about immigrants voting and foreign fundraising. But that measure went down to defeat after an all-night Democratic filibuster.

“Missouri voters don’t love the idea of government interference generally, but at the same time, they support conservative principles,” said Beth Vonnahme, associate dean in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City. “So when you have a candidate who’s advocating conservative principles, they win. But when you have amendments that are progressive but focus on government interference, they also tend to do pretty well.”

Before the abortion amendment made it on the ballot, it survived a number of legal challenges. In September, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to keep Amendment 3 on the ballot, rejecting claims that the initiative failed to list all laws it might affect.

Still, state Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, a Republican from Jefferson County and an architect of the Missouri abortion ban — and one of the plaintiffs in the state Supreme Court case — said amendment proponents are lying “by saying it won’t do some things that it very obviously will do.” She said that if Amendment 3 passes, the only way for lawmakers to undo the damage would be to put a new amendment on the ballot to overturn it.

Marcia McCormick, a Saint Louis University law professor who specializes in sexuality and the law, called the billboard claims highly misleading “straw man” arguments. She emphasized that while Amendment 3 ensures reproductive freedom, it is narrowly focused on fertility and childbirth.

Michael Wolff, a retired chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court, said he was confident anti-abortion lobbyists are already working with legislators on a new amendment. Wolff, who helped advise the Amendment 3 proponents on ballot language, said he anticipated that the effort would lead with the transgender medical care issue, as the billboards have done.

He said lawmakers might lead a new amendment “the same way they started out with Clean Missouri — they started out with something that people would agree with,” adding, “Everybody with any resources that puts together ballot propositions is going to poll on what the voters will find attractive.”

by Jennifer Berry Hawes

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 brilliant mid-October morning, Harold Singletary stood before a teal shroud hanging from a building along one of the most famed architectural stretches in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. A Black businessman, he never imagined he would be standing here, for this purpose, along a street he had walked countless times, not knowing.

He prepared to address a group gathered to unveil a historical marker that announced to anyone walking by that the finely restored antebellum structure behind him once housed an auction firm that in 1835 “conducted the largest known domestic slave sale in United States history.”

In all, 600 enslaved people were put up for sale.

The new marker is notable because these streets, once bustling with businesses critical to the slave trade, yield little of that story to the average passerby. Singletary grew up in this coastal city — once the nation’s busiest slave port — where racial atrocities went largely ignored by white locals until recently.

He held prepared remarks in one hand. But before speaking, he walked over to hug Lauren Davila, a stranger who in 2022 discovered an ad for the sale of 600 people when she was a College of Charleston graduate student. Last year, a ProPublica reporter traced the sale to a wealthy plantation operator named John Ball Jr., which enabled Singletary to connect his own family members to those sold — and opened the door to additional research into the fates of the 600 people advertised for sale.

Until Davila’s discovery, the largest known slave auction in the U.S. was one that was held over two days in 1859 just outside Savannah, Georgia, roughly 100 miles down the Atlantic coast from Charleston. At that auction, 436 people were sold.

A small group then spearheaded creation of the marker Singletary was prepared to unveil.

“This is a big moment in representing ancestors,” Singletary began. Among those sold by the auction firm housed here were the mother and grandparents of an ancestor Singletary so reveres that he named his business, BrightMa Farms, after her. Its corporate office sits a four-minute walk away.

Harold Singletary, whose ancestors were among the 600 people put up for sale, speaks at the unveiling of the marker. Behind him stands Bernard Powers, a historian and key advocate for the marker. (Catie Cleveland/College of Charleston)

“America has to face some hard facts,” Singletary said. “And those facts change stories that change narratives.” He thanked the people “who helped change the narrative.” Among them is the man who owns the salmon-colored building at 24 Broad Street and agreed to hang the marker on it.

Attorney Stephen Schmutz bought the two-story building in 1989 and has operated his law firm there since. He had no idea it once housed a notorious slave auction firm.

“I just started thinking of the irony of it all,” Schmutz said. He grew up in segregated schools. Until he attended law school, all of his classmates were white. But when he was a young man during the Civil Rights movement, men like Martin Luther King Jr. “opened my eyes to the injustice of segregation.”

Among others, Schmutz has represented families of those killed in the 2015 Emanuel AME Church massacre, in which a white supremacist murdered nine Black worshippers. Standing before the marker, he applauded work to compile a more honest accounting of the city’s history.

The marker, about 2 feet tall, reads: “SLAVE AUCTIONS OF THE DOMESTIC SLAVE TRADE.” The auction firm Jervey, Waring & White, which operated in the building from 1828 to 1840, was “part of a network of similar enterprises” around it that included banks and insurance companies, the marker explains.

The marker’s story began in March 2022 when Davila, now a doctoral student at Tulane University, was scouring newspaper archives from her home in Charleston. As part of an internship, she was logging ads for slave auctions.

On that day, she clicked on Feb. 24, 1835. From a sea of classified ads, she read:

“This day, the 24th instant, and the day following, at the North Side of the Custom-House, at 11 o’clock, will be sold, A very valuable GANG OF NEGROES, Accustomed to the culture of rice; consisting of SIX HUNDRED.” She was stunned.

Graduate student Lauren Davila discovered this ad announcing the sale in the classifieds of the Charleston Courier on Feb. 24, 1835. (NewsBank/Readex. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

But the ad she found was brief. It yielded almost no details beyond the size of the sale and where it would be held.

A ProPublica reporter then found the original ad for the sale, which ran more than two weeks earlier. Published on Feb. 6, 1835, it revealed that the sale of 600 people was part of the estate auction for John Ball Jr., scion of a slave-owning planter regime. Ball had died the previous year, and five of his plantations were listed for sale — along with the people enslaved on them.

A descendant of Ball’s named Edward Ball wrote a bestselling book in 1998, “Slaves in the Family,” which detailed his family’s skeletons and the horrors long minimized by a Lost Cause narrative of benevolent slave owners. Ball had located descendents of people his ancestors had enslaved — including Harold Singletary.

Davila’s research was supported by the College of Charleston’s Center for the Study of Slavery and a white Charlestonian named Margaret Seidler. At 65, Seidler had discovered notorious slave traders in her own family tree, and then she began identifying others — including Jervey, Waring & White.

Seidler wrote a book about her findings and has been reaching out to other white Charlestonians urging them to help provide an honest account of the city’s slave history. She and historian Bernard Powers, the Center for the Study of Slavery’s founding director, pushed for the marker.

“Truth can be a tonic,” she said.