ProPublica

by Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Ellis Simani, ProPublica

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

Texas lawmakers and an advocacy group representing charter schools harshly criticized a tiny charter school network that has paid its superintendent up to $870,000 annually, making him one of the highest-paid public school leaders in the country.

The criticism came after ProPublica and the Texas Tribune published a story last week about Valere Public Schools, revealing that the district had only reported paying its superintendent, Salvador Cavazos, less than $300,000 per year. In fact, bonuses and one-time payments roughly tripled his income for running a district that has fewer than 1,000 students across three campuses.

Lawmakers brought up the story during a critical Texas House of Representatives committee hearing on March 6 to discuss how much funding the state should provide traditional public and charter schools in the coming years. Legislators repeatedly pressed Bryce Adams, the vice president of government affairs for the Texas Public Charter Schools Association, about Cavazos’ compensation and asked why charter schools need additional state funding if they use it for high administrator pay.

“You got a report in The Texas Tribune today about one of your guys making $800,000 a year,” said State Rep. John Bryant, a Democrat from Dallas. “None of our superintendents at the public level who have 100,000, 150,000 kids make anything close to that.”

State Rep. Terri Leo Wilson, a Republican from outside Houston who previously served on the Texas State Board of Education, called Cavazos’ bonuses “ridiculous, unheard-of, outrageous.”

In response, Adams said his organization is also opposed to the superintendent’s high compensation. He handed out copies of a letter the charter association had sent to the three members of the Valere Public Schools board stating they should pay Cavazos less. The association said it rarely questions a district’s actions but described the additional $500,000 to $600,000 the board awards Cavazos on top of his annual salary as “completely out of alignment” with the market. The letter urged the school board to tie Cavazos’ bonuses to specific metrics.

“This behavior will cast a shadow over the public charter school system in Texas and could be detrimental to TPCSA’s ability to advocate on behalf of its members and the students they serve,” the association’s board members wrote in the Jan. 22 letter.

The association sent the letter to Valere after learning about the newsrooms’ findings but before the article was published. ProPublica and the Tribune also shared that two other charter school systems pay their superintendents hundreds of thousands of dollars on top of their base salaries. The association did not answer questions about whether it also reached out to those schools.

The Texas Public Charter Schools Association sent a letter to Valere Public Schools stating that Superintendent Salvador Cavazos’ compensation is above market value and should be reduced. (Obtained and cropped by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

The strong public rebuke of Cavazos’ compensation comes as leaders from traditional public and charter schools are lobbying legislators for more money after going years without increases to their base funding. That push has intensified given lawmakers’ ongoing efforts to implement a voucher-like program this legislative session, which would allow parents to use taxpayer dollars to send their kids to private schools. Legislative budget experts found that doing so could take money away from public schools. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has championed the voucher program.

Since charter schools are considered public, not private, lawmakers questioned whether taxpayers could be confident that additional spending on public education would go to students’ needs rather than into the pockets of administrators like Cavazos.

Valere Public Schools’ board members provided no direct response to legislators’ concerns about Cavazos’ pay in an emailed reply to the news organizations’ questions this week. They also wrote they had not answered the letter from the charter association and said the association has “no regulatory or other authority over Valere.”

Cavazos has declined multiple interview requests. Board members have defended his compensation, explaining that he is also the charter network’s CEO and his contributions justify his pay. The members also said that a “significant” part of Cavazos’ compensation comes from private donations, but they would not provide evidence to support their claim.

Bryant, the Dallas representative, told the newsrooms in an interview that Valere Public Schools’ actions show why the state needs stronger oversight of its charter schools.

He said legislators must tighten the Texas Education Agency’s current reporting requirements. The agency mandates districts post all superintendent compensation and benefits on their website or in an annual report. Districts must also send information about the superintendent’s annual salary and any supplemental payments for extra duties to the state directly, but the state education agency did not clarify if that includes bonuses. It told the newsrooms it does not check whether districts follow the first requirement unless a potential violation is flagged.

“We need to put it in the law that they have to report it and that there’s a penalty for failing to do so,” said Bryant. “Otherwise, it’ll continue to be obscured.”

The Texas Education Agency did not respond to questions the newsrooms sent after the legislative hearing about the state’s current oversight of charter schools and superintendent compensation. Nor did Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows or Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who set the legislative priorities for state lawmakers.

Andrew Mahaleris, press secretary for Abbott, sent a written statement to the news organizations scolding school districts that spend the state’s funding on “administrative bloat instead of the teachers they employ and the students they serve.” Abbott will work with lawmakers to ensure public dollars go to “students and teachers, not systems and overpaid administrators,” Mahaleris wrote. He did not mention specific bills or solutions.

Lawmakers have submitted at least five bills during this legislative session that would restrict superintendents’ salaries, but most would not have applied to the vast majority of Cavazos’ compensation because the proposals don’t limit bonuses.

State Rep. Carrie Isaac, a Republican representing counties between Austin and San Antonio, filed a proposal that would restrict superintendents’ pay to no more than twice that of the highest-earning teacher in the school district. Isaac’s current proposal does not account for superintendents’ bonuses. After learning about the Valere School Board’s method of awarding Cavazos hefty payments on top of his base salary, she said she was “absolutely” open to revising her bill to include bonuses.

“I don’t see any justification for that,” Isaac said in an interview. “I would like to see superintendents that pursue their role out of a dedication for student success, not a means to secure these excessive salaries.”

Despite the outcry from lawmakers and experts inside and outside the charter school sector, the Valere board has so far stood behind its decisions. Asked by the newsrooms whether it had any current plans to make changes to the pay that Cavazos receives on top of his base salary, the board sent a one-word response:

“No.”

by Anjeanette Damon

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If you ask a National Park Service ranger how the Trump administration’s cost cutting will affect your next park visit, you might get talking points instead of a straight answer.

A series of emails sent late last month to front-line staff at parks across the country provided rangers with instructions on how to describe the highly publicized staff cuts. Park leaders further instructed staff to avoid the word “fired” and not blame closures on staffing levels.

On Feb. 14, at least 1,000 park service employees were terminated as part of broad reductions to the federal workforce by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. As a result, visitor centers have reduced hours, tours of popular attractions have been canceled, lines have spiraled, bathrooms may go uncleaned, habitat restoration has ceased and water has gone unchecked for toxic algae.

Meanwhile, rangers have been ordered to describe these cuts — or “attrition” and “workforce management actions,” according to the talking points — as “prioritizing fiscal responsibility” and “staffing to meet the evolving needs of our visitors.” They also should tell visitors the parks will continue to ensure “memorable and meaningful experiences for all.”

If asked about limited offerings, one park’s rangers were instructed to say “we are not able to address park or program-level impacts at this time.”

The guidance mirrors other measures instituted by the Trump administration to dictate how federal employees communicate with the public. This month, employees at the National Cancer Institute were told they needed approval for any communication dealing with 23 “controversial, high profile, or sensitive” issues, including peanut allergies and autism. Agencies across the federal government have begun compiling lists of words to avoid because they could conflict with Trump’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, The New York Times has reported.

The guidance handed down to park employees puts rangers in a particularly difficult position, said Emily Douce, deputy vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy organization for the parks. Rangers pride themselves on knowledge of their parks and their responsibility to accurately educate the public about the habitats, wildlife and geology of those special places.

“They shouldn’t be muzzled to not talk about the impacts of what these cuts mean,” Douce said. “If they are asked, they should be truthful on how federal dollars are being used or taken away.”

An NPS spokesperson said in an emailed statement that any assertion that park staff are being “silenced is flat-out wrong” and that talking points are a “basic tool” to “ensure consistent communication with the public.”

“The National Park Service is fully committed to responsible stewardship of our public lands and enhancing visitor experiences — we will not be distracted by sensationalized attacks designed to undermine that mission,” the statement said.

The spokesperson also criticized park staff who spoke with a ProPublica reporter. “Millions of hardworking Americans deal with workplace challenges every day without resorting to politically motivated leaks,” the spokesperson said.

One park ranger, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the talking points prevent rangers from telling the public the truth. Some employees have delivered the statements in an exaggerated “monotone” to convey to visitors they are toeing the company line but there’s more to the story, the ranger said.

“We have a duty to tell the public what’s going on,” the ranger said. “If that’s saying, ‘We just don’t have the staff to stay open and that’s what these firings are doing,’ I think the people have a right to know. Every person we lose hurts.”

In the immediate aftermath of the firings, parks quickly closed visitor centers, ended tours and altered other services. Some parks were clear on social media that the staffing cuts had resulted in the closures. But recently parks have been more vague in discussing the impact and not offered explanations for particular closures.

The administration has reinstated about 50 NPS employees and announced it will proceed with the hiring of seasonal employees, a workforce that is essential to park operations during the busy summer season. The hiring process, however, has been delayed, which may lead to operation disruptions. And more cuts are likely coming. The Hill recently reported that the administration is considering a 30% payroll reduction for the NPS.

The cuts come as the parks are seeing increases in visitation, which hit a record in 2024 for the first time since 2016. Although the new data was released on the park service’s website last week, the administration didn’t publicize that milestone with a news release as it has in the past. The terminations also come amid staffing shortages across the service.

Aviva O’Neil, executive director of the Great Basin National Park Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports a small park in a remote corner of Nevada, bristled at the idea put forth in the talking points that parks can continue to provide the same level of “memorable experiences” with the cuts. When the park lost five of its 26 permanent employees in February, it was forced to close tours of a signature attraction, Lehman Caves. To help restore services, the foundation raised the money to temporarily hire the terminated workers.

“How do they do their day-to-day operations when they don’t have the staff?” she said.

by Taylor Kate Brown

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists.

Two inches of raw sewage. Persistent chemical leaks. Pipes insulated with asbestos. A bat infestation. Black mold. “It kind of blows my mind some of the things I found in public schools,” says Emily Schwing, a KYUK reporter and ProPublica Local Reporting Network partner. Recently, we published her investigation of dangerous conditions in deteriorating public schools in Alaska’s rural villages. Schwing, who reported this story while also participating in the University of Southern California, Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship, spoke to dozens of sources, including local resident Taylor Hayden, who showed her concrete footings that had been reduced to rubble in one village school.

ProPublica has previously reported on how restrictive funding policies in Idaho have contributed to similarly dangerous school conditions.

In Alaska, a unique set of circumstances means the responsibility for school repairs in many rural villages rests exclusively on the state Legislature. Yet over the past 25 years, state officials have largely ignored hundreds of requests by rural school districts to fix the problems that have left public schools across Alaska crumbling, even though the state owns these buildings. As rural school districts wait for funding, the buildings continue to deteriorate, posing public health and safety risks to students, teachers and staff. The impact is felt most by Alaska Natives.

For Schwing, the “record scratch” moment came when she realized some school districts were spending their own money, in one case $200,000, in a desperate effort to rank higher up the funding priority list, even going as far as hiring a lobbyist. Other districts told her they couldn’t do so without cutting teaching positions.

“Why are public school districts paying a lobbyist to convince lawmakers to invest in public schools, and even more so, to invest in infrastructure that the state owns?” she thought.

I called up Schwing to talk about the process of reporting this investigation and how different going to school can be for students across Alaska. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.

What got you interested in this story?

I travel a lot to rural communities in Alaska, just by virtue of the things that I cover. And usually when you are traveling to villages, you stay in the school. I have always been surprised by the things that I’ve experienced there. On the Chukchi coast, there’s a school where you can’t see out the windows anymore because they’re so pitted from the wind. There was a school that I was in last year during a sled dog race that I was covering where I could smell the bathrooms from down the hall. That’s not normal. So I was keeping a list of things that were strange for public schools.

Then Taylor Hayden called me and told me what’s going on at the Sleetmute school. So I went out there. He showed me [the conditions] in the wood shop. And then we went under the building and I thought: “Oh my God. This is crazy.” It took off from there.

How does seeing that black mold and guano in person change the story for you?

I want to tell you about these two little kids I met, Edward and Loretta [in Sleetmute]. They’re in fourth grade. I’m in their school, and they’re giving me a tour: “This is our library, and this is our piano in the kindergarten room, and this is my favorite book.” They’re showing me their artwork. Never once did these kids say, “This is where the moldy part of our school is.” It made me sad to think that they think that this is normal for their school, but it also made me so proud of them for just being fourth-grade kids.

You can throw out numbers and statistics and do an investigation into these state records, but until you’re in the building, I don’t think the reality of how awful things are hits you. The kids are doing their homework at the lunch tables, or the high school kids are doing some really cool science projects, but they’re sitting in a school where if the wood shop collapses, it also takes the water system, the heat system, the HVAC, like all of the critical infrastructure, the electricity that keeps that school usable.

Watch “Alaska Has Ignored Hundreds of Requests to Fix Its Crumbling Public Schools“ What does a school mean to a place like Sleetmute?

I have visited over 45 villages off the road system in Alaska at this point in my career, and the school is the center of these communities. It’s the largest building. They’re one of two buildings with a guarantee that there will be running water. They’re places where people get together, where people socialize. They have pickup basketball nights and fundraisers.

Public schools in rural Alaska also serve an emergency management function that is often overlooked. If there is some sort of natural disaster — a flood, a giant storm, a severe drop in temperature — or if there’s some sort of other piece of critical infrastructure that’s having problems — the water plant burns down or the electricity goes out or the heating fuel doesn’t get delivered — people will go seek shelter in the school. Wildland firefighters and the National Guard will be based out of these buildings if they’re responding to a disaster.

But in order for it to be an effective emergency management tool, you have to have it safe and operational. There are so many more functions that the public school serves than just school.

Why do you think there’s such little urgency around these repairs?

There’s so much conversation around operational funding, to pay for textbooks and teacher salaries. Currently in our Legislature, it’s all the lawmakers can talk about.

The people who are offering testimony to lawmakers from urban areas are all about funding curriculum and keeping teachers. Then you hear public testimony from people in rural communities who can’t even get that far, because there are pots and pans on the floor to catch the leaks from the roof, or there’s a bucket of oil next to them in their classroom and there’s one in the hall. There’s a very clear boundary between what rural constituents are experiencing and what urban constituents are experiencing with respect to education.

It’s very easy to forget the hundreds of villages that exist in Alaska off the road system, because they are so small. That’s where the real problem lies — when you don’t notice, then you have a roof that leaks for 20 years, and then it turns into a real public health and safety crisis.

This story was translated to the Central Yup’ik dialect of Yugtun. Why was that important?

There are over 50 villages on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta that KYUK serves. It’s the predominant dialect spoken on the delta, and there are a lot of elders who speak Yup’ik as their first language. The vast majority of KYUK’s audience is Yup’ik.

The other thing that you’ll notice in this story is the vast majority of the population that is served by rural public schools are Indigenous. So the largest impact from a lack of investment in school infrastructure is on Alaska Natives. So I think it’s really important to the most affected people that we would deliver a story like this in their Indigenous and often first language.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with KYUK and NPR’s Station Investigations Team, which supports local investigative journalism.

by ProPublica

Trailer for “Before a Breath”

ProPublica’s feature documentary “Before A Breath,” directed by Nadia Sussman, will have its YouTube premiere on Thursday, March 20, at 8 p.m. Eastern.

“Before a Breath” is a tender, infuriating and ultimately hopeful story of three mothers who have lost children to stillbirth and are now striving to make pregnancy safer. The film explores an experience shared by thousands of families in the U.S., where more than 20,000 stillbirths occur each year. At least a quarter of those losses are probably preventable.

After the stillbirth of her daughter, Debbie Haine Vijayvergiya goes to Washington. She finds herself battling entrenched political inertia as she fights to pass the SHINE for Autumn Act, legislation named for her stillborn child. Kanika Harris, a maternal health advocate, takes change into her own hands, telling the story of Kodjo and Zindzi, the twins she lost, as she trains a new generation of Black birth workers. The stakes for making birth safer crystalize as we meet Stephanie Lee, a nurse administrator in Manhattan who, while seeking answers about her daughter Elodie’s stillbirth, takes the ultimate leap of faith. We follow her as she prepares to give birth again, under the care of the Rainbow Clinic at Mount Sinai, which offers specialized care for parents who have experienced these losses.

Inspired by Duaa Eldeib’s groundbreaking reporting, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, this film shines a light on the aftermath of stillbirth, an experience often shrouded in silence.

“Before a Breath” will also be distributed by The WNET Group. The film is a production of ProPublica. It is executive-produced by Almudena Toral and produced by Sussman, Eldeib, Lisa Riordan Seville and Liz Moughon, who is also the director of photography. It was edited by Margaret Cheatham Williams, with additional editing by Mahdokht Mahmoudabadi. Where and how to watch

After the film’s debut on YouTube on Thursday, March 20, “Before a Breath” will be available to stream on ProPublica’s YouTube channel and at youtube.com/ThirteenWNET and thirteen.org. There will also be a number of free and open-to-the-public screenings at cinemas and other venues across the country.

Join us for a virtual discussion about the film

Join us on Wednesday, April 2, at 4 p.m. Eastern for a panel discussion with the filmmakers as they welcome the film’s main participants to share their powerful insights and experiences surrounding the stillbirth crisis. Reporter Duaa Eldeib and director Nadia Sussman will be joined by Kanika Harris, Stephanie Lee, Debbie Haine Vijayvergiya and Dr. Joanne Stone, founder of the Rainbow Clinic at Mount Sinai.

by ProPublica

ProPublica announced on Wednesday that Cassandra Garibay and Ashley Clarke have joined the crowdsourcing and engagement reporting team.

“I was so heartened by the incredible applicant pool for our engagement reporter position,” said Ariana Tobin, ProPublica’s crowdsourcing and engagement team editor. “Our field has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, and we are so excited to have hired two journalists working at the cutting edge of it. Ashley and Cassandra have both done exceptional, thoughtful, creative work reporting on and with communities facing some of the most pressing issues of our time. I can’t wait for people to see how they level up our coverage of housing, education, immigration and more.”

Garibay is a Bay Area-based engagement reporter who plans to work on community-sourced investigations related to issues like housing and health equity. She comes to ProPublica from the bilingual news outlet El Tímpano, where she was a senior housing reporter, leading investigations into topics including how exposure to lead-based paint has impacted Latino communities in Oakland, California. Her work there was driven by citizen-fueled science, text message outreach, data analysis, research partnerships and community events.

Before her time at El Tímpano, Garibay was the California engagement editor at the University of Southern California’s Center for Health Journalism, working with journalists across the state to center the communities they covered and reach audiences in innovative ways. She previously reported on housing, health and local government for the Fresno Bee, Fresnoland and the San Luis Obispo Tribune.

“I am thrilled to join the team and excited to help crowdsource investigations and center communities at the heart of important issues across the country,” said Garibay.

Clarke plans to cover issues that impact low-income individuals and families, particularly those living in urban communities, focusing on topics like housing insecurity and homelessness, education, transportation and environment. She comes to ProPublica from Bloomberg Industry Group, where she covered law firms and worked with a product team to test and write prompts for machine learning tools designed for reporters.

Prior to her time at Bloomberg, Clarke worked as an audience engagement editor at the Center for Public Integrity, where she both reported and worked with reporters to build relationships with communities. She also managed collaborations between CPI and local newsrooms, including the award-winning investigation “Unhoused and Undercounted,” which focused on the lack of support for public school students experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity. She was named the Institute for Nonprofit News’ 2023 Nonprofit Newcomer of the Year for shaping how the CPI reports on impacted communities.

Clarke began her career in local television news at NBC in Washington, D.C., where she continues to be based. She is an adjunct professor at American University’s School of Communications and serves on the board of the Washington Association of Black Journalists. She will be with ProPublica through at least this fall.

“I’m honored to be working alongside such a talented team of journalists who are committed to doing work that drives impact and changes lives,” said Clarke. “I’m so excited to dig in and contribute to the mission.”

by Charles Ornstein

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists.

In February, my colleague Ken Schwencke saw a post on the social media network Bluesky about a database released by Sen. Ted Cruz purporting to show more than 3,400 “woke” grants awarded by the National Science Foundation that “promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.”

Given that Schwencke is our senior editor for data and news apps, he downloaded the data, poked around and saw some grants that seemed far afield from what Cruz, a Texas Republican, called “the radical left’s woke nonsense.” The grants included what Schwencke thought was a “very cool sounding project” on the development of advanced mirror coatings for gravitational wave detectors at the University of Florida, his alma mater.

The grant description did, however, mention that the project “promotes education and diversity, providing research opportunities for students at different education levels and advancing the participation of women and underrepresented minorities.”

Schwencke thought it would be interesting to run the data through an AI large language model — one of those powering ChatGPT — to understand the kinds of grants that made Cruz’s list, as well as why they might have been flagged. He realized there was an accountability story to tell.

In that article, Agnel Philip and Lisa Song found that “Cruz’s dragnet had swept up numerous examples of scientific projects funded by the National Science Foundation that simply acknowledged social inequalities or were completely unrelated to the social or economic themes cited by his committee.”

Among them: a $470,000 grant to study the evolution of mint plants and how they spread across continents. As best Philip and Song could tell, the project was flagged because of two specific words used in its application to the NSF: “diversify,” referring to the biodiversity of plants, and “female,” where the application noted how the project would support a young female scientist on the research team.

Another involved developing a device that could treat severe bleeding. It included the words “victims” — as in gunshot victims — and “trauma.”

Neither Cruz’s office nor a spokesperson for Republicans on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation responded to our requests for comment for the article.

The story was a great example of how artificial intelligence can help reporters analyze large volumes of data and try to identify patterns.

First, we told the AI model to mimic an investigative journalist reading through each of these grants to identify whether they contained themes that someone looking for “wokeness” may have spotted. And crucially, we made sure to tell the model not to guess if it wasn’t sure. (AI models are known to hallucinate, and we wanted to guard against that.)

For newsrooms new to AI and readers who are curious how this worked in practice, here’s an excerpt of the actual prompt we used:

Background: We will be showing you grants from the national science foundation that have been targeted for cancellation because they contain themes as identified by Republican Senator Ted Cruz's office as involving woke ideology; diversity, equity, and inclusion; or pro-Marxist ideology. We are looking to analyze themes of the award descriptions in this list to determine what may have terms or themes that would be considered "woke" or related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). It is your task to determine whether or not the text contains these themes and tell me about what you've found. Only extract information from the NSF grant if it contains the information requested.

--

As an investigative journalist, I am looking for the following information

--

woke_description: A short description (at maximum a paragraph) on why this grant is being singled out for promoting "woke" ideology, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda. Leave this blank if it's unclear.

why_flagged: Look at the "STATUS", "SOCIAL JUSTICE CATEGORY", "RACE CATEGORY", "GENDER CATEGORY" and "ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE CATEGORY" fields. If it's filled out, it means that the author of this document believed the grant was promoting DEI ideology in that way. Analyze the "AWARD DESCRIPTIONS" field and see if you can figure out why the author may have flagged it in this way. Write it in a way that is thorough and easy to understand with only one description per type and award.

citation_for_flag: Extract a very concise text quoting the passage of "AWARDS DESCRIPTIONS" that backs up the "why_flagged" data.

Of course, members of our staff reviewed and confirmed every detail before we published our story, and we called all the named people and agencies seeking comment, which remains a must-do even in the world of AI.

Philip, one of the journalists who wrote the query above and the story, is excited about the potential new technologies hold but also is proceeding with caution, as our entire newsroom is.

“The tech holds a ton of promise in lead generation and pointing us in the right direction,” he told me. “But in my experience, it still needs a lot of human supervision and vetting. If used correctly, it can both really speed up the process of understanding large sets of information, and if you’re creative with your prompts and critically read the output, it can help uncover things that you may not have thought of.”

This was just the latest effort by ProPublica to experiment with using AI to help do our jobs better and faster, while also using it responsibly, in ways that aid our human journalists.

In 2023, in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune, a Local Reporting Network partner, we used AI to help uncover patterns of sexual misconduct among mental health professionals disciplined by Utah’s licensing agency. The investigation relied on a large collection of disciplinary reports, covering a wide range of potential violations.

To narrow in on the types of cases we were interested in, we prompted AI to review the documents and identify ones that were related to sexual misconduct. To help the bot do its work, we gave it examples of confirmed cases of sexual misconduct that we were already familiar with and specific keywords to look for. Each result was then reviewed by two reporters, who used licensing records to confirm it was categorized correctly.

In addition, during our reporting on the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune obtained a trove of unreleased raw materials collected during the state’s investigation. This included hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings, which were difficult to sift through. The footage wasn’t organized or clearly labeled, and some of it was incredibly graphic and disturbing for journalists to watch.

We used self-hosted open-source AI software to securely transcribe and help classify the material, which enabled reporters to match up related files and to reconstruct the day’s events, showing in painstaking detail how law enforcement’s lack of preparation contributed to delays in confronting the shooter.

We know full well that AI does not replicate the very time-intensive work we do. Our journalists write our stories, our newsletters, our headlines and the takeaways at the top of longer stories. We also know that there’s a lot about AI that needs to be investigated, including the companies that market their products, how they train them and the risks they pose.

But to us, there’s also potential to use AI as one of many reporting tools that enables us to examine data creatively and pursue the stories that help you understand the forces shaping our world.

Agnel Philip, Ken Schwencke, Hannah Fresques and Tyson Evans contributed reporting.

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.

In 2008, as the Great Recession was starting to take hold, my travels reporting on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign took me to one American city after another that was reeling from major layoffs. I visited places such as Kokomo, Indiana, which was losing so many jobs at its Chrysler and Delphi plants that by year’s end it was labeled one of America’s fastest-dying towns, and Lorain, Ohio, where Obama visited a National Gypsum plant that closed four months later.

After each trip, I would return to my home in Alexandria, Virginia, in the metro Washington, D.C., area, and be struck by how removed the nation’s capital seemed from the pain being felt in so much of the country. Not only was it insulated because of its high proportion of government employment, it actually prospered as a result of the recession, since so much of the federal economic stimulus ended up staying with the Beltway contractors who administered the spending.

When my growing family started looking for a larger home in 2009, we left our corner of Alexandria. As prices in every other metro area in the country were declining, they were still rising in the inner suburbs of Northern Virginia.

The situation now is sharply reversed. As a result of Elon Musk’s relentless scythe, the Department of Government Efficiency, the big layoffs are in and around Washington. In the week ending Feb. 22, unemployment claims in the District of Columbia rose 25% from the week prior and were four times as high as one year earlier — and that’s only the beginning. The district’s chief financial officer has predicted that the city, where the federal government accounts for roughly a quarter of all wages, could lose as many as 40,000 jobs over the next few years, more than a fifth of its total, which he estimates would cost the city more than $1 billion in revenue.

The fallout is spreading through the DMV — D.C., Maryland and Virginia — a region where nearly a tenth of all jobs are with the federal government, not to mention the tens of thousands of people working for contractors dependent on federal spending.

The losses are already manifest beyond the numbers: in the resumes from highly educated professionals flooding LinkedIn, in pleas from laid-off young people seeking others to take over their apartment leases, in hushed discussions about this or that family pulling up stakes and leaving town.

It is also manifest in the very landscape of the city. The Trump administration briefly placed the headquarters of many government departments on a list of “non-core” properties that are slated for offloading because they are vacant or underused — among them the departments of Justice, Labor, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Energy and Housing and Urban Development. This conjures the prospect that those hulking Brutalist and Classic Revival buildings constructed in the 20th century could one day stand vacant, just like the abandoned 19th-century factories looming over so many of the country’s postindustrial cities.

All of this raises a question that was unfathomable until recently: Is the nation’s capital, so long blessed by being the government’s company town, at risk of a fate resembling that of so many other company towns through the years? And if it is, why aren’t people beyond metro Washington more concerned about it? When Detroit was in free fall, Obama intervened to bail out the auto industry, deciding a great American city needed help. But now, the administration in power is itself delivering the fateful blow to a major city.

It is hard not to detect in this turnabout some resentment on the part of Trump allies and supporters from regions that have not been faring well in recent times. By 2012, when the country was finally emerging from the recession, seven of the 10 wealthiest counties were in metro Washington; the area’s number of high-net-worth households, with investable assets of more than $1 million, had risen by 30% since 2008. While Midwestern communities such as Vice President JD Vance’s hometown, Middletown, Ohio, were being crushed by the opioid epidemic, the Aston Martin dealership in Tysons Corner, Virginia, was selling hundreds of the bespoke James Bond car for about $280,000, and home prices in the District were approaching a 400% increase from the early 1990s.

There is also more recent fuel for schadenfreude over Washington’s pain: Federal workers were much slower than those in other industries to return to the office after the pandemic, making it easier for the Trump administration to cast the entire lot of them as cosseted and unproductive. The persistence of remote work in the federal government had in recent years given downtown Washington a desolate feel, as it contributed to the closure of countless fast-casual lunch locales, retail shops and a major movie theater. There is no small irony in the fact that Trump’s return-to-office order has brought more life to downtown streets at the very moment that the city is so imperiled by impending layoffs.

The DOGE cuts will not do all that much harm to the region’s true economic elite. There will still be lobbyists raking in six-figure contracts. Trump has done precious little to threaten that aspect of the so-called swamp; if anything, the DOGE assault has led many sectors, such as higher education, to spend more on lobbyists. There will still be Beltway-bandit consulting firms soaking up some of the work previously done by government workers and national security contractors lining the soulless highway approach to Dulles airport.

The actual target of the cuts will be a more modest sort: career civil servants who, in many cases, could have been making more money in the private sector, or security guards and office cleaners returning every evening to working-class neighborhoods in Anacostia or Prince George’s County. It’s these people — from housing finance analysts to food-safety researchers and administrative assistants — who are now frantically looking for other work or considering leaving the region altogether.

The cuts will fall especially hard on the region’s Black residents, who have long relied on federal employment as a ladder to the middle class. (Black people make up a disproportionately large share of the national federal workforce.)

Watching all of this unfold, I can’t help but be put in mind of another company town: my own hometown, Pittsfield, Massachusetts. It once held three major divisions of General Electric, which at its mid-20th-century peak employed more than 13,000 people in a county of about 130,000, sustaining broadly shared prosperity in a city with stellar public schools and a bustling main street.

But by the time I reached high school in the late 1980s, the company was scaling back operations at a rapid clip under the leadership of Jack Welch, who had himself come up through the ranks in Pittsfield. My classmates and I watched as, one by one, the families of engineers and managers moved away and empty storefronts proliferated downtown. Ultimately, many of us decided to build our careers elsewhere. Pittsfield’s population has fallen a quarter since 1970, and only 1,000-odd people remain employed at the company that took over one of the rump G.E. units, General Dynamics.

Washington is unlikely to suffer so stark a fate, given the many barnacles that have attached themselves to its economy beyond the bureaucracy. Tourists will still come by the thousands to admire the monuments, even if some of the big stone buildings turn vacant, like the ruins of the Roman Forum. But the experience of Pittsfield and so many larger company towns is a reminder of how wrenching the disruption is when the biggest employer in town takes a big hit and the ladder rungs toward upward mobility start to crumble. The echo of all those other cities’ plights is reason to offer some sympathy, or at least recognition, as the Beltway now absorbs its blows.

by Lomi Kriel, Perla Trevizo and Mica Rosenberg

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The text came from inside a Panamanian government outpost, set hours away from the country’s capital, on the edge of the Darien jungle.

It had been written by a migrant who’d managed to smuggle a cellphone into the facility by hiding it in his shorts. He said authorities had detained him without providing him access to a lawyer or any means to communicate with relatives. He was hungry because all he was being fed were small portions of bread and rice. His cellphone was all he had to try to get help.

I am Hayatullah Omagh, from Afghanistan, 29 years old.

I arrived in February, 07 in USA.

They took me to the San Diego detention center and on Feb, 12 they deported to Panama.

Now we are like prisoners.

He was one of the lucky ones. Most of the hundred or so other migrants who were being detained with him had no way to communicate with the outside world. They’d been sent to Panama as part of President Donald Trump’s high-profile campaign to ramp up deportations. In addition to Afghanistan, the migrants had traveled to the U.S. from Iran, Uzbekistan, Nepal, Vietnam, India and China, among other countries. Some told reporters that they had only recently crossed the U.S.-Mexico border when they were detained, and that they were hoping to seek asylum. But, they said, American authorities refused to hear their pleas and then treated them like criminals, putting them in shackles, loading them onto military airplanes and flying them from California to Panama.

Three flights, carrying a total of 299 migrants, including children as young as 5, landed in Panama in mid-February. For the following three weeks, amid an international outcry over what critics described as a stunning breach of U.S. and international law, the migrants who had not committed any crimes were held against their will. As public pressure on Panama mounted and immigrant advocates filed suit against that country, authorities there released the migrants over the weekend, on the condition that they agree to make their own arrangements to leave within 90 days.

Their release has hardly settled matters, however, among those groups that consider themselves part of the international safety net charged with providing migrants humanitarian support. Among them is the International Organization for Migration, which helped Panama return migrants who chose to go home rather than remain in detention. The IOM said it participated in the effort because it believes that without its presence the situation for migrants would be “far worse.” Critics charge that the group’s role shows how much the safety net relies on the United States and as a result can easily come undone.

“I appreciate that some individuals hold the view that providing a more humane detention and deportation or voluntary return is better than a less humane version of those unequivocal rights violations,” said Hannah Flamm, an attorney with the International Refugee Assistance Project, a legal advocacy group in New York. “But in the context of egregious unlawful conduct by the Trump administration, this is a moment that calls for deep introspection on where the line of complicity lies.”

She added, “If everybody abided by their legal and ethical obligations not to violate the rights of people seeking protection in the U.S., these third-country removals could not happen.”

Since taking office, Trump has signed several executive orders that eliminated options for seeking asylum at the border and deemed all crossings illegal, broadly authorizing the removal of migrants encountered there. The American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups sued over the orders. The United States has not responded to the lawsuit in court. The proceedings against Panama, in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, are not conducted in public. But at a press conference on the day after the first planeload of migrants landed last month, the country’s president dodged, reassuring the public that the migrants were only passing through Panama on their way elsewhere. Their stay would be brief and cost nothing, he said, and added that it had all been “organized and paid for by the International Organization for Migration.”

The IOM, founded in the aftermath of World War II and now part of the United Nations, typically plays a critical, but low-profile, role helping migrants including those who, when faced with deportation, seek instead to voluntarily return to their homes. It provides everything from advice to governments managing sudden mass refugee movements to travel documents, food and lodging for individual migrants. And its mission statement charges it with upholding the rights of people on the move.

However, its role in support of sending home asylum-seekers who’d been expelled from the United States without the opportunity to make a case for protection from persecution has exposed just how easily the safety net can come undone.

In response to the Trump administration’s litany of threats against Mexico and Central America — including imposing tariffs, cutting off aid and, in Panama’s case, seizing its canal — those governments have taken extraordinary steps that upend international and diplomatic norms by agreeing to allow the Trump administration to turn their countries into extensions of the U.S. immigration enforcement system. President Rodrigo Chaves Robles of Costa Rica, whose government has historically gone to great lengths to uphold itself as neutral in regional conflicts and strife, also allowed U.S. migrant flights to land in his country. In a public event last month, he made the stakes plain.

“We’re helping our powerful economic brother in the north,” he said, “because if they impose a tax on our export zones, we’re screwed.”

Meanwhile, groups like the IOM are just as vulnerable to U.S. pressure. Some 40% of the donations that have funded its work come from the United States. And in recent weeks, the organization was forced to lay off thousands of workers after Trump froze billions of dollars in foreign aid. What that means, according to a former Biden administration official who worked on migration issues, is that when the United States makes a request, even ones that risk going against the IOM’s mission, “there is not a lot of space to say no.”

Speaking of the IOM, the official added that it “almost can’t exist without the U.S.”

Without the legal protections established under international law, asylum-seekers like those that the United States transported to Panama have been left to fend for themselves. By the time many of them had made it to the United States, they had little more than the clothes on their backs and the money in their pockets. And U.S. authorities expelled them exactly as they’d come. Upon landing in Panama, authorities confiscated any cellphones they found in the migrants’ possession. Omagh was one of the few who’d managed to keep his phone from being discovered.

The situation in the Darien Forest is extremely difficult. There are security guards everywhere and they are very vigilant. They even watch us when we go to the bathroom.

Distressed texts like those provided the only information about what the migrants were going through while they were in detention. Before being sent to the Darien camp, Panamanian authorities kept the migrants under 24-hour watch by armed guards at a hotel in downtown Panama City. But when scenes of them standing in the hotel windows with handwritten pleas for help, some scrawled in toothpaste on the glass, triggered an international outcry, IOM officials quickly moved to fly out more than half of the migrants who agreed to be sent home and the Panamanian government shuttled the rest to the remote Darien camp.

On at least two occasions, Panamanian officials offered to allow journalists into the camp to speak with the detainees, but they canceled both times without explanation. Since then, they have declined multiple requests for interviews. Panamanian lawyers said they were also denied access to the migrants.

Migrants deported by the U.S. to Panama who decided to accept an offer to voluntarily go home with the assistance of the IOM were initially held at a hotel in Panama City while their travel arrangements were made. (Alejandro Cegarra for ProPublica)

Secret cellphone chatter filled the void, offering glimpses of the conditions inside the camp. Migrants wrote that bathrooms and showers had no doors for privacy, and that they were held in sweltering temperatures without air conditioning. One migrant had gone on a hunger strike for seven days. Omagh wrote that when he and others complained about the quantity and quality of the food, authorities offered to buy more if the detainees paid for it.

We immigrants, each of us, have no more than $100, and some don’t even have a single dollar. How long can we buy ourselves?

On Friday, the Panamanian government announced it would release the 112 migrants left. The authorities said that those migrants who stayed beyond the three-month time limit risked being deported. Migrants said they were also told they would only be allowed to leave the camp if they agreed to sign a document saying they had not been mistreated — potentially making it hard for them to file legal claims later.

The following day, IOM and Panamanian officials entered the camp again and told the migrants that they would be asked to vacate the premises in a matter of hours, setting off a new wave of pandemonium and anxiety among the detainees, most of whom speak no Spanish and have no contacts or places to stay in Panama. Omagh, who understood what was happening because he’d picked up some Spanish when he migrated to the United States through Mexico, texted about the upheaval.

I asked, if we go to Panama City, what will happen there? We are refugees. We don’t have money. We do not have nothing. The IOM told me ‘it is your responsibility.’

I don’t know what will happen there, but I’m sure that IOM, they will not help us.

When asked about these comments, the IOM said that because its staff helped Panamanian officials with interpretation, migrants in the camp often confuse who is who. Jorge Gallo, a regional spokesperson for the IOM in Latin America and the Caribbean, defended his group’s involvement in Panama. He said the agency’s work “empowering migrants to make informed decisions, even in the face of constrained options, is preferable to no choice at all.”

He and other IOM officials said the organization helps migrants find “safe alternatives,” including helping them go to other countries where they can obtain a legal status if they don’t choose to go home.

IOM officials say their only involvement with the migrants the U.S. expelled to Panama is to help those who wish to return home. (Alejandro Cegarra for ProPublica)

The State Department and Department of Homeland Security did not respond to detailed questions about the expulsions. However, a State Department spokesperson expressed gratitude to those countries that had agreed to cooperate, saying they showed that they are “committed to ending the crisis of illegal immigration to the United States.”

Within the human rights community, advocates are at odds with one another about what to do. As the Panamanian government prepared to move migrants out of the Darien camp, IOM officials reached out to faith-based shelter managers seeking places for the migrants to stay. Elías Cornejo, migrant services coordinator for the Jesuit ministry Fe y Alegría in Panama City, said some of the managers hesitated because they worried that anything that gave the appearance that they were advancing policies that run contrary to the law could taint their reputation.

“It’s Like They Want to Delete Us” Hayatullah Omagh sent this voice message to ProPublica’s reporters while he was detained in Panama.

The IOM, Cornejo said, might be trying to do the right thing, but its actions can have unintended consequences that would be hard to undo. He said the agency was “whitewashing” Panama’s collusion and “dirtying its own hands” by participating in an improvised effort “without control and without the possibility of doing something good for the people.”

Hayatullah Omagh, a 29-year-old immigrant from Afghanistan, tries to figure out what to do after Panamanian authorities released him from detention and gave him up to 90 days to leave the country. (Matias Delacroix/AP Images)

As the migrants at the Darien camp scrambled to figure out what they’d do after leaving, they felt free to openly use their phones and to share them with one another.

Tatiana Nikitina got a message from her 28-year-old brother, who’d migrated to the United States from Russia. He had been detained after crossing the border near San Diego, but her family hadn’t heard from him for days and was panicked that he might be forced to return home. Not knowing where to turn for answers about his whereabouts, his sister sought information in public chat groups and then began communicating with ProPublica about her desperate search for him.

Her brother, Nikita Gaponov, using Omagh’s phone, also communicated with ProPublica and explained why he fled home.

I am LGBT. My country harass these people.

I cannot live a normal life in my country. It’s impossible for me.

He said he spoke with IOM representatives about his fears.

They said, We are sorry we cannot help you.

I also do not know my USA status like it was deportation or not

In USA they show me zero documents. No protocols or nothing.

Omagh, too, said he was terrified about the prospect of returning to Afghanistan. He said he is from an ethnic minority group that is systematically persecuted by the ruling Taliban and that he’d been briefly jailed.

They will execute me without hesitation.

I want to apply for asylum, but I don’t know where I can apply for asylum, in which country, and how.

I cannot go back to my country, never, never, never.

Lexi Churchill contributed research.

by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards

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With a mass email sharing what it called “difficult news,” the U.S. Department of Education has eroded one of its own key duties, abolishing more than half of the offices that investigate civil rights complaints from students and their families.

Civil rights complaints in schools and colleges largely have been investigated through a dozen regional outposts across the country. Now there will be five.

The Office for Civil Rights’ locations in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco are being shuttered, ProPublica has learned. Offices will remain in Atlanta, Denver, Kansas City, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

The OCR is one of the federal government’s largest enforcers of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, investigating thousands of allegations of discrimination each year. That includes discrimination based on disability, race and gender.

“This is devastating for American education and our students. This will strip students of equitable education, place our most vulnerable at great risk and set back educational success that for many will last their lifetimes,” said Katie Dullum, an OCR deputy director who resigned last Friday. “The impact will be felt well beyond this transitional period.”

The Education Department has not responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

In all, about 1,300 of the Education Department’s approximately 4,000 employees were told Tuesday through the mass emails that they would be laid off and placed on administrative leave starting March 21, with their final day of employment on June 9.

The civil rights division had about 550 employees and was among the most heavily affected by Tuesday’s layoffs, which with other departures will leave the Education Department at roughly half its size.

At least 243 union-represented employees of the OCR were laid off. The Federal Student Aid division, which administers grants and loans to college students, had 326 union-represented employees laid off, the most of any division.

On average, each OCR attorney who investigates complaints is assigned about 60 cases at a time. Complaints, which have been backlogged for years, piled up even more after President Donald Trump took office in January and implemented a monthlong freeze on the agency’s civil rights work.

Catherine Lhamon, who oversaw the OCR under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden said: “What you’ve got left is a shell that can’t function.”

Civil rights investigators who remain said it now will be “virtually impossible” to resolve discrimination complaints.

“Part of OCR’s work is to physically go to places. As part of the investigation, we go to schools, we look at the playground, we see if it’s accessible,” said a senior attorney for OCR, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not laid off and fears retaliation. “We show up and look at softball and baseball fields. We measure the bathroom to make sure it’s accessible. We interview student groups. It requires in-person work. That is part of the basis of having regional offices. Now, California has no regional office.”

The OCR was investigating about 12,000 complaints when Trump took office. The largest share of pending complaints — about 6,000 — were related to students with disabilities who feel they’ve been mistreated or unfairly denied help at school, according to a ProPublica analysis of department data.

Since Trump took office, the focus has shifted. The office has opened an unusually high number of “directed investigations,” based on Trump’s priorities, that it began without receiving complaints. These relate to curbing antisemitism, ending participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports and combating alleged discrimination against white students.

Traditionally, students and families turn to the OCR after they feel their concerns have not been addressed by their school districts. The process is free, which means families that can’t afford a lawyer to pursue a lawsuit may still be able to seek help.

When the OCR finds evidence of discrimination, it can force a school district or college to change its policies or require that they provide services to a student, such as access to disabilities services or increased safety at school. Sometimes, the office monitors institutions to make sure they comply.

“OCR simply will not be investigating violations any more. It is not going to happen. They will not have the staff for it,” said another attorney for the Department of Education, who also asked not to be named because he is still working there. “It was extremely time and labor intensive.”

The department said in a press release that all divisions at the department were affected. The National Center for Education Statistics, which collects data about the health of the nation’s schools, was all but wiped away.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the layoffs “a significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system.” In addition to the 1,300 let go on Tuesday, 600 employees already had accepted voluntary resignations or had retired in the past seven weeks, according to the department.

Trump and his conservative allies have long wanted to shut the department, with Trump calling it a “big con job.” But the president hasn’t previously tried to do so, and officially closing the department would require congressional approval.

Instead, Trump is significantly weakening the agency. The same day Congress confirmed McMahon as education secretary, she sent department staff an email describing a “final mission” — to participate in “our opportunity to perform one final, unforgettable public service” by eliminating what she called “bloat” at the department “quickly and responsibly.”

Education Department employees received an email on Tuesday afternoon saying all agency offices across the country would close at 6 p.m. for “security reasons” and would remain closed Wednesday. That led many workers to speculate that layoffs were coming.

Then, after the workday had ended, employees who were being laid off began receiving emails that acknowledged “the difficult workforce restructuring.”

Emails also went to entire divisions: “This email serves as notice that your organizational unit is being abolished along with all positions within the unit — including yours.”

by Eli Hager

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Since the arrival of a team from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Social Security is in a far more precarious place than has been widely understood, according to Leland Dudek, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration. “I don’t want the system to collapse,” Dudek said in a closed-door meeting last week, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. He also said that it “would be catastrophic for the people in our country” if DOGE were to make changes at his agency that were as sweeping as those at USAID, the Treasury Department and elsewhere.

Dudek’s comments, delivered to a group of senior staff and Social Security advocates attending both in person and virtually, offer an extraordinary window into the thinking of a top agency official in the volatile early days of the second Trump administration. The Washington Post first reported Dudek’s acknowledgement that DOGE is calling the shots at Social Security and quoted several of his statements. But the full recording reveals that he went much further, citing not only the actions being taken at the agency by the people he repeatedly called “the DOGE kids,” but also extensive input he has received from the White House itself. When a participant in the meeting asked him why he wouldn’t more forcefully call out President Donald Trump’s continued false claims about widespread Social Security fraud as “BS,” Dudek answered, “So we published, for the record, what was actually the numbers there on our website. This is dealing with — have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?”

Throughout the meeting, Dudek made alarming statements about the perils facing the Social Security system, but he did so in an oddly informal, discursive manner. It left several participants baffled as to the ultimate fate of the nation’s largest and most popular social program, one that serves 73 million Americans. “Are we going to break something?” Dudek asked at one point, referring to what DOGE has been doing with Social Security data. “I don’t know.”

But then he said, in a more reassuring tone: “They’re learning. Let people learn. They’re going to make mistakes.”

Leland Dudek (via Social Security Administration)

Dudek embodies the dramatic whipsawing of life as a public servant under DOGE. For 25 years, he was the ultimate faceless bureaucrat: a midlevel analyst who had bounced between federal agencies, ultimately landing at the Social Security Administration and focusing on information technology, cybersecurity and fraud prevention. He was largely unknown even within the agency. But in February, he suddenly vaulted into the public eye when he was put on leave for surreptitiously sharing information with DOGE. It appeared that he might lose his job, but then he was unexpectedly promoted by the Trump administration to the position of acting commissioner. At the time, he seemed unreservedly committed to the DOGE agenda, writing — then deleting — a bellicose LinkedIn post in which he expressed pride in having “bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.”

Now, only weeks into his tenure, he was taking a far more ambivalent posture toward not just DOGE but Trump. On multiple occasions during last week’s meeting, according to the recording, Dudek framed the choices that he has been making in recent weeks as “the president’s” agenda. These choices have included planned cuts of at least 7,000 Social Security employees; buyouts and early retirement offered to the entire staff of 57,000, including those who work in field offices and teleservice centers helping elderly and disabled people navigate the program; cuts to disability determination services; the dissolution of a team that had been working to improve the user experience of the ssa.gov website and application process; a reduction of the agency’s footprint across the country from 10 regional offices to four; the terminations of 64 leases, including those for some field office and hearing office space; proposals to outsource Social Security customer service; and more.

“I work for the president. I need to do what the president tells me to do,” Dudek said, according to the recording. “I’ve had to make some tough choices, choices I didn’t agree with, but the president wanted it and I did it,” he added later. (He didn’t name specific actions that Trump did or did not direct.)

At still another point, Dudek said that “I don’t want to fire anyone” but that “a lot of the structural changes that you’ve seen me make at headquarters, I’ve had long conversations with the White House about, and the DOGE team. … And that’s not to say I don’t have some more hard choices to come. The president has an agenda. I’m a political appointee. I need to follow that agenda.”

Dudek also more than once dismissed Trump’s claims about Social Security fraud, which the president amplified just hours after Dudek’s meeting in a speech to Congress in which he implied that millions of probably-dead people over the age of 100 are receiving Social Security benefits. There are indeed 110-year-old and older people in one of the Social Security databases that the DOGE team has been looking at, Dudek said, but those people are “not in pay status” — they’re not actually being paid benefits. “These are records we never bothered with,” he explained.

Still, Dudek and two of his deputies, who also spoke intermittently at the meeting, seemed hesitant to more publicly resist Trump’s misstatements. A spokesperson chimed in to say that they were proud of a recent press release in which, in mild language, they’d obliquely contradicted some of the false claims. The other official said that DOGE’s narrative about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us” but that “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.”

Spokespersons for Dudek and the Social Security Administration, the White House and Elon Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Dudek’s remarks come at a time when many Social Security employees are feeling confused about Dudek, his role versus DOGE’s and what it all means for the future of the Social Security Administration, according to ProPublica’s conversations with more than two dozen agency staffers. Many said that because the recent cuts at the agency have been carried out in a piecemeal fashion, the public doesn’t seem to be grasping the totality of what is happening to the program, which is having its 90th anniversary this year.

The layoffs — and the looming specter of potentially thousands more employees taking a buyout by a Friday deadline — have meant even less attention to the complicated casework of low-income elderly people and people with physical and intellectual disabilities, as ProPublica has reported.

Meanwhile, DOGE, which Musk has portrayed as a squad of techno-efficiency geniuses, has actually undermined the efficiency of Social Security’s delivery of services in multiple ways, many employees said. Under DOGE, several Social Security IT contracts have been canceled or scaled back. Now, five employees told ProPublica, their tech systems seem to be crashing nearly every day, leading to more delays in serving beneficiaries. This was already a problem, they said, but it has gotten “much worse” and is “not the norm,” two employees said.

And under a policy that DOGE has applied at many agencies, front-line Social Security staff have been restricted from using their government purchase cards for any sum above $1. This has become a significant problem at some field offices, especially when workers need to obtain or make copies of vital records or original documents — birth certificates and the like — that are needed to process some Social Security claims, one management-level employee said.

“Elections have consequences,” Dudek wrote in a March 1 email to the agency’s staff.

In the meeting last week, Dudek was asked about many of these organizational changes, according to the recording. Regarding the closure and consolidation of regional offices as well as the cuts to the part of the agency that helps evaluate disability claims, which is already severely backlogged, he said: “It certainly was done at the administration level. That would have not been my first preference. I think we need to see what’s going to happen in terms of fallout.”

“Again,” he said, “I work for the president. DOGE is part of that.”

Dudek, who had been scheduled to speak for only 15 minutes, according to a copy of the agenda, instead spoke for around an hour, talking about everything from his upbringing by a disabled mother who’d depended on Social Security, to a 1989 book titled “Bureaucracy” that mentions Trump. He continued to vacillate between sharing advocates’ concerns for vulnerable Social Security recipients and sticking up for some of what DOGE has been trying to do at his agency.

“I actually like having the kids around,” he said, adding that although they were unfamiliar with the “nuances” of Social Security, he was trying to get them to be more thoughtful. “They’re thinking about work differently.”

He confirmed that the DOGE team members had broad access to Americans’ Social Security numbers and other personal data, but he claimed that if they were to do anything illegal with that information, he’d have them investigated and potentially prosecuted. He said he wanted to bulk up resources for field offices and customer service, even as front-line workers received buyout offers just like other staffers.

Throughout, Dudek emphasized that he wanted constructive feedback and open conversation, because he cares deeply about the Social Security Administration and the people it serves. He was honest about his shortcomings: “I’m in a role that I did not expect to be in,” he said. “I am an IT guy and a fraud guy.”

Dudek will eventually be replaced by Frank Bisignano, Trump’s long-term pick to run the Social Security Administration. At times, Dudek sounded fatalistic.

“I’m the villain,” he said in the recording. “I’m not going to have a job after this. I get it.”

by Audrey Dutton, ProPublica, and Kelcie Moseley-Morris, States Newsroom

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With a steady but urgent cadence, Dr. Jim Souza told reporters what would become one of the most cited talking points in a protracted legal fight over Idaho’s abortion ban: Without a court order protecting emergency room doctors from prosecution, his hospital system was sending patients to nearby states when certain pregnancy complications meant termination might be necessary.

It was April 2024. Souza said Boise-based St. Luke’s Health System had airlifted six pregnant patients in a span of four months to states where abortion was a legal treatment option in health emergencies. That happened once in all of 2023, a time when a court order kept Idaho from enforcing the ban in those cases.

Souza, the hospital system’s chief physician executive, said Idaho’s law was a looming threat to hospital workers and quality health care. St. Luke’s delivered about 41% of Idaho babies last year.

“Fear is the problem. Fear of prosecution,” Souza said at the time. “And even if it doesn’t occur, it doesn’t fix the jeopardy that is actively eroding our system of care.”

Less than a year later, St. Luke’s is the one major institution — other than advocacy groups — standing in the way of restrictions on emergency abortion care in Idaho, a state with one of the most absolute abortion bans in the country.

The Justice Department on March 5 dropped a lawsuit brought under President Joe Biden that claimed Idaho’s ban, which does not allow abortions to protect a patient’s health, violated a federal law mandating access to emergency medical care. St. Luke’s administrators, who made the same claim in their own lawsuit in January, vowed to press on. A temporary court order in the St. Luke’s case will allow emergency abortions to take place for now.

The abortion lawsuit is the latest controversial stance for a hospital system operating in a state whose political climate treats public institutions — hospitals, libraries, schools, health departments — not as the basic infrastructure of society but as ideological battlegrounds.

St. Luke’s defended its medical staff during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, when residents objected to masks and vaccines. It took on Ammon Bundy, one of the state’s flagbearers of far-right extremism, whose followers protested against hospital employees caught up in a child welfare case involving the grandchild of one of Bundy’s friends.

St. Luke’s administrators declined to speak with States Newsroom and ProPublica for this story, citing the ongoing litigation.

Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador, who is defending against the abortion challenge, has accused health care providers of deliberately misconstruing the ban’s prohibitions. Labrador, whose career was built on being to the right of mainstream Republicans, also has said, without providing evidence, that the reason doctors are leaving Idaho is because they made “the vast majority of their money on abortions, or they wanted to live in a place that allowed abortions.”

The state lost 22% of its OB-GYN workforce and more than half the specialists who handle high-risk pregnancies in the 15 months after the Supreme Court abortion decision, according to a report from the Idaho Coalition for Safe Healthcare.

Odette Bolano, the former CEO of Saint Alphonsus Health System, a St. Luke’s competitor, said health care institutions have historically been reluctant to take on anything with political implications. They often stay neutral because they care for all patients regardless of politics.

But Bolano, who led the Catholic-based system for six years, said everything seems to have taken on political undertones in recent years. She said health systems now have to take difficult positions when they feel something keeps them from delivering safe care.

“The price in reputation — regardless of whatever stance you take and steps you take to safeguard patients, visitors and the community at large — could be significant. It could land you in a very bad place,” she said, “but values, integrity and ability to deliver on commitments have to take precedence.”

St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center (Otto Kitsinger for Idaho Capital Sun)

In a small state like Idaho, where the population just crossed 2 million, St. Luke’s is a behemoth. It has eight hospitals and ranks among the state’s largest employers, with a workforce of 18,000 and more than $4 billion in revenue.

It’s also a nonprofit and unaffiliated with any national chain or any church, despite its name.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, St. Luke’s took in a crush of critically ill patients. Some had ignored public health advice and listened to people who said vaccines were harmful — including a local pathologist who promoted COVID-19 vaccine skepticism and ineffective treatments, then won appointment to a public health board alongside Labrador.

Leading St. Luke’s through the pandemic turmoil was Chris Roth.

Roth joined the system in 2007. He led its Boise-area operations, worked as the system’s chief operating officer, then became CEO when his longtime boss retired in February 2020.

The next month, Idaho went into shelter-in-place mode with the rest of the world. Blaine County, anchored around the Sun Valley ski resort and a tiny St. Luke’s hospital, became one of the nation’s early COVID-19 hot spots.

Roth and other St. Luke’s leaders spoke out in support of public health measures while a small but loud contingent of Idahoans made a show of defying those measures: burning masks at the state Capitol, staging aggressive protests at the Boise region’s health department and showing up at the homes of that agency’s board members.

Souza, who worked as a critical care doctor and pulmonologist in addition to his leadership role at St. Luke’s, gave sobering warnings about the grave reality he saw in the hospital. In the lead-up to the 2020 holiday season, Souza went on a conservative talk radio show and urged listeners to heed public health advice.

When health care organizations including St. Luke’s announced they would require COVID-19 vaccines for employees, anti-vaccine groups set up protests outside hospitals and clinics belonging to St. Luke’s and others.

Roth described a sense of helplessness and anxiety in a 2021 interview with the Idaho Capital Sun: “We’re deeply concerned about our front-line caregivers, and they are just going through hell. Every day. And then they go out to the community, and it’s business as usual — rodeos, fairs, football games, debates in the school boards.”

He spoke of St. Luke’s doctors who faced laughter from the audience at a school board meeting when they described the scene inside hospitals. “It’s like we’re seeing the de-evolution of humanity, right in front of our eyes,” Roth said.

As the nation was starting to emerge from the pandemic in 2022, another source of anxiety arose for St. Luke’s and its hospital workers: Ammon Bundy. The flashpoint was the hospital’s role in a child protection case involving the infant grandson of one of Bundy’s friends.

After police responded to a child welfare report by the baby’s health care provider, the boy was taken to St. Luke’s, where a doctor determined he was malnourished and in need of care, according to the subsequent lawsuit by St. Luke’s and trial testimony. Bundy showed up at the hospital, demanding the baby be returned to his parents. (The baby was returned six days later. No one was charged with child abuse or neglect.)

Bundy was arrested there and later pleaded guilty to trespassing.

Bundy, a self-proclaimed defender against government tyranny, moved to Idaho from Arizona after prevailing against charges associated with the 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge office in eastern Oregon and a 2014 standoff over his father’s unpermitted use of federal lands for cattle grazing in Nevada.

During the pandemic, Bundy led a crowd that forced its way into the Idaho House of Representatives. He also founded the People’s Rights Network, an organizing apparatus for people with populist, anti-government and survivalist goals.

Bundy, his friend and their followers took to blogs and social media after the friend’s grandson was taken to St. Luke’s, and they coordinated protests outside the hospital, where they were joined by dozens of people, including far-right legislators.

Those protests came to a head one day when Bundy posted a now-deleted video urging people to go to the hospital and begin “making noise” because he believed the baby was about to be transferred to a foster placement and “we need to go back there and get this straightened out. … This is an emergency.”

Demonstrators showed up outside the St. Luke’s hospital in downtown Boise following Ammon Bundy’s calls for protest. (Idaho Capital Sun)

Court records say the hospital went on lockdown and sent ambulances elsewhere for an hour as an angry, armed crowd gathered outside. Callers flooded the switchboard and sent profane and threatening emails to hospital staff and executives. Roth would later read one of the emails from a protester aloud in court. It included antisemitic and homophobic slurs and said Roth was “getting strung up along with everyone else who is complacent in the medical tyranny.”

The hospital system and some of its employees, including Roth, sued Bundy, his friend and their associated commercial operations in May 2022, alleging defamation.

The lawsuit accused them of spinning lies that harmed St. Luke’s and its employees — whose names, photos and personal information spread online via Bundy’s allies and the People’s Rights Network.

Roth, in a court filing, said he worried that parents wouldn’t bring in their children for care if they believed St. Luke’s “secretly vaccinates children and engages in child trafficking.” Citing armed protests against St. Luke’s, Roth said it was important for the health system to stand up to bullying and intimidation.

“Inaction would signal that this type of behavior is acceptable in our community,” Roth wrote. “It is not.”

The baby’s grandfather answered St. Luke’s lawsuit by repeating, without evidence, his allegations against the health system.

Bundy told States Newsroom and ProPublica in a recent interview he personally didn’t make false allegations. He called someone else’s claim that St. Luke’s conspired to kidnap children “so ridiculous.” But in a still-public Instagram post, made while the lawsuit was active, Bundy accused St. Luke’s CEO of being “an accessory to child abduction.”

Bundy decided not to participate in the defamation case against him. For more than a year, he ignored the court proceedings and didn’t show up to the trial to offer a defense.

He thought the worst-case outcome would be a $50,000 default judgment, he told ProPublica.

He was wrong.

A jury rendered a $52 million judgment. Bundy and the People’s Rights Network were responsible for about half. His co-defendant filed an appeal, and the appeal request is pending.

Although Bundy did not appeal, his tangle with St. Luke’s wasn’t over. Bundy had a history of defying legal orders. After state officials barred him from the Capitol, police arrested Bundy multiple times for violating that order. After a court sentenced him to community service, Bundy tried to say campaign events during his failed bid for governor counted as service.

St. Luke’s was not going to let go of its courtroom win.

When Bundy sold his property to a friend so that St. Luke’s would have no claim to it, St. Luke’s sued Bundy again — and it now owns the property.

When he continued to defy court orders, St. Luke’s sought contempt charges. While Bundy was being arraigned, the judge threatened him with arrest if, once again, he failed to show up for a trial. Bundy didn’t show, and the judge issued a $250,000 misdemeanor warrant that remains active in Ada County.

Bundy moved to Utah and, in July, filed for bankruptcy.

Within days of the bankruptcy filing, St. Luke’s was on Bundy’s heels once more. The hospital system has since persuaded the bankruptcy court to order Bundy and his wife to show up and answer questions about their finances and assets.

Bundy has called St. Luke’s actions “lawfare.” When asked for comment on his actions since the defamation suit was decided, Bundy said, among other things, “Sounds like another hit piece.”

The public positions St. Luke’s took during COVID-19 and with Bundy were a precursor to its decision to take a stand on abortion as emergency treatment.

“St. Luke’s is here because we care about the pregnant patients in our community, and we want them to receive the emergency care that is available to anyone who presents to an emergency room,” Peg Dougherty, deputy general counsel for St. Luke’s Health System, said outside Boise’s federal courthouse last week.

Idaho’s trigger abortion ban was ready to go two months after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade’s protections of abortion rights in 2022. It criminalizes the termination of a pregnancy at any stage. Penalties include prison time, and the physician’s medical license can be revoked. There are exceptions for documented rape and incest or to save a pregnant patient’s life, but not to preserve the patient’s health.

Opponents say a health exception is essential in rare cases where emergency abortion is the best treatment option, such as when a patient’s water breaks before the fetus is viable. That can quickly cause a deadly infection.

In a brief to the Supreme Court describing one such case, an abortion rights group said the doctor, whom it did not name, decided it was necessary to wait until the patient’s condition was life-threatening before feeling legally permitted to end the pregnancy. The group described the experience as “traumatic for the patient and torture for the doctor.”

The Biden Justice Department sued the state in 2022. The agency alleged Idaho’s ban conflicts with a federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, requiring any emergency room that accepts Medicare to offer stabilizing treatment to every patient who comes through the door.

A series of shifting appeals and court orders in the case left emergency abortion care in Idaho legal, then illegal, then legal again since June. Anticipating that the Trump administration would drop the Biden-era challenge, St. Luke’s sued in January, seeking a new order while the case proceeds. Senior U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill granted St. Luke’s request for a temporary order on March 5, keeping emergency abortions legal while Winmill considers a longer-term injunction.

Dr. Caitlin Gustafson, president of the Idaho Coalition for Safe Healthcare and a practicing family medicine obstetrician, said it is remarkable that St. Luke’s is willing to use its power so that patients and doctors don’t feel abandoned.

“The need for EMTALA isn’t going away no matter what administration is there, and we’re still stuck,” Gustafson said.

She also suspects the lawsuit could be a bulwark against further attempts by politicians and interest groups to dictate the decisions of health care providers.

Physicians and advocates in other states are watching.

Dr. Christopher Ford, an emergency room physician in Wisconsin, has seen the effects of an abortion ban on emergency care, when abortion was effectively prohibited in Wisconsin for 15 months.

“We had patients presenting with partial surgical or medical abortions who were very apprehensive to seek care,” Ford said. “We had very young patients from age 16, up to age 41 or 42, who were essentially septic and at incredible risk of mortality and morbidity.”

He said it seems atypical for a hospital system to take on a lawsuit of this nature, and he is glad to see it.

“It’s definitely a testimony to how important this is and how other hospitals should follow suit,” he said. “Just reading it from the outside looking in, the hospitals are getting involved as a last-ditch effort as the only way to advocate for their patients sitting in front of them.”

When health systems sue, it is typically over business matters. Individual doctors and patients are the usual plaintiffs in abortion cases, along with advocacy organizations like the Center for Reproductive Rights or Planned Parenthood.

For those reasons, St. Luke’s stands out.

“I think it’s a testament to them meeting the moment,” said Melanie Folwell, executive director for Idahoans United for Women and Families, which is organizing an abortion rights ballot initiative for 2026. “We are at an inflection point, and if they don’t act, who will?”

by Vernal Coleman

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

The Trump administration has shut down a unit of the Department of Veterans Affairs created under President Joe Biden to address disparities in how the federal government provides disability compensation to military service members.

The closure of the Veterans Benefits Administration’s Office of Equity Assurance effectively hobbles internal efforts at the VA to investigate and eliminate long-standing racial inequities the department itself has acknowledged.

The office was eliminated as part of the Trump administration’s purge of programs broadly aimed at addressing diversity, equity or inclusion, according to emails obtained by ProPublica. But several VA sources said that the office was not exclusively focused on race, and that it takes on cases for a range of veterans to ensure no one is denied proper benefits — including for reasons of age, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation and geographic location.

Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat, criticized the Trump administration’s action as “excessive” and “reckless.”

“The closure of the OEA will undoubtedly have disastrous effects on the care we offer veterans,” Takano, former chair and now ranking member of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said in a statement to ProPublica. “This office was making it easier for minority veterans to access care and benefits. Its closure will directly impact the care and benefits received by minority veterans.”

Richard Brookshire, co-founder of the Black Veterans Project, a nonprofit focused on rectifying discrimination faced by Black veterans, echoed Takano’s concerns.

“It’s a first step toward gutting the second-largest agency in our federal government,” he said. “The consequences will be dire, wide-reaching and deadly.”

VA spokesperson Peter Kasperowicz declined to say whether the agency would continue to study racial disparities. But he emphasized in a statement that newly installed VA Secretary Douglas Collins “treats all veterans and beneficiaries fairly and equally, so the Office of Equity Assurance is no longer needed.”

He added: “The money saved by closing the office will be redirected to improve health care, benefits and services for Veterans, all of whom we treat fairly and equally. VA will always fulfill its duty to provide veterans, families, caregivers and survivors the health care and benefits they have earned. That is a promise.”

The VA grew significantly under the Biden administration, with tens of thousands of employees added to beef up capacity in conjunction with the passage of the PACT Act. The 2022 law expanded health care and benefits for an estimated 3.5 million veterans exposed to toxic substances from burn pits and other chemicals.

The Biden administration also created the OEA and several other initiatives to help analyze and rectify discrimination in the delivery of health care, benefits and other services. Those moves were seen as a direct response to long-standing complaints by minority veterans.

The closure of the OEA is just one of several disruptive staff cuts at the VA in recent weeks. Around 2,400 VA employees have lost their positions since the Trump administration began slashing the federal workforce, with significantly more firings to come.

The department currently employs around 470,000 workers. Kasperowicz said that the administration plans would shed nearly 15% of its workforce, dropping the total to roughly 398,000.

Workers assigned to the OEA were informed on Feb. 14 via email that their positions were terminated immediately and that the office was being “liquidated.” The notices were sent to nearly all of the office’s employees, effectively dissolving the unit, sources familiar with the firings told ProPublica.

The administration reversed at least some of the terminations later that month, according to correspondence obtained by ProPublica. Workers who were attached to the OEA have now been placed on administrative leave pending a possible reassignment within the VA or another federal department, according to sources familiar with the department who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

“But even if they are reassigned, it won’t be to the OEA,” said one official familiar with the moves. “It’s definitely gone.”

Black veterans and their advocates have long complained of a divide in how claims are handled. An ongoing suit filed by the National Veterans Council for Legal Redress against the government gave the suspicions new life.

The group’s case was bolstered by data unearthed through Freedom of Information Act requests from the Black Veterans Project, which found that the VA was far more likely to reject applications for service-related disabilities by Black veterans than their white counterparts.

Attorneys for the federal government asked the judge overseeing the suit to dismiss the claims, stating that only the VA secretary has jurisdiction to decide disputes over award benefits and that the court lacks the jurisdiction to hear them.

A 2023 U.S. Government Accountability Office report also concluded that there were disparities. It found that the department approved compensation applications for service-related disabilities like hearing loss, impaired limb movement and post-traumatic stress by Black veterans at lower rates than veterans of other races.

The report found that between 2010 and 2020 the approval rate for benefit applications made by White male veterans was 3% to 22% higher than Black male veterans for the selected medical conditions.

The OEA’s demise is just one part of an ongoing rollback of the racial equity programs the Trump administration has called “radical and wasteful.”

Since Trump entered office, a webpage detailing the VA’s work to address equity and diversity appears to have been scrubbed from its website. In January, the administration fired the heads of internal advisory groups formed to address the concerns and needs of minority and female veterans.

One of those groups, the Center for Minority Veterans, worked in conjunction with the OEA to address racial disparities in disability compensation. Between 2013 and 2018, the advisory group raised its concerns over the Black veterans’ lower rate of claims approval to VA leadership five times, according to the National Veterans Council for Legal Redress suit.

Mariela Roca, a former Republican congressional hopeful, took over as director of the advisory group last week. It’s unclear what specific strategies the group will pursue to advance the needs and concerns of minority veterans under new leadership. Roca did not respond to a request for comment.

by Callie Ferguson and Erin Rhoda, Bangor Daily News, and Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen, 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.

On a Monday last month, after a conservative Maine legislator expressed outrage on Facebook about a transgender girl winning a high school pole vaulting event, the hammer of the federal government began to swing.

By Friday of that week, Feb. 21, President Donald Trump singled out Maine’s governor during a White House event and threatened to cut off the state’s federal funding. “See you in court,” Gov. Janet Mills shot back.

Then came a barrage of investigations and threats: The U.S. Department of Education opened inquiries into the Maine Department of Education and the student’s school district, alleging they had violated federal civil rights law. The same day, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services targeted the Maine Education Department, too, as well as the state’s university system.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture then launched an investigation into the university system; and on Tuesday, the university said the USDA had halted funding as the agency investigates “prospective” civil rights violations, records show.

The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter that “Maine should be on notice” that the agency was poised to sue. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration even pulled $4.5 million for marine research, but it didn’t touch the 33 other grantees who get similar funding.

Then last week, the Social Security Administration briefly became the sixth federal agency to target Maine, canceling contracts that allowed hospitals to automatically report births and funeral homes to report deaths.

Although the Social Security contracts were reinstated, and the state may reapply for the marine research funding, the moves had already wreaked havoc.

Now, more federal agencies are pressing down on Maine than there are transgender girls competing in girls’ sports in the state. Only two transgender girls are competing this school year, according to the Maine Principals’ Association.

“The president is trying to crush the opposition. He’s trying to crush Maine,” said David Webbert, a longtime civil rights attorney in Maine. To Webbert, it’s as if Trump is saying: “‘Maine believes in transgender rights? Well, you’re going to see what happens to you.’”

Some view Maine as a test case for how the Trump administration may try to force its policies on states, regardless of existing state laws. In public comments, residents have invoked the state’s motto to rally Mainers: “Dirigo,” Latin for “I lead.”

“It’s Maine now, but what state is it going to be next? This is not just a Maine issue, but Maine spoke up. So right now, it’s, ‘Let’s make an example out of Maine,’” said Kris Pitts, executive co-director of the nonprofit MaineTransNet.

State officials, thrust into the spotlight, have been trying to avoid becoming more of a target, carefully choosing their words and declining interviews with reporters. And Mills hasn’t challenged Trump again publicly on this issue.

Maine Gov. Janet Mills in January. She clashed with President Donald Trump last month over transgender girls competing in girls’ sports, but she hasn’t publicly challenged him again on the issue. (Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Portland Press Herald via AP)

There are signs the administration is preparing to force other states to follow the president’s directives: The DOJ recently sent letters to California and Minnesota threatening to sue those states if they don’t ban transgender girls from athletics.

The Trump administration also is taking a multiagency approach with Columbia University. On Friday, several federal agencies canceled a combined $400 million in grants and contracts because, the administration alleged, the university was not sufficiently combatting antisemitism.

The press release announcing the multimillion-dollar punishment contained a caution for noncompliant institutions: “Doing business with the Federal Government is a privilege.”

Nearly everything about the blitz of investigations in Maine, including how they’re being carried out, is not ordinary.

Federal agencies that don’t usually enforce civil rights laws in schools launched inquiries. HHS, for instance, usually focuses on health care access for people with disabilities or language translation, and there’s no evidence it’s conducted an investigation of Maine in the past 20 years.

Not only did it dive into Maine’s policies on transgender athletes, it reached a conclusion with unprecedented speed.

Investigations like this typically take months, if not years, according to a review of federal investigation data and records by ProPublica and the Bangor Daily News. But just one business day after announcing the investigation, the federal agency decided the Maine Department of Education wasn’t giving girls equal opportunities and had violated Title IX “by allowing male athletes to compete against female athletes,” according to a letter from HHS to the state.

It sent that finding to the general inbox at the Maine attorney general’s office after interviewing no one from that office, the Education Department, governor’s office or officials from two high schools cited in the letter for allowing transgender athletes to compete against girls, according to those agencies and schools.

The Maine attorney general’s office pointed out that the letter cited an incorrect sum of federal funding that flows to the state. Legal experts also viewed its interpretation of Title IX as problematic. Trump’s Feb. 5 “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order asserted that transgender girls can’t play girls’ sports under that federal law. But Title IX has never required schools to exclude them, and Trump’s order can’t rewrite federal law, said Deborah Brake, a professor at University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

“The president can put out an executive order saying anything he wants,” Brake said, but “there has never been a court decision interpreting Title IX to require the exclusion of transgender girls from girls’ sports.”

The president is trying to crush the opposition. He’s trying to crush Maine.

—David Webbert, civil rights attorney

In a statement, the agency reiterated that Maine could lose federal funding if it didn’t comply with its position. “HHS will investigate and enforce Title IX to the full extent permitted by law to uphold fairness, safety, dignity, and biological truth in women’s and girls’ educational athletic opportunities. Men have no place in women’s sports,” it said.

The USDA investigation of the University of Maine, launched on a Saturday, the day after Mills’ exchange with Trump, also is unusual. In announcing the investigation, the department said $100 million to the university was at risk because of the state’s “blatant disregard” of Trump’s order; a university system spokesperson said that amount reflected multiple years of funding.

Then came a series of questions, according to records obtained by the Bangor Daily News and ProPublica. At 10:50 a.m. the following Tuesday, a USDA official sent a University of Maine official 10 yes-or-no questions about its transgender athlete policies — and gave her 1 hour, 10 minutes to respond. The officials agreed to discuss the questions over a Zoom call, and, about five hours after that call, the USDA sent a list of follow-up questions. The agency wanted those answers by 1 p.m. the following day.

Sherron Jernigan, a USDA civil rights director for the animal and plant inspection service, sent the questions:

“Does the University of Maine System provide sex-separated toilet, locker room, and shower facilities for male student athletes and female student athletes?” The university answered “yes.”

“Does the University of Maine System permit a biological male to participate in individual or team contact sports with biological females?” The university answered “no.”

The university’s Title IX coordinator told the USDA that none of the seven universities within the system has transgender athletes participating in NCAA-sanctioned sports. (Of the more than 500,000 students who compete on NCAA teams across the country, fewer than 10 are transgender, the league’s president recently told a U.S. Senate panel.)

In her response to follow-up questions, Liz Lavoie, the university’s Title IX coordinator, added that the USDA had not given the university “any explanation as to the basis or scope of its inquiry, or the steps in the process.”

“Further, we have been given mere hours to respond to both sets of questions and we are responding in good faith but find the approach concerning given the lack of official service and the informal nature that the questions and interview have been presented,” Lavoie wrote.

The USDA did not issue any findings after the questioning, but the agency already is taking action. On Tuesday, the university said the USDA had frozen funding that could affect research on everything from the contamination of Maine farms by forever chemicals to the sustainability of Maine’s lobster industry. Last fiscal year, the USDA awarded nearly $30 million to the University of Maine.

A USDA spokesperson said the agency would not comment on a pending investigation.

Webbert, the civil rights attorney, called the federal government’s inquiries “a show.”

“It’s a political move dressed up, very barely, with a legal process, but it’s a fake legal process. So it is very concerning because they’re not even trying to make it look like it’s due process,” he said. “It reeks of pure politics.”

Doing business with the Federal Government is a privilege.

—Government press release

The federal government has made no effort to hide the ideological perspective that its various inquiries are seeking to enforce in Maine and the rest of the county, according to documents obtained by ProPublica and the Bangor Daily News. In announcing its action in Maine, HHS said it wanted to “restore biological truth to the federal government” and in its findings cited an article from OutKick, a Fox-owned conservative news site with a mission of “exposing the destructive nature of ‘woke’ activism.”

Meanwhile, the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education — which does have a mandate to investigate gender-based discrimination in schools and, with more than 500 people, dwarfs most of the nation’s civil rights enforcement divisions — seemed to conclude that Maine was violating Title IX before it finished investigating.

The press release announcing the launch of the investigation quoted the department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, Craig Trainor: “It is shameful that Governor Mills refuses to stand with women and girls. Her rejection of the antidiscrimination obligations that Maine voluntarily accepted when it agreed to receive federal taxpayer dollars is unlawful.”

Trainor linked to “credible local reporting” around the pole vaulter in his letter to Maine officials announcing the civil rights investigation. The report came from the Maine Wire, an online outlet founded by a conservative think tank based in the state. The office hasn’t made contact with Maine since it notified state agencies of its investigation, according to the Maine agencies.

The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Maine’s governor never believed her state would receive an impartial investigation. “I imagine that the outcome of this politically directed investigation is all but predetermined,” Mills said in a statement after the Education Department investigation began. She has since declined to discuss her view of Maine’s transgender athlete policy.

But she has reiterated that Trump legally can’t force the state to violate its own law, the Maine Human Rights Act, which prevents discrimination based on gender identity.

Mainers aren’t sure what this full-court press will mean for their state; keeping up with it is hard enough. State Sen. Joe Rafferty, a Democrat who co-chairs the Legislature’s committee on education and cultural affairs, expressed disbelief when a reporter informed him that HHS’ investigation only lasted four days. He wasn’t aware it had officially started.

“That is why I think part of this is a mirage,” he said of the various investigations. The eventual resolution, he said, is more likely to be settled in a courtroom.

Indeed, HHS referred its finding to the DOJ, which can sue Maine to remove its federal funding. (The health agency also expanded its investigation last week to include the Maine Principals’ Association and the Maine high school where the pole vaulter is a student, according to the agency.) The results of that lawsuit could have significant implications, said Brake, the law professor. Not once since Congress enacted Title IX in 1972 has the DOJ ever cut off funding for a violation.

The transgender student athlete singled out by Republican politicians attends Greely High School in Cumberland. (Callie Ferguson/Bangor Daily News)

All the federal attention has been unsettling to some Mainers, welcomed by others who don’t want transgender girls playing girls’ sports and disruptive to the 625-student Greely High School, which the transgender pole vaulter attends.

“It’s just upsetting to everybody at school to be the center of attention and focus. It’s unnerving to go to school and the school is surrounded by police and reporters on every corner,” Gia Drew, who leads a statewide LGBTQ+ advocacy group called EqualityMaine, said of what she’s hearing from the community. “It’s hard to focus on a calculus test when your friends are under attack. It affects not just trans people but everyone who is part of a school system.”

After state Rep. Laurel Libby, a Republican from Auburn, singled out the student on her Facebook page and brought Trump’s attention to Maine, parents in the school district planned to show support by displaying signs and handing out treats before classes began, said state Rep. Christina Mitchell, a Democrat who represents Cumberland, home to Greely High School. She’s also a school board member in the district.

But there were television trucks and a police presence surrounding the school, so parents decided not to add to the commotion.

The Bangor Daily News and ProPublica reached out to the family of the student athlete but received no response. Mitchell said other students, including the transgender student’s teammates and competitors, are supportive of her. “Nobody was making a fuss,” she said.

And many in Maine don’t want a fuss. Even as Mills’ response to Trump made some proud — you can now buy “See you in court” T-shirts — others recognized that it launched Maine into the nation’s consciousness. “You watch it and feel like: ‘Oh, all eyes will be here. This will be something big,’” said Pitts, with MaineTransNet.

Libby and other Republican lawmakers have welcomed the chance to amplify their viewpoint that allowing transgender girls in sports is unsafe and discriminates against girls. Another Republican lawmaker introduced a bill to the Legislature to require transgender athletes to compete on teams matching the gender they were assigned at birth.

State Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, in February. She singled out the transgender student on her Facebook page and brought Trump’s attention to Maine. (Linda Coan O’Kresik/Bangor Daily News)

“All of the accomplishments of women over the years are being erased by men masquerading as women, erasing us from the history books,” Libby said in a weekly address from Maine House Republicans.

While Libby has been censured by Democrats who control the Maine House for her initial Facebook post about the pole vaulter, she has continued to make appearances on right-wing media to urge the governor to stop supporting the right of transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports. On Tuesday, she filed a lawsuit in Maine District Court against the state’s House speaker over the censure, accusing him of stripping her voting rights “in retaliation for protected speech on a highly important and hotly debated matter of public concern,” according to the complaint. Her party has rallied around her and her cause.

“Allowing biological boys to compete with our girls, is not only unpopular, and unfair, but it is also illegal,” Republican House Minority Leader Billy Bob Faulkingham of Winter Harbor said in a written statement. “Governor Mills should abandon this indefensible position and uphold Title IX protections for our girls.”

Maine institutions being targeted by the federal government have continued to follow state law. And at a regularly scheduled school board meeting at Greely High School on Thursday night, the board president pledged the district’s “unwavering support” of all students.

Mitchell said that Maine may be the federal government’s target now, but other states could be next.

“I think you have to stand up to it. Whatever you think is right, you have to stand up for it, because, if you don’t, it’ll just keep going and spread to other places,” Mitchell said. “We’re a small state, but if you give an inch, you know?”

Eli Hager contributed reporting.

by Eric Umansky

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In the fall of 2022, the New York Police Department began posting videos online to promote one of its latest initiatives: the Community Response Team, an elite unit formed under the city’s new mayor, Eric Adams.

Punctuated by dramatic music and quick cuts, the first video, dubbed “True Blue NYPD Finest,” looked like the TV show “Cops.” Officers run and shout as they chase people joyriding on motorbikes and ATVs.

One points a Taser at a motorcyclist and his passenger. Others tackle a rider, pinning him to the ground. Still others chase a motorbike onto the sidewalk, endangering nearby pedestrians.

Within the NYPD, department officials were disturbed by what they saw. “I threw red flags,” said Matthew Pontillo, a former chief who noted what he called “constitutional concerns” in the footage. But Pontillo and two former department executives say that when they raised the videos and the officers’ conduct with one of the unit’s leaders, he pushed back and complained to an unlikely party: the mayor himself.

If Adams was troubled by the unit’s actions, he hasn’t shown it. Instead, for more than two years, the mayor has repeatedly championed the CRT and his allies who run it, even as NYPD officials have warned its policing has been too aggressive.

In 2023, for example, Pontillo wrote a scathing internal audit after finding that some CRT officers were wrongfully stopping New Yorkers and failing to document the incidents. Weeks later, the mayor took to Instagram to boost the unit. “Turning out with the team,” he wrote, showing a photo of him wearing a wide smile and khaki pants, CRT’s official uniform.

The mayor has been so closely connected to the unit, former senior officials said, that at one point he had special access to a livestream of the team’s body-worn cameras.

“The unit effectively reported directly to City Hall,” recalled a former top NYPD official with direct knowledge of the interactions, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal. “If you raised concerns, they would go directly to the mayor. All the time. It was insanity.”

In 2023, Mayor Eric Adams posted a photo of himself with the Community Response Team, in which he wore the unit’s uniform, khaki pants. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

In a few instances, after getting a call from one of the unit’s leaders, the mayor questioned department lawyers who objected to officers’ actions, another former official recalled. In one case, the mayor demanded to know the name of the lawyer and asked whether they were stating the law or just their opinions. The CRT leader, Kaz Daughtry, then ignored the lawyer’s objections, the official said. (Daughtry said he always cooperated with department lawyers.)

The dynamic underscores a central irony around policing during the Adams administration: As a former police captain, Adams railed against the injustices of gung-ho policing, but as the mayor, he has embraced a unit that perpetuates it.

Within the department, Adams’ views are clear. “Our mayor has given us the mandate to start playing offense out here,” one of CRT’s other leaders, John Chell, told a local TV station in 2023, months after the promotional videos.

The CRT has played a central role in carrying out Adams’ public safety priorities, from breaking up college campus protests to cracking down on illegal motorcycles and shuttering unlicensed cannabis shops.

The fallout for New Yorkers has been significant.

An officer chasing unlicensed motorcyclists killed a rider after swerving into him, body-camera footage shows. A commander punched a driver and kicked him in the head, according to cellphone video posted to social media. Officers stopped a young man without apparent cause, according to the audit, and, when he complained, a supervisor slammed him into a car window.

Body-Camera Footage Shows CRT Officer Shoving Man Into a Car Window (Body-camera video obtained by ProPublica)

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The questionable conduct has sometimes extended into the bizarre. In November, a CRT officer repeatedly grabbed and squeezed a man’s genitals without searching him elsewhere, according to an investigation by the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board that was obtained by ProPublica. Police then cited the man for littering.

“When you put your thumb on the scale, it tips the culture,” Pontillo said. “And that starts with the mayor.”

Adams declined to be interviewed for this story. A mayoral spokesperson provided a statement that said, in part, “While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to public safety and we are always working to improve operations, CRT has been an important addition to the NYPD’s mission to ensure community members are both safe and feel safe.” She added that the mayor has always instructed the team to follow the guidance of department lawyers.

ProPublica interviewed more than a dozen former and current members of the NYPD, reviewed internal department records and watched video footage of several police encounters.

As Adams faces calls to resign over federal corruption charges, our reporting provides a new window into how the mayor has wielded power — and whom he’s entrusted to carry out his vision for public safety.

Among them are Daughtry and Chell, longtime leaders of the CRT. The two are allies of the mayor and were photographed with him at a group lunch in Washington in January around President Donald Trump’s inauguration. An NYPD spokesperson said they were part of a department contingent that was there “to assist with security efforts.”

Within law enforcement circles, Chell and Daughtry have long stirred controversy.

Chell shot a young man in the back in 2008, killing him. He was not criminally charged and has denied any wrongdoing. Chell said he fired by accident, but a jury in a civil suit determined the shooting was intentional. He now holds the NYPD’s top uniformed position, where he oversees a wide swath of the department. (Chell did not respond to requests for comment.)

Daughtry has been found by the Civilian Complaint Review Board to have repeatedly engaged in misconduct, including for pointing a gun and threatening to kill a motorcyclist. Adams recently chose him to be deputy mayor for public safety, a role that will likely place him at the center of the city’s response to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. (Daughtry did not respond to questions about his record. When the New York Daily News reported on it in 2023, he said, “At the end of the day, we have a job to do.”)

Overall, more than half of the officers assigned to the CRT have been found to have engaged in misconduct at least once in their career, according to a ProPublica analysis of Civilian Complaint Review Board records. That compares with about 15% of officers across the NYPD. More than 40 have three or more cases of substantiated misconduct. The supervisor who shoved a man into the car window had 28.

“It’s not like they’re taking the best of the best,” said a current senior officer who spoke with ProPublica on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “They’re grabbing a bunch of cowboys and just letting them loose on the city.”

A spokesperson for the NYPD touted the team’s record, saying it has confiscated nearly 4,000 motorbikes and ATVs, as well as hundreds of fake license plates and guns.

But even department leaders have at times found it hard to track the team’s work.

The 2023 audit of CRT, obtained by ProPublica, found that officers were going out on patrols even though they weren’t actually assigned to the team, making it difficult for commanders to track which officers were involved in particular actions. They were also frequently turning on their body-worn cameras too late to record full incidents, in violation of the patrol guide.

A recent report by a city watchdog slammed the unit for its secrecy. Citing a “lack of public transparency,” the report noted CRT has no required training or policies on officers’ conduct. “The absence of clear rules,” the report concluded, “limits NYPD’s ability to effectively oversee CRT.”

The NYPD spokesperson said Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who took office in November, is making changes. Among them, Tisch ordered hundreds of officers to return to their assigned units. “She will continue to review the department, including CRT, and make any changes necessary to ensure accountability and strengthen our ability to fight crime,” the spokesperson said.

A Unit “Acting Recklessly”

CRT Officer Drove Into Motorcyclist Samuel Williams (Body-camera video obtained and edited by ProPublica)

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Samuel Williams died in 2023 after an encounter with the CRT that lasted about a second.

It was Memorial Day weekend, and the Bronx man had gone riding on his motorbike after feeding his 6-year-old daughter breakfast and kissing her goodbye. He was crossing the University Heights bridge when CRT officers driving in the opposite direction spotted him.

Unlicensed motorcyclists joyriding in the city have long been a nuisance to New Yorkers and of particular concern to Adams. “We need to hold these drivers accountable,” Adams said when first running for mayor.

That day on the bridge, CRT officer Raymond Perez decided to take drastic action. Body-camera footage shows that he swerved his unmarked police car across the yellow line and into oncoming traffic, hitting Williams head-on and sending him flying through the air.

Officers found Williams splayed across the hood of a nearby car, suffering horrific injuries. His right leg was bent unnaturally — the tibia so badly broken it pierced his jeans, according to a report from civilian investigators.

In the body-camera footage, Williams can be heard screaming in pain. “Why would you all hit me?” he asks between moans. “For a fucking dirt bike, are you serious?” Williams begged the officers for help. Instead, they pushed him against the car hood and handcuffed him.

Williams, seen here with his daughter, died after CRT officer Raymond Perez hit the motorcycle he was riding head-on. (Courtesy of the Williams Family)

Perez did not respond to requests for comment, but the NYPD previously said the officer was trying to pull Williams over.

Williams’ mother, Joyce Fogg, soon got a call that there had been an accident and her son was in the hospital. When Fogg arrived, she found police guarding Williams’ door and refusing to let anyone in. “They didn’t want nobody talking to him,” Fogg said.

By the time Williams’ sister, Sha-Sha Prince, was allowed into the room, she recalled, “he was covered in a sheet.”

After an autopsy, the New York medical examiner listed Williams’ cause of death as “complications following blunt injuries.”

His family never heard from anyone at the NYPD. They did, however, get a bill from the city demanding $3,429.23 for the damage Williams caused to the police car when officers ran into him. (The bill was rescinded after the news organization The City reported it.)

The family is now suing the city and the police. “It was CRT doing what they do, acting recklessly, and Sammy is not with us today as a result,” said their lawyer, Jaime Santana. (In a response to the suit, the city said Williams’ “culpable conduct caused or contributed, in whole or in part,” to his injuries.)

The NYPD said Perez, as punishment, had forfeited 13 days of vacation. The department’s website shows the officer is still with the CRT.

“We Will Avoid Mistakes of the Past”

Adams has not always embraced aggressive police units. About 25 years ago, he launched a campaign to shutter one after its officers fired 41 shots at an unarmed man named Amadou Diallo. The killing was just the latest in a long trail of violence and abuse by the so-called Street Crimes Unit. Its motto was “We Own The Night.”

At the time, Adams was a 38-year-old NYPD lieutenant and leader of a group of Black officers that spoke out against police brutality.

To bring attention to the abuses, Adams orchestrated City Council testimony by a disguised officer who had been in the unit.

He sat next to the officer as she laid out a pattern of rampant racism. The NYPD fired the officer an hour after her testimony. But Adams kept up his campaign, and the unit was eventually closed.

Adams, right, at a City Council hearing in New York in 1999 when he was a 38-year-old NYPD lieutenant. He orchestrated the testimony of a disguised officer, center, from the Street Crimes Unit who spoke about racism within the unit. (Librado Romero/The New York Times/Redux)

In the years that followed, Adams continued to push for change. He gave key testimony in a historic lawsuit that challenged the NYPD’s use of a tactic known as stop-and-frisk, where officers were stopping, questioning and frisking residents without reasonable suspicion. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Adams spoke powerfully about how police leadership needs to step up. “We have to create a culture of zero tolerance,” Adams said. “That accountability really starts at the top.”

But Adams had a different focus when he ran for mayor a year later. Amid concern over rising crime, Adams positioned himself as a former officer who would keep New Yorkers safe. One of his main proposals was to take guns off the streets by bringing back a refashioned Street Crimes Unit. “We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater,” Adams said. “We can do it right.”

After he took office, Adams announced the creation of new roving anti-crime units. “We will avoid mistakes of the past,” Adams said at a press conference. “These officers will be identifiable as NYPD, they will have body cameras and they will have enhanced training and oversight.”

The units were dubbed Neighborhood Safety Teams, and officers in them did get more oversight.

But a few months later, Daughtry, Chell and another Adams ally created the CRT. The unit was essentially off the books — it had never gone through the NYPD’s process for creating teams, there was no announcement at its debut and many of its members weren’t formally assigned to the group.

“It was one of those teams where everyone is a ghost,” said Pontillo, the former chief.

Even top NYPD officials were kept in the dark. When they eventually learned of the CRT’s existence, they were befuddled, noting the launch of the similar much-publicized effort at nearly the same time. “What’s the difference between NSTs and CRTs?” said one of the former NYPD officials. “If you can answer that, lemme know.”

CRT Commander Punched Unarmed Driver and Kicked Him in the Head (Cellphone video obtained by ProPublica)

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Operating in the Shadows

The CRT began to make waves after the department started posting videos in the fall of 2022. In one 38-minute spot, Chell described how the team was created to address so-called quality-of-life issues, such as unlicensed motorbikes and ATVs.

“We attacked quality of life,” Chell says. “Our Community Response Team was all over the city of New York. And I’ll tell you this, it’s been highly, highly successful.” As he speaks, the video shows roughly a dozen CRT members, with Adams standing in the middle.

A still from a CRT promotional video showing Adams standing among members of the team. (NYPD)

By the spring of 2023, it was not only NYPD officials who were asking questions. Pontillo, a top department oversight official at the time, said the federal monitor’s office charged with overseeing the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk called him to ask about the CRT. Pontillo told ProPublica that he went to Chell, who told him, wrongly, the team was only a short-lived experiment.

“There was an effort to conceal the reality and conduct of CRT,” Pontillo recalled.

Neither Chell nor the NYPD responded to questions about the exchange.

Another instance of secrecy involved body-worn cameras. Early in 2023, the team had purchased new models that allowed users to send live feeds to select individuals — including the mayor — but unit leaders had not informed others at the NYPD, according to an official’s notes from the time.

For weeks, videos from the new cameras were not stored in the NYPD’s main database for footage, rendering it invisible to the department lawyers responsible for sharing evidence in criminal and civil cases. “Footage wasn’t being produced for discovery,” recalled one former department executive. “We lost our minds.”

Jerome Greco, head of digital forensics at Legal Aid Society, said failing to turn over the footage “could get cases dismissed. It could have significant consequences, and frankly it should.”

It was after the body-camera issue that Pontillo wrote his audit of CRT, which flagged the team’s aggressive policing. Adams’ first police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, ordered commanders to gather and discuss it. But the conversation didn’t go far.

After meeting with the mayor that same day, Sewell resigned with no explanation. She did not respond to requests for comment for this story. But a former official close to her said she had grown tired of being undermined by Adams and his deputies.

“I don’t think Sewell resigned because of CRTs,” the former official said. “But it was another thing on the list.”

As for Pontillo, he said he was offered a choice: be demoted five ranks or retire. He chose the latter. The NYPD has not commented. The department previously told the news organization The City that leadership changes are common when a new commissioner arrives, as happened here.

CRT members, in their trademark khakis, breached Hamilton Hall at Columbia University on April 30, 2024. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters) Mayoral Priorities

Over the past year, the CRT’s actions have often reflected the mayor’s priorities.

Last spring, for example, Adams became the public face of opposition to demonstrations at Columbia University over the war in Gaza. Blaming “professional outside agitators,” he said, “This must end now.” That night, khaki-wearing CRT officers led the way in breaching a building that had been barricaded by protesters. The NYPD made a video of the operation, set to dramatic music.

Days later, the mayor announced a new initiative to close down unlicensed cannabis shops. The CRT was again at the forefront of the operation.

Surveillance footage from one store shows officers jumping over the counter to grab and arrest the shopkeeper after he had asked to see a court order. “When a cop tells you to do something, you fucking do it,” one officer said.

It is difficult to tally the number of civilians who have had these types of encounters with the CRT. The NYPD does not disclose data about the team, as it does for most other units.

But over the past two years, New Yorkers have filed at least 200 complaints of improper use of force by CRT members, according to Civilian Complaint Review Board records obtained by ProPublica. Among them was the incident with Williams, the motorcyclist who died. The similarly sized Neighborhood Safety Teams had about half as many complaints.

Others have also been hurt by the team’s high-risk tactics. About a month after police ran into Williams, Daughtry and other officers pursued an alleged car thief into New Jersey, according to an internal report. Daughtry turned his car on the road in an attempt to block the driver, who slammed into it. The man was seriously injured after he fled the scene and jumped over the side of the highway.

The report noted that Daughtry did not have his camera on during the chase.

Kaz Daughtry was just tapped to be Adams’ deputy mayor for public safety. (Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times/Redux)

Chuck Wexler, who has studied chases as head of the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum, said Daughtry and the others shouldn’t have even started a pursuit. Given that there hadn’t been a violent crime, Wexler said, “why would you engage in a high risk chase that puts officers and civilians in danger?”

Neither Daughtry nor the NYPD responded to questions about the incident.

Tisch, the new commissioner, ordered officers in January to curtail chases. Meanwhile, Daughtry has not been punished, according to disciplinary records.

Instead, he was promoted in July 2023, about two weeks after the chase, for what his official bio described as his “significant contributions as a leader and trailblazer.”

“Let me tell you,” Adams said at a press conference last November, “Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry, you don’t realize how much this young man has really changed the game of policing in this city.”

In January, asked by an interviewer on YouTube about Daughtry, the mayor said: “Love Kaz, man.”

Daughtry, just named as a deputy mayor, regularly boasts on social media about the CRT. One Instagram post from last summer showed dozens of officers posing in Central Park. “Your Community Response Teams own the night,” Daughtry wrote. It was an echo of the motto of the street crime unit that Adams had once fought to shutter.

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by Richard A. Webster, Verite News

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

Update, March 11, 2025: A federal judge has temporarily barred Louisiana from carrying out its first nitrogen gas execution, which had been scheduled for March 18.

Attorney Scott Greene warned those present in a Louisiana courtroom last September that the video they were about to see was disturbing. Created as part of a murder investigation, the 1993 tape showed a dentist repeatedly grinding a dental mold of the suspect’s teeth into the face and arm of a dead toddler during a post-mortem examination.

Those marks, which prosecutors decades ago had told jurors came from the suspect, were critical evidence in convicting Jimmie Chris Duncan, who has spent the past 27 years on death row for the killing of his girlfriend’s daughter. They were also a fraud, Greene argued at the appeals hearing.

Nine other prisoners have walked free after being convicted in part on inaccurate evidence presented by Michael West, the dentist, or his pathologist partner, Dr. Steven Hayne, once stars of the Mississippi forensics field. Seven of those convictions had involved bite mark identification analysis, a discipline that has been called into question. And three of the freed men had been sentenced to die.

There is only one person who still awaits an execution date based on evidence produced by the pair: Duncan.

Since his 1998 conviction, Duncan has maintained his innocence. Now, with a tough-on-crime Republican governor in office, he faces the very real threat of being put to death as Louisiana is slated to resume executions after a 15-year pause, with the first scheduled for March 18.

Louisiana has a long record of convicting and sentencing to death people later found to be innocent. In the past three decades, the state has exonerated 11 people facing execution, among the highest such numbers in the country, according to The National Registry of Exonerations.

Prosecutorial misconduct such as withholding evidence accounted for about 60% of wrongful convictions in Louisiana, nearly twice the national average, according to the registry.

And yet, upon taking office last year, Gov. Jeff Landry, a staunch death penalty advocate, has attempted to expedite executions. Louisiana has not put anyone to death since 2010 because of the unavailability of execution drugs. Landry recently approved the use of nitrogen gas, a controversial method allowed in only three other states.

“For too long, Louisiana has failed to uphold the promises made to victims of our State’s most violent crimes,” Landry said in a February news release. “The time for broken promises has ended; we will carry out these sentences and justice will be dispensed.”

Louisiana prosecutors say they have no doubt Duncan is guilty and insist he be put to death without delay. In a Jan. 9 brief, they acknowledged questions surrounding the credibility of bite mark analysis but said there is no consensus on whether it is junk science. They also downplayed the importance of the evidence presented by the dentist, saying it was not needed to connect Duncan to the crime scene, despite his defense team’s argument that it was the only physical evidence linking Duncan to the child’s death.

This is the purest manifestation of the harm of junk science, bad lawyering and pro-prosecution bias that one can imagine.

—Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation at the Innocence Project

Robert S. Tew, district attorney for Louisiana’s 4th Judicial District, and Michael Ruddick, the lead prosecutor in the case, declined through a spokesperson to be interviewed, citing the case’s ongoing nature. Neither answered follow-up questions about allegations of prosecutorial misconduct or of West manufacturing the bite marks.

In Duncan’s original trial, the video of the dentist’s post-mortem examination was never shown in court. Nor did prosecutors show it to their own expert testifying in the case. And yet, they used photographs of the bite mark evidence prepared by West even though they chose not to put him on the witness stand because he had been temporarily suspended by a professional board for a pattern of errors.

As defense expert Dr. Lowell Levine watched the video during last year’s hearing as part of Duncan’s post-conviction appeal, he recoiled.

“It’s a fraud, simply put,” Levine, former president of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, said from the witness stand.

Dr. Lowell Levine, a defense expert, testified in a September hearing as part of Jimmie Chris Duncan’s post-conviction appeal over the death of his girlfriend’s daughter. He is quoted in a brief summarizing Duncan’s case following his appeal hearing. (Obtained by Verite News and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

The bite marks are not the only evidence in Duncan’s case that has been cast into doubt by the defense team. A jailhouse informant who claimed Duncan confessed to the crime has since recanted his testimony. And in what Duncan’s current attorneys described in a 2022 court filing as a “bizarre, one-sided” deal, prosecutors and Duncan’s previous defense team had agreed not to present evidence at his original trial that his current team says indicates the child could have died due to a seizure caused by prior head injuries.

In a January court filing, Ruddick dismissed all the new evidence presented by Duncan’s current defense team, accusing it of “throwing another handful of spaghetti on the wall to see if anything can stick.” He wrote that the video of West does not show what the defense claims and said the dentist was simply doing his job.

West did not respond to emailed requests for an interview or questions about the case that were hand-delivered to his Mississippi home.

In a 2023 interview with The New Republic, however, West said that while he believes Duncan is guilty, he does not believe he should be executed. “You can be 99.9999999%, but you will never be 100%,” he said, adding, “It is a lot easier to get you out of jail than it is to get you out of the cemetery.”

Duncan’s fate now rests in the hands of a judge, who is expected to issue a ruling on his appeal in the coming months. The court can either grant Duncan a new trial or decide that his original verdict stands. Duncan’s defense team would not grant Verite News and ProPublica an interview with him.

“This is the purest manifestation of the harm of junk science, bad lawyering and pro-prosecution bias that one can imagine,” said attorney Chris Fabricant with the Innocence Project in New York, who is part of Duncan’s legal team.

He said moving forward with Duncan’s execution would not amount to justice, as Landry purports; it would be murder.

The Original Charge: Negligent Homicide

On Dec. 18, 1993, Detective Chris Sasser pressed record on a tape deck as he sat across from Duncan at the West Monroe Police Department headquarters. Haley Oliveaux had been pronounced dead just three hours earlier. In a clipped Southern drawl, the 13-year veteran officer instructed Duncan to “tell us exactly what happened.”

The 25-year-old sniffled and breathed deeply, then spoke, his voice barely above a whisper: “I got up this morning and I fed the baby. …”

At the time of Haley’s death, Duncan was living with Haley’s mother, Allison Oliveaux, in West Monroe, a struggling town about 280 miles northwest of New Orleans. Duncan’s father, Bennie, described the couple’s relationship as strained but said his son adored Haley, even though he wasn’t her father. “If the baby got sick, he was the one carrying her to the doctor,” Bennie said.

On the morning Haley died, Oliveaux left for work around 8:30, Duncan said. He got the toddler out of bed, fed her oatmeal, then left her in the bathtub while he washed dishes. At some point, Duncan said, he heard a loud noise.

“I thought I heard her splashing in the tub. I thought she was just playing,” he told Sasser, his voice starting to quiver. “I went in there and she was face down in the tub.”

Duncan said he yanked the 23-month-old girl out of the bathwater and attempted CPR. She spit up oatmeal but didn’t regain consciousness. “I was shaking her, holding her and just shaking her as much as I could,” he told the detective.

He ran next door with Haley, screaming for help. His neighbors also tried CPR without success. Someone called 911. Paramedics arrived and failed to revive the girl.

“Nobody could wake her up,” Duncan said, sobbing uncontrollably as he recounted the scene to the detective.

Duncan and his girlfriend, Allison Oliveaux, were living in this home at the time of 23-month-old Haley Oliveaux’s death. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)

Haley was taken to a local hospital where she was pronounced dead less than an hour later. Child welfare workers and a coroner examined her and noticed some scratches and a faded bruise on her face but no bite marks, according to recent court filings. Sasser said he didn’t see any bite marks either but noted the bruising and “extensive injuries to her anus” in legal filings.

The detective searched the couple’s home for any evidence of sexual assault but didn’t find a trace of blood or semen — not on Duncan, his clothing or any of the items within the house. Later that evening, Sasser arrested Duncan for negligent homicide, which carried a maximum sentence at the time of five years in Louisiana.

That charge would only stick for a few hours.

Shortly after Duncan’s arrest, law enforcement and prosecutors would send the girl’s body to a morgue 120 miles to the east in Jackson, Mississippi, where West and Hayne were awaiting its arrival.

The Pathologist and the Dentist

At the time of Haley’s death, Hayne and West dominated the autopsy business in Mississippi and were making inroads into Louisiana. Hayne could turn autopsies around quickly, and his findings nearly always supported the working theory of law enforcement, implicating their main suspect in whatever crime they were investigating, defense attorneys in multiple cases said.

Hayne had found an ideal collaborator in West, one of the leading experts in forensic bite mark analysis, a relatively new science that claimed to be able to match bite marks on a victim with the teeth of the suspected biter.

On multiple occasions, Hayne claimed to be performing up to 90% of all autopsies in Mississippi and boasted that he completed 1,200 to 1,800 procedures in a single year. If true, that would far exceed the recommended annual maximum of 250 set by the National Association of Medical Examiners. When pathologists surpass that number, they risk engaging in shortcuts and making mistakes, according to the organization.

Hayne, who died in 2020, had a long, documented history of errors, according to news reports, court records and books written about the pair in the years after Duncan’s conviction. In one case, he testified that he removed a victim’s spleen when in fact it had already been removed prior to the man’s death. In another, he said he found in a female child a fully formed prostate gland, an organ that does not exist in girls.

Hayne, however, dismissed questions over his workload, saying he had a superhuman capacity for labor, according to the 2018 book “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist” by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington. “I work at a much more efficient level and much harder than most people,” Hayne said, according to court testimony from a 2003 murder trial outlined in the book. “I was blessed with that and cursed with that, but that’s what I carry with me.”

West held an equally high opinion of his own abilities. When a defense attorney in an unrelated case later asked how often he is wrong, the dentist replied that his error rate is “something less than my savior, Jesus Christ.”

In 1993, after receiving Haley’s body, Hayne performed what Duncan’s defense described in legal filings as a preliminary examination and noted what he believed to be bite marks on the body. He called Sasser that same night to report his findings, saying there was also evidence of sexual assault. Shortly after that call, the detective told the DA to upgrade Duncan’s charge from negligent homicide to first-degree murder, which can be punishable by death.

The next morning, West examined the girl’s body and, according to the video he recorded, appeared to manufacture the bite marks that confirmed Hayne’s findings.

West has said he was simply using what he called a “direct comparison” technique, in which he presses a mold of a person’s teeth directly onto the location of suspected bite marks because it provides the most accurate results, according to a 2020 interview with Oxygen.com.

At Duncan’s trial in 1998, Hayne took the stand. West didn’t.

By then, West was serving a one-year suspension from the American Board of Forensic Odontology for “overstating his credentials” and misidentifying tooth marks. So prosecutors brought in another bite mark expert, Dr. Neal Riesner, to testify — but they never showed him the West video. Instead, Riesner commented only on photographs taken from West’s examination, a move by prosecutors that Duncan’s current defense team called an “appalling failure.”

The prosecution had pushed for the West video to remain hidden, arguing to Judge Charles Joiner that the only reason the defense wanted to show it was so it could “drag Dr. West into the case” and “create ancillary issues for the jury to consider.”

Joiner agreed that the video was inadmissible after determining there was nothing on it that would point to Duncan’s innocence. Joiner did not explain his reasoning.

West, in the interview with The New Republic, disputed the merits of his suspension, saying his methods are valid because other people have used them. He said he chose not to testify because of Haley’s physical resemblance to his daughter, and it would have been too emotional for him.

When Hayne took the stand, he testified that Haley had suffered a savage attack in which she was bitten, sexually assaulted, then drowned to cover up the crime. It was later revealed that Hayne had misrepresented his forensics pathology credentials during the trial, according to the Innocence Project.

Haley’s mother did not respond to requests for comment. She had testified during the trial that she never saw Duncan physically or sexually abuse the child and said she told him to follow the doctor’s guidance not to leave Haley unattended in the tub.

First image: Duncan, center, with his family and friends during a visit at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Second image: Duncan’s parents, Sharon and Bennie. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)

After about two weeks of testimony and arguments, the jury found Duncan guilty and later sentenced him to death. Rape, the jury determined, was an aggravating factor that prompted them to recommend the death penalty, even though such charges were never brought. He was taken to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola while prosecutors continued to call upon Hayne and West to help them solve some of the worst crimes in Mississippi and Louisiana.

Cracks, however, continued to grow in the forensics team’s facade. And in a few years, it would completely shatter.

A Broader Pattern of Misconduct

A decade into Duncan’s sentence, two men from Noxubee County in Mississippi walked out of prison after problems emerged with Hayne’s and West’s testimonies used to convict them.

Juries had sentenced Levon Brooks to life in prison and Kennedy Brewer to death after the testimonies connected them to the separate rapes and murders of two 3-year-old girls. In each instance, Hayne conducted an autopsy, during which he found what he characterized as human bite marks. He then brought in West, who confirmed the presence of those bite marks and, after pushing dental molds of suspects’ teeth into the victim’s bodies, connected the marks to the prime suspects identified by police.

Throughout their trials, Brooks and Brewer insisted they were innocent and offered alibis to clear their names.

Their exonerations in 2008 marked the first high-profile cases in which the testimonies of Hayne and West were found by the courts to be riddled with errors and, in some instances, completely fabricated.

In Brooks’ and Brewer’s cases, DNA evidence proved that the two girls were murdered by the same man, Justin Albert Johnson, who was later convicted. Forensic experts determined that the marks Hayne and West said were created by human teeth in the Brewer case were actually created by bugs and crawfish eating away at the girl’s corpse while it floated in a pond. In Brooks’ case, West and Hayne misidentified scrapes as bite marks, according to news reports at the time.

West told Oxygen.com that while he accepts that Johnson confessed to the killings, he doesn’t believe Johnson acted alone and still believes Brooks and Brewer were responsible for the bite marks on the two girls. Brooks died in 2018; Brewer declined to comment through his attorney.

A year after Brooks and Brewer were freed, the National Academy of Sciences issued a damning report on bite mark analysis in which it stated there is “no evidence of an existing scientific basis for identifying an individual to the exclusion of all others.” Other reports found that skin cannot accurately hold the form of teeth, that there is no proof teeth provide unique individual markers and that analysts often have trouble determining if a bite mark is in fact a bite mark and if the source is even human.

Since 1982, there have been 32 people in the United States who were convicted largely due to bite mark evidence and later exonerated, according to the Innocence Project.

Following the exonerations of Brooks and Brewer, civil rights attorneys began to dismantle many of Hayne and West’s most high-profile cases.

When I testified in this case, I believed in the uniqueness of human bite marks. I no longer believe that.

—Michael West

West even admitted that he no longer believed in bite mark analysis in a 2011 deposition that was part of the post-conviction appeal for Leigh Stubbs, who had been sentenced to 44 years in prison for assault. West had testified at her 2001 trial that he found bite marks on the victim’s hip, which he matched to a mold of Stubbs’ teeth. As in Duncan’s case, West is seen on a video using that mold to make bite marks on the victim, who was in a coma at the time, according to Stubbs’ attorney who saw the video. West has said pressing the dental mold against the victim’s flesh was part of his verification method.

Stubbs was exonerated in 2013 after more than a decade in prison.

“When I testified in this case, I believed in the uniqueness of human bite marks. I no longer believe that,” West said during a deposition when a defense attorney asked if he was still confident in his analysis of bite marks. “And if I was asked to testify in this case again, I would say I don’t believe it’s a system that’s reliable enough to be used in court.”

When pressed as to whether he made mistakes in previous cases, West said, “I made bite mark analysis that turned out to be wrong, yes.”

In 2021, the courts overturned Eddie Lee Howard’s murder conviction and death sentence after noting the absence of bite marks in the autopsy photos — and the presence of another man’s DNA on the murder weapon — despite West’s 1994 testimony connecting bite marks to Howard. Hayne had had the body of murder victim Georgia Kemp exhumed and unembalmed three days after her burial because he believed he might have missed several bite marks during her autopsy. West then examined the body and claimed to have found those bite marks.

Mississippi Supreme Court Justice James Kitchens said in his opinion about Howard’s case that West and his methodology have faced “overwhelming rejection by the forensics community,” and that the court “should not uphold a conviction and death sentence on the testimony of a proven unreliable witness, Dr. West.”

Hayne’s reputation had also been unraveling over the years. A Louisiana judge on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals described Hayne as the “now discredited Mississippi coroner” who “lied about his qualifications as an expert and thus gave unreliable testimony about the cause of death” in a 2014 opinion about a different murder case.

Prosecutors Suppressed Evidence

All the while, Duncan, now 56, remained locked behind bars.

During that time, his defense team discovered more examples of what they characterized as prosecutorial misconduct.

Aside from the discredited bite mark analysis, the most damning testimony during Duncan’s trial had come from a jailhouse informant, Michael Cruse, who briefly shared a cell in the Ouachita Correctional Center with more than a dozen people, including Duncan, as he awaited trial.

According to Cruse, a distraught Duncan willingly provided graphic details about raping and killing Haley, insisted he blacked out at one point during the attack and claimed “the devil took over.”

What prosecutors did not reveal at the time, though, is that when Cruse initially wrote to them from his jail cell, he offered to share Duncan’s confession for “obvious” reasons. Cruse, who had been arrested for burglary and was facing up to 12 years in prison, then suggested if the DA helps him, he could return the favor. “If I can work this out perhaps I can help in other areas as well.”

Michael Cruse, a former cellmate of Duncan’s in 1993, wrote a letter to prosecutors offering to testify about an alleged confession Duncan made. Duncan’s defense team claims Cruse did so in exchange for leniency. (Obtained by Verite News and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

After testifying in Duncan’s case, Cruse was given a three-year suspended sentence; prosecutors said in the January brief that his sentence was “not an out of the ordinary plea offer.”

The DA’s office never gave Duncan’s defense team a copy of Cruse’s letter in which he appeared to offer his assistance in exchange for leniency, something that could have been used to undermine his testimony. Duncan’s team, which only learned of the letter years after his conviction, described the transgression as a flagrant violation of a federal law requiring prosecutors to hand over all evidence that could help in their client’s defense.

Prosecutors, in their January filing defending Duncan’s conviction, pointed to a Louisiana Supreme Court rejection of Duncan’s 1999 appeal in which the court stated that even if the letter had been produced, it would not have affected the outcome of the trial.

In November 2022, more than 24 years after Duncan was convicted, his legal team tracked Cruse down and pressed him about the accuracy of his testimony. Cruse admitted to an investigator hired by the defense that Duncan “never said he was guilty” and spent the majority of this time in their jail cell with his “head down … mumbling and crying to himself,” according to Cruse’s statements in the court filings. The defense team also found another cellmate of Duncan’s, Michael Lucas, who said that Cruse was constantly harassing Duncan about the baby’s death, and that Duncan never confessed.

He “just cried over and over again saying he did not do it. He didn’t do it,” Lucas told the investigator, according to court documents filed by the defense.

Ruddick, the lead prosecutor, dismissed the new statements, saying in last year’s appeals hearing that Cruse, who could not be located to testify in 2024, had previously testified twice under oath that Duncan had confessed. Any statement given decades later is worthless hearsay, Ruddick said.

Verite News and ProPublica could not reach Cruse for comment through email or phone calls.

Allegations that Duncan had raped Haley were similarly problematic, according to court filings. Dr. Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist and an expert witness for the defense, said in court last September that Haley’s anal injuries were likely caused by hard stools, constipation or an infection, which can often mimic an assault.

“There’s absolutely no sexual assault,” Melinek said in court after reviewing Haley’s post-mortem exams.

Duncan’s defense team also uncovered evidence, not heard at the first trial, that provided a potential cause of Haley’s death. In the weeks prior to her drowning, Haley had suffered several head injuries, the worst happening when she attempted to climb a chest of drawers and the entire structure fell on her. Haley spent six days in the hospital during which a CT scan showed three skull fractures.

When she was discharged, doctors warned her family to not leave her unattended in a bathtub as she might suffer seizures, according to court filings. Haley spent most of the next two weeks with her maternal grandparents. She returned home to her mother and Duncan the night before she died.

None of that evidence, however, was presented at trial. Louis Scott, who represented Duncan at the time, struck a deal with prosecutors that neither side would raise the issue. Scott’s wife told Verite News and ProPublica that he is experiencing health challenges, including memory loss, but would relay a message to him; Scott has not responded.

In October 2023, Duncan’s current legal team flew to the DA’s office in Monroe to present to prosecutors all the additional evidence it had uncovered. Greene, one of the defense attorneys, said he wanted to give Tew, the DA, a chance to reconsider his position and avoid a miscarriage of justice before the new evidence was laid bare in court. But Tew did not show.

Instead, Ruddick sat patiently through the defense team’s hourlong PowerPoint presentation, asked a question or two and said very little, according to members of the team.

Greene offered to fly back at any time to meet with the DA to further discuss the case. “Ruddick said, ‘I’ll let you know,’” Greene recalled. “And then nothing happened.”

One year later, following the six-day appeals hearing last fall, the state filed its response, making clear what it thought of all the new evidence: “Defendant, Jimmie Duncan, is a murderer.”

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Ginny Monk and Dave Altimari, The Connecticut Mirror

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

The Connecticut legislature is working to overhaul the state's towing laws to protect consumers and lengthen the time before a towed vehicle can be sold.

Drivers, landlords and towing industry leaders testified at the state Capitol on Monday during a public hearing before the state Transportation Committee. It is among the early actions that House Bill 7162 must undergo in the legislative process.

The bill comes in response to an investigation by The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica that showed how state towing laws have come to favor tow companies at the expense of vehicle owners. The news organizations’ reporting found that Connecticut has one of the shortest windows in the country between towing and the potential sale at 15 days for vehicles worth less than $1,500. People with low incomes have been disproportionately impacted by these laws, the news organizations found.

“One single tow can have a profound snowball effect, forcing tenants to choose between paying for towing and paying their rent,” said Rep. Laurie Sweet, D-Hamden, testifying before the committee.

The bill would overhaul Connecticut’s towing laws and address nearly all of the issues raised in CT Mirror and ProPublica’s reporting.

The bill would lengthen the amount of time between a tow and the sale of a vehicle, require tow companies to post certain information about consumer rights and curb aggressive property management companies and towers who remove vehicles from private property. The proposed legislation would still let towers to seek permission to sell a car after 15 days, but they would not be allowed to actually sell a vehicle worth less than $1,500 until 30 days have passed.

Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles Commissioner Tony Guerrera said Monday that sales typically take longer than 15 days right now, and the bill would clarify that process.

Some car owners told CT Mirror and ProPublica that requirements to pay in cash and limited hours made it more difficult for them to get their vehicles back. Sometimes, they said, towing managers refused to release their cars despite showing ownership paperwork because the vehicle wasn’t yet registered in their name, an ambiguity in state law.

The bill includes a slew of consumer protections including mandates that tow companies accept debit and credit card payments, make themselves “reasonably available” on weekends to allow people to get their cars back, issue a 24-hour warning ahead of a private property tow and require that companies accept a title or bill of sale to prove vehicle ownership.

Under the bill, towing companies would also not be allowed to remove a vehicle from a private lot or garage for having an out-of-date parking permit unless it has been expired for more than 15 days.

Melissa Anderson’s car was towed from her Hamden apartment complex parking lot in 2021 because her temporary parking permit had expired just two days before her appointment to register the car at the DMV.

“This is awesome. It’s great news,” Anderson said when informed of the proposed legislation. “I wouldn’t have lost my car, and now maybe others won’t either.”

Guerrera submitted testimony and spoke in favor of the bill on Monday, saying it contains “meaningful new consumer protection measures.”

Guerrera’s written testimony also outlined administrative steps the agency has taken to address issues outlined in the news outlets’ reporting. He said it is updating forms and guidance around the vehicle sale process and has assigned more staff to do “spot field checks” of towing companies.

Connecticut DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera testifies as towing company employees look on. (Shahrzad Rasekh/CT Mirror)

Others who testified in favor of the legislation also highlighted the consumer protection aspects of the bill. People whose vehicles had been towed told lawmakers about the ways their lives had been impacted. Insurance companies said they’d also struggled with Connecticut’s policies.

“This bill is long overdue,” said Rafie Podolsky, a legal aid attorney, in written testimony. “It makes a strong effort to identify and correct abusive practices in the towing industry that have had a serious and detrimental effect on motor vehicle owners.”

Jack Boudreau, whose father and stepmother live in a Hamden apartment complex that was targeted by what residents said was predatory towing, testified Monday that his father had a truck sold under the system the bill seeks to change.

“Due to ongoing fear and badgering from these towing entities, my siblings and I have been personally afraid and cautious to visit/stay with our family due to the ongoing threat of being falsely towed,” Boudreau said in his testimony.

Jeniffer Perez Caraballo, a Hartford resident, told legislators about a time her car was towed from her apartment complex, which had a parking lot shared with other businesses. Her car was buried under ice and snow, and the fees quickly stacked up until she said it didn’t make sense to get it back.

“It soon became easier to just let it go, because we were losing money every single day and we didn’t have a way to get to the place to actually pay,” Perez Caraballo said.

“Why are we OK with people without means being a money generator for others?” she asked.

The bill faces fierce opposition from the towing industry. About a dozen tow trucks lined the parking areas at the Capitol on Monday.

Timothy Vibert, president of the Towing & Recovery Professionals of Connecticut, said towers weren’t sufficiently involved in the drafting of the bill and asked lawmakers to create a working group to study the issue. Vibert, among other towers, also said the bill doesn’t address towing rates, which they said are too low.

“I kind of chuckle about the bill of rights, about us towing people because we are getting inundated with abandoned motor vehicles,” Vibert said of the requirement that towers post information about consumer rights. And, he said, often the issue isn’t that people don’t want to pay, it’s that “they just don’t want the car anymore.”

The bill faces fierce opposition from the towing industry. (Shahrzad Rasekh/CT Mirror)

Landlords and property managers also opposed the bill, saying provisions such as the 24-hour warning would be difficult to maintain and impose unnecessary restrictions. They want to make sure their residents can park without any issues, they said.

“Requiring a 24-hour written notice before towing an unauthorized or improperly parked car would inconvenience responsible tenants, disrupt essential operations like snow removal and create security risks,” Lauren Tagliatela, a member of the Connecticut Apartment Association, said.

Legislative leaders on the Transportation Committee said they expect bipartisan support on the bill.

“Let me be clear, these predatory towing practices are a direct attack on poor people and people who rent, and this bill seeks to address that in a holistic way,” Sweet said.

State Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney, D-New Haven, also issued testimony in support of the bill.

House Republicans on Friday called for a hearing into further reporting from CT Mirror and ProPublica that detailed how a DMV employee was able to sell towed cars and earn thousands. The lack of oversight at the state agency allowed him to trade favors for deep discounts on towed cars, an internal report found, but the agency didn’t take any action against the employee and he still works at the DMV. The employee said in an interview that he didn’t do anything wrong.

“Calling the findings in this latest news report on towed vehicle sales ‘troubling’ would be a massive understatement,” said Friday’s statement from House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, and Government Oversight Committee ranking member Rep. Devin Carney, R-Old Saybrook. “State government is meant to serve residents, not exploit them. The fact that someone can brazenly use their taxpayer-funded position for personal gain is nothing short of outrageous.”

Senate Republicans on Sunday issued a statement as well, calling for bipartisan reform to state law.

“What this investigation has exposed is that consumers are not being properly protected and that the current system is unfair. Fraud and abuse is allowed to fester under the current system. Vulnerable residents are taken advantage of under the current system,” said the statement from Government Oversight Committee ranking member Sen. Rob Sampson, R-Wolcott, General Law Committee ranking member Sen. Paul Cicarella, R-North Haven, and Senate Minority Leader Stephen Harding, R-Brookfield.

The Transportation Committee must vote on the bill by March 24 to move it along to the House.

by Annie Waldman and Lisa Song

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

Employees at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, received internal guidance last week to flag manuscripts, presentations or other communications for scrutiny if they addressed “controversial, high profile, or sensitive” topics. Among the 23 hot-button issues, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica: vaccines, fluoride, peanut allergies, autism.

While it’s not uncommon for the cancer institute to outline a couple of administration priorities, the scope and scale of the list is unprecedented and highly unusual, said six employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. All materials must be reviewed by an institute “clearance team,” according to the records, and could be examined by officials at the NIH or its umbrella agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Staffers and experts worried that the directive would delay or halt the publication of research. “This is micromanagement at the highest level,” said Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

The list touches on the personal priorities of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist who has repeatedly promoted medical conspiracy theories and false claims. He has advanced the idea that rising rates of autism are linked to vaccines, a claim that has been debunked by hundreds of scientific studies. He has also suggested that aluminum in vaccines is responsible for childhood allergies (his son reportedly is severely allergic to peanuts). And he has claimed that water fluoridation — which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called “one of the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20th century” — is an “industrial waste.”

In confirmation hearings in January, Kennedy said that he was not “anti-vaccine,” and that as secretary, he would not discourage people from getting immunized for measles or polio, but he dodged questions about the link between autism and vaccines.

Another term on the list, “cancer moonshot,” refers to a program launched by President Barack Obama in 2016. It was a priority of the Biden administration, which intended for the program to cut the nation’s cancer death rate by at least half and prevent more than 4 million deaths.

The list is “an unusual mix of words that are tied to activities that this administration has been at war with — like equity, but also words that they purport to be in favor of doing something about, like ultraprocessed food,” Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco, said in an email.

A directive on topics requiring prepublication review at the National Cancer Institute was said to be circulated by the agency’s communications team. (Obtained by ProPublica)

The guidance states that staffers “do not need to share content describing the routine conduct of science if it will not get major media attention, is not controversial or sensitive, and does not touch on an administration priority.”

A longtime senior employee at the institute said that the directive was circulated by the institute’s communications team, and the content was not discussed at the leadership level. It is not clear in which exact office the directive originated. The NCI, NIH and HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions. (The existence of the list was first revealed in social media posts on Friday.)

Health and research experts told ProPublica they feared the chilling effect of the new guidance. Not only might it lead to a lengthier and more complex clearance process, it may also cause researchers to censor their work out of fear or deference to the administration’s priorities.

“This is real interference in the scientific process,” said Linda Birnbaum, a former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences who served as a federal scientist for four decades. The list, she said, “just seems like Big Brother intimidation.”

During the first two months of Donald Trump’s second presidency, his administration has slashed funding for research institutions and stalled the NIH’s grant application process.

Kennedy has suggested that hundreds of NIH staffers should be fired and said that the institute should deprioritize infectious diseases like COVID-19 and shift its focus to chronic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity.

Obesity is on the NCI’s new list, as are infectious diseases including COVID-19, bird flu and measles.

The “focus on bird flu and covid is concerning,” Woodruff wrote, because “not being transparent with the public about infectious diseases will not stop them or make them go away and could make them worse.”

by Peter Elkind

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

Lincare, a giant respiratory-device supplier with a long history of fraud settlements and complaints about dismal service, is facing its latest legal challenge: a lawsuit that claims its failures caused the death of a 27-year-old man with Down syndrome.

The case, set to go to trial in state court in St. Louis on March 17, centers on the 2020 death of LeQuon Marquis Vernor, who suffered from severe obstructive sleep apnea and relied on a Lincare-supplied BiPAP machine to help him breathe while sleeping. The lawsuit, filed by his mother, accuses Lincare of negligence after the company took seven days to respond to her report that the device had stopped working.

Lincare, the largest oxygen-device supplier in the U.S., with $2.4 billion in annual revenue, has long faced an array of legal issues, but it’s rare for a claim of wrongful death linked to its service and equipment to go to trial. The litigation over what happened to Vernor offers an unusual window into the company’s interaction with a vulnerable patient. This account is based on extensive court filings, including medical records, deposition excerpts and Lincare’s internal “customer account notes.”

Vernor lived with his mother, who was 64 and on disability, in a tidy public housing apartment complex in Madison, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. He suffered from obstructive sleep apnea, a common problem among adults with Down syndrome that is often exacerbated by obesity. Just under 5 feet tall, Vernor weighed 280 pounds.

Since 2015, Vernor had relied on a BiPAP (or bilevel positive airway pressure) machine, which delivers pressurized air through a mask. The device was prescribed after the Sleep Medicine Center at Washington University in St. Louis found that he repeatedly stopped breathing while he slept. “His airway is extremely crowded,” his doctor wrote in his medical notes at the time. Vernor, who was on Medicare, regularly used the device for 10 to 12 hours while he slept, according to his mother.

He spent his days at New Opportunities, a local nonprofit that provides educational opportunities for people with developmental disabilities. “He was a happy young man,” said Kim Fears, executive director of the program.

On Sept. 11, 2020, Vernor’s BiPAP suddenly started making “a loud buzzing or humming sound,” according to his mother, Sharon Vernor. She called the local Lincare office to report the problem, telling the customer service representative that the breathing machine wasn’t working and that it was “something that he needed” and “could not go without.”

The Lincare representative told her that, because his machine was more than 5 years old, under Medicare rules her son was eligible for a replacement BiPAP but that Lincare would first need to obtain a new order from his doctor. This was required for Lincare to collect rental payments for the new device. The representative later recounted making a call that day to the doctor’s office that went unanswered, then faxing the office a request. (Lincare said it was unable to find a copy of the fax among its voluminous records related to LeQuon Vernor.)

In the meantime, the representative suggested unplugging the malfunctioning BiPAP for 30 minutes. That didn’t fix the problem. The representative then promised, according to the account notes, to have a company respiratory therapist contact Sharon Vernor about the problem “until we get him a new machine.”

But that never happened. No one from Lincare, which had an office about 20 minutes away, came out to fix the broken machine or assess LeQuon Vernor’s condition, according to testimony in the case. (Lincare hadn’t performed any home visits or maintenance on the BiPAP since 2015.) As the company acknowledges, Lincare also never offered to provide Vernor with a “loaner” BiPAP to use while waiting for a new device to arrive. Industry veterans say other companies commonly provide temporary replacements while a patient with a malfunctioning device waits for a repair or a new, permanent one to arrive.

Without his BiPAP, Vernor struggled to sleep (and breathe), snoring loudly throughout the night. The Vernors got no further word from the company until seven days later, on Friday, Sept. 18.

Late that morning, Lincare nurse Ann Marie Eberle called Vernor’s mother, explaining that she would be arriving later that day with his new BiPAP. The doctor’s order had finally arrived. Sharon Vernor prepared a breakfast of sausage and biscuits for her son, who hadn’t yet gotten up. She was surprised when he still didn’t appear; the smell of food usually roused him. About 2 p.m., she went upstairs to wake him up.

She opened the door to find her son motionless in bed, with bloody fluid and foam coming out of his mouth and nose. His body was cold. The broken BiPAP sat on the dresser nearby. Frantic, she called 911. “I think my son’s dead! Oh Lord, please God, NO!” she screamed. “Please hurry!”

An ambulance and police cars were still parked in front of the Vernors’ apartment when Lincare’s Eberle pulled up to deliver the new BiPAP machine. “It just gave you a sunken feeling when you saw that,” Eberle later testified. Sharon Vernor met her at the door in tears. Eberle’s notes state that she “SAT WITH MOTHER UNTIL FAMILY MEMBER ARRIVED. POLICE STILL PRESENT UNTIL CORONER ARRIVED WHEN I LEFT.”

An autopsy completed two days later for the Madison County coroner found LeQuon Vernor’s lungs were a “maroon” color, heavily “congested and edematous” — filled with fluid that made it difficult to breathe. The report attributed Vernor’s death to “complications of obstructive sleep apnea.”

In 2022, Sharon Vernor brought a wrongful death suit against Lincare and Washington University, now set for trial next week. Her case accuses Lincare of putting profits ahead of patient care by failing to make sure that her son got a replacement BiPAP quickly and refusing to provide “loaner equipment” in the meantime, because the company didn’t believe it could bill for it.

“In short, when faced with information that LeQuon’s bipap was not working properly, Lincare did nothing,” a December 2024 filing alleged. The company took no action for a week, even though “Lincare knew this was a life-or-death situation for their customer LeQuon.” Johnny Simon, the Vernors’ St. Louis lawyer, said that “this was an avoidable, horrific tragedy.” (Sharon Vernor declined an interview request.)

The suit also accuses the Washington University medical program of failing to respond “in a timely manner” to requests for a new BiPAP order. The clinic’s prescription for LeQuon Vernor’s new BiPAP was signed on Sept. 15 but not sent back to Lincare for two more days. The Washington University medical school declined comment through a spokesperson, citing the litigation. In a legal filing, the university denied the allegations in the suit.

ProPublica has reported extensively on Lincare, which has a decadeslong history of Medicare-related misconduct, including multiple settlements regarding claims of billing fraud. And that misconduct continued even while the company was under government “probationary” agreements requiring it to provide enhanced compliance oversight. On the Better Business Bureau’s website, 939 customer reviews give the company an average 1.28 rating out of 5, offering lacerating complaints about dirty and broken equipment, delivery delays, nightmarish customer service, improper billings, and harassing sales and collection calls.

In emailed responses to questions from ProPublica, Lincare offered its “sympathies” to the Vernor family but asserted that “the allegations against Lincare are false.” The company said that it is legally barred from providing even a loaner BiPAP until it receives a new prescription and suggested that it had no reason to believe LeQuon Vernor faced a life-threatening situation, because “a BiPAP is not a life-sustaining device.” The company added: “Lincare delivers a high level of care to millions of patients in a heavily regulated field. Our response to this case was consistent with legal requirements and our policies.”

Lincare’s lawyers went a step further in a February court filing, blaming what happened on an alleged failure by Vernor’s doctors to provide the new order promptly. “Lincare did its job,” the company argued. “The moment Lincare knew that Decedent needed a new machine, Lincare reached out to Decedent’s medical provider. However, Lincare did not receive an updated prescription until one week later.” The company, they added, was “at the mercy of Decedent’s medical provider to supply an updated prescription.”

Sharon Vernor’s lawyers dispute Lincare’s claim that it was barred from providing a loaner BiPAP without obtaining a new prescription. (A spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services declined to address the issue, citing a “pause on mass communications and public appearances” imposed by the new Trump administration.) LeQuon Vernor’s 2015 prescription, filled by Lincare, also specified that he had a “lifetime” need for a BiPAP.

Two former Lincare managers told ProPublica that they were discouraged from dispatching temporary replacement equipment; at least one manager instructed staff to falsely tell customers “all our loaners are out.” One said that, acting on orders from her supervisor, she tossed CPAP and BiPAP devices marked by local offices as loaners into dumpsters. The respiratory companies they later worked for, both said, routinely provided loaner equipment to patients who relied on a breathing device while they awaited a repair or a doctor’s order required to replace it. As one of them put it, “We would make sure the patient is taken care of in that moment.” (“Lincare’s policy is to provide loaner equipment to its patients in accordance with our patient care standards and regulatory requirements,” the company responded.)

In a deposition, Dr. Gabriela de Bruin, a Washington University neurologist who assessed Vernor’s sleep study in 2015, said allowing him to go a week without a functioning BiPAP posed a serious health risk, given the severity of his disease. Noting that Vernor had “severe sleep apnea,” she said, “Anytime we prescribe treatment for obstructive sleep apnea, our recommendation is that patients should use it nightly and should avoid being without their device if they can.” Asked whether Lincare should have understood that Vernor’s apnea created a risk of death, she said, “It’s very difficult for me to say there was this much risk that he could have died.” She added, “But certainly, I would be very concerned.”

A judge in the case dealt Lincare a setback on March 5, ruling that the evidence presented by Sharon Vernor’s lawyers had met the state’s legal standard for seeking punitive damages. That, he wrote, would allow a “trier of fact” to reasonably conclude that “Lincare intentionally acted with a deliberate and flagrant disregard for the safety of others.”

During deposition questioning, Pamela Karban, the manager of the Lincare outlet that handled LeQuon Vernor’s equipment, testified that “we should have referred the mom, if it was that serious, to take him to the nearest emergency room.” Asked whether the company was negligent for not providing Vernor with loaner equipment, she replied: “Yes. We failed to provide that.” Lincare subsequently submitted an affidavit, signed by Karban, stating that she didn’t understand the legal meaning of the term “negligence.”

Doris Burke contributed research.

by Matt Krupnick for ProPublica

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Alexandria Ehlert has pursued a college education hoping to become a park ranger or climate scientist. Now she’s wondering whether she’ll ever finish her studies at College of Menominee Nation.

The scholarship that kept her afloat at the tribal college in Wisconsin vanished in recent weeks, and with it her optimism about completing her degrees there and continuing her studies at a four-year institution.

Ehlert is one of about 20 College of Menominee Nation students who rely on scholarships funded through a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant. The Trump administration suspended the grant amid widespread cost-cutting efforts. Unless other money can be found, Ehlert and the other scholarship students are in their final weeks on campus.

“It’s leaving me without a lot of hope,” said Ehlert, a member of the Oneida nation. “Maybe I should just get a warehouse job and drop school entirely.”

Many staff and students at the country’s 37 tribal colleges and universities, which rely heavily on federal dollars, have been alarmed by the suspension of crucial grants early in Donald Trump’s second presidency.

Even before he retook office, the schools essentially lived paycheck to paycheck. A 1978 law promised them a basic funding level, but Congress hasn’t come close to fulfilling that obligation in decades. Today, the colleges get a quarter-billion dollars less per year than they should, when accounting for inflation, and receive almost nothing to build and maintain their campuses. Water pipes break frequently, roofs leak, ventilation systems fail and buildings crumble. Other than minuscule amounts of state funding in some cases and a smattering of private donations, tribal colleges that lose any federal funding have few other sources of income.

“You freeze our funding and ask us to wait six months to see how it shakes out, and we close,” said Ahniwake Rose, president of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which lobbies for tribal colleges in Washington, D.C. “That’s incredibly concerning.”

At least $7 million in USDA grants to tribal colleges and universities have been suspended, Rose said. The schools’ concerns have been magnified by a lack of communication from federal agencies, which she attributed partly to many federal workers being laid off as the Trump administration has made across-the-board cuts to the federal bureaucracy.

Staff at the College of Menominee Nation were seeking reimbursement for $50,000 spent on research and other work conducted in January, when a federal website indicated a grant from the USDA had been suspended. It was a technical issue, they were told when they first reached someone at the agency, and they needed to contact technical support. But that didn’t solve the problem. Then a few days later the department told the college to halt all grant activity, including Ehlert’s scholarship, without explaining why or for how long.

The frozen grants are administered by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, or NIFA. They stem from a 1994 law, the Equity in Educational Land-Grant Status Act, which designated the tribal colleges as land-grant institutions. Congress created the land-grant system in the 19th century to provide more funding for agricultural and vocational degrees.

The 1994 addition of tribal colleges to the list of land-grant institutions gave the schools access to more funding for specific projects, mostly focused on food and agriculture. Many grants funded food research and projects to increase the availability of food, which is particularly important in rural areas with fewer grocery stores and restaurants.

“It’s really precarious for tribal colleges,” said Twyla Baker, president of Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College in North Dakota. Her college also lost access to NIFA funds that were paying for food research and a program that connects Indigenous farmers, ranchers and gardeners to each other. “We don’t have large endowments to fall back on.”

Several other college presidents said they were preparing for the worst. Red Lake Nation College in Minnesota was freezing salaries, travel and hiring, said President Dan King. So was United Tribes Technical College in North Dakota, which paused renovation of a dormitory originally built as military barracks in 1900. ProPublica reported in October that tribal colleges need more than half a billion dollars to catch up on campus maintenance.

“We’re hoping to get started soon, because we have a short construction season here,” said Leander McDonald, president of the United Tribes college.

At Blackfeet Community College in northern Montana, a NIFA grant is helping to create a program to train workers for the Blackfeet tribe’s new slaughterhouse. The college has started construction on a new building, but President Brad Hall worries that without access to promised federal funds, he might have to pause the project.

Hall, the school’s president, on the campus of Blackfeet Community College in Browning, Montana (Rebecca Stumpf for ProPublica)

Like other tribal college leaders, Hall hasn’t been able to get clear answers from the USDA. Unlike some other schools, his college has been able to access federal funds, but he wonders for how long.

“Without the clarity and without the communication, it’s very hard to make decisions right now,” he said. “We’re in a holding pattern, combined with a situation where the questions aren’t being answered to our satisfaction.”

USDA spokespeople declined to answer questions. The agency emailed a written statement noting that “NIFA programs are currently under review,” but did not provide details on which grants have been suspended or for how long. The agency did not respond to requests for clarification.

Some tribal college leaders theorized they were targeted partly because of the formal name of the 1994 land-grant law: the Equity in Educational Land-Grant Status Act. The Trump administration has laid waste to federal spending on programs with “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion” in the names.

While “equity” often refers to fairness in relation to race or sex, in the 1994 bill, Congress used the word to highlight that tribal colleges would finally have access to the same funds that 19th-century laws had made available to other land-grant colleges and universities. A spokesperson for the organization that represents nontribal land-grant institutions, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, said he was not aware of any USDA funds to nontribal colleges being suspended.

Tribal colleges argue their funding is protected by treaties and the federal trust responsibility, a legal obligation requiring the United States to protect Indigenous resources, rights and assets. Cutting off funding to the tribal colleges is illegal, several university presidents said.

“We were promised education and health care and basic needs,” said King at Red Lake Nation College. “The fact that we’re being lumped in with these other programs — well, we’re not like them.”

The College of Menominee Nation was only a year into its game-changing $9 million USDA grant, which was funding workforce development, training students in local trades such as forestry, and improving food access for Indigenous people. The five-year grant was a “once-in-a-lifetime award,” said college President Christopher Caldwell.

“We want our students to graduate and have healthy job opportunities,” Caldwell said. “Now it just kind of got cut off at the knees.”

by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica and FRONTLINE, James Bandler, ProPublica, and Lukáš Diko, Investigative Center of Jan Kuciak

This story contains references to homophobia, antisemitism and racism, as well as mass shootings and other violence.

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

The teen entered the chat with a friendly greeting.

“Hello lads,” he typed.

“Sup,” came a reply, along with a graphic that read “KILL JEWS.” Another poster shared a GIF of Adolf Hitler shaking hands with Benito Mussolini. Someone else added a short video of a gay pride flag being set on fire. Eventually, the talk in the group turned to mass shootings and bombings.

And so in August 2019, Juraj Krajčík, then a soft-faced 16-year-old with a dense pile of brown hair, immersed himself in a loose collection of extremist chat groups and channels on the massive social media and messaging platform Telegram. This online community, which was dubbed Terrorgram, had a singular focus: inciting acts of white supremacist terrorism.

Over the next three years, Krajčík made hundreds — possibly thousands — of posts in Terrorgram chats and channels, where a handful of influential content creators steered the conversation toward violence. Day after day, post after post, these influencers cultivated Krajčík, who lived with his family in a comfortable apartment in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. They reinforced his hatreds, fine-tuned his beliefs and fed him tips, encouraging him to attack gay and Jewish people and political leaders and become, in their parlance, a “saint.”

On Oct. 12, 2022, Krajčík, armed with his father’s .45-caliber handgun, opened fire on three people sitting outside an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava, killing two and wounding the third before fleeing the scene.

That night, as police hunted for him, Krajčík spoke on the phone with Marek Madro, a Bratislava psychologist who runs a suicide hotline and mental health crisis team. “He hoped that what he had done would shake up society,” recalled Madro in an interview, adding that the teen was “very scared.”

During the call, Krajčík kept repeating phrases from his manifesto, according to Madro. The 65-page document, written in crisp English and illustrated with graphics and photos, offered a detailed justification for his lethal actions. “Destroy the degenerates!” he wrote, before encouraging people to attack pride parades, gay and lesbian activists, and LGBTQ+ bars.

Eventually Krajčík, standing in a small grove of trees alongside a busy roadway, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

The next day, Terrorgram influencers were praising the killer and circulating a PDF of his manifesto on Telegram.

About This Partnership

“The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram” is part of a collaborative investigation from FRONTLINE and ProPublica. The documentary premieres March 25 at 10 p.m. EDT/9 p.m. CDT on PBS stations (check local listings) and will be available to stream on YouTube, the PBS App and FRONTLINE’s website.

“We thank him from the bottom of our hearts and will never forget his sacrifice,” stated one post written by a Terrorgram leader in California. “FUCKING HAIL, BROTHER!!!”

The story of Krajčík’s march to violence shows the murderous reach of the online extremists, who operated outside the view of local law enforcement. To police at the time, the killings seemed like the act of a lone gunman rather than what they were: the culmination of a coordinated recruiting effort that spanned two continents.

ProPublica and the PBS series FRONTLINE, along with the Slovakian newsroom Investigative Center of Jan Kuciak, pieced together the story behind Krajčík’s evolution from a troubled teenager to mass shooter. We identified his user name on Telegram, which allowed us to sift through tens of thousands of now-deleted Telegram posts that had not previously been linked to him. Our team retraced his final hours, interviewing investigators, experts and victims in Slovakia, and mapped the links between Krajčík and the extremists in Europe and the U.S. who helped to shape him.

“The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram,” part of a collaborative investigation from FRONTLINE and ProPublica, premieres March 25.

The Terrorgram network has been gutted in recent months by the arrests of its leaders in North America and Europe. Telegram declined repeated requests to make its executives available for interviews but in a statement said, “Calls for violence from any group are not tolerated on our platform.” The company also said that since 2023 it has stepped up moderation practices.

Still, at a time when other mainstream social media companies such as X and Meta are cutting back on policing their online content, experts say the violent neo-Nazis that populated Telegram’s chats and channels will likely find an online home elsewhere.

At first, Krajčík didn’t fit in with the Terrorgrammers. In one early post in 2019, he argued that the white nationalist movement would benefit from large public protests. The idea wasn’t well received.

“Rallies won’t do shit,” replied one poster.

Another told the teen that instead of organizing a rally, he should start murdering politicians, journalists and drag performers. “You need a mafia state of mind,” the person wrote.

Krajčík had found his way to the Terrorgram community after hanging out on 8chan, a massive and anonymous forum that had long been an online haven for extremists; he would later say that he was “redpilled” — or radicalized — on the site.

On 8chan, people posted racist memes and made plenty of vile comments. But the Terrorgram scene was different. In the Terrorgram chats people discussed, in detail, the best strategies for carrying out spectacular acts of violence aimed at toppling Western democracies and replacing them with all-white ethno-states.

The chats Krajčík joined that summer of 2019 were administered by Pavol Beňadik, then a 20-year-old Slovakian college student who had helped create the Terrorgram community and was one of its leading personalities.

A hybrid of a messaging service like WhatsApp and a social media platform like X or Facebook, Telegram offered features that appealed to extremists like Beňadik. They could engage in private encrypted discussions, start big chat groups or create public channels to broadcast their messages. Importantly, Telegram also allowed them to post huge PDF documents and lengthy video files.

In his Terrorgram chats, Beňadik, who used the handle Slovakbro, relentlessly pressed for violent actions — although he never took any himself. Over two days in August, he posted instructions for making Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs, encouraged people to build radioactive dirty bombs and set them off in major cities, and called for the execution of police officers and other law enforcement agents. “TOTAL PIG DEATH,” he wrote.

At the time, the chats were drawing hundreds of participants from around the world, including a large number of Americans.

Beňadik, who was from a small village in western Slovakia, took a special interest in Krajčík, chatting with him in the Slovak language, discussing life in their country, and making him feel appreciated and respected.

For Krajčík, this was a change. In his daily life outside of Terrorgram, he “felt completely unnoticed, unheard,” said Madro, who spoke with several of Krajčík’s classmates. “He often talked about his own feelings and thoughts publicly and felt like no one took him seriously.”

Krajčík started spending massive amounts of time in the chat. On a single day, he posted 117 times over the span of 10 hours. The teen’s ideas began to closely echo those of Beňadik.

In late September, two regulars had a friendly mixed martial arts bout and streamed it on YouTube. Krajčík shared the link with the rest of the chat group, who cheered and heckled as their online friends brawled. Beňadik encouraged Krajčík to participate in a similar bout in the future.

“Porozmýšlam,” replied Krajčík: “I’ll think about it.”

For Beňadik, the combatants were providing a good example. He wanted Terrorgrammers to transform themselves into Aryan warriors, hard men capable of doing serious physical harm to others.

In reality, Krajčík was anything but a tough guy. A “severely bullied student,” Krajčík had transferred to a high school for academically gifted students, a school official told the Slovak newspaper Pravda. Two therapists “worked intensively with him for two years until the pandemic broke out and schools closed,” the official said.

Juraj Krajčík posted this selfie on Twitter, which was later circulated on Terrorgram channels, accompanied by propaganda. (Obtained by Investigative Center of Jan Kuciak)

Beňadik created at least five neo-Nazi channels and two chat groups on Telegram, one of which eventually attracted nearly 5,000 subscribers. He crafted an online persona as a sage leader, offering tips and guidance for carrying out effective attacks. He often posted practical materials, such as files for 3D-printing rifle parts, including auto sears, which transform a semiautomatic gun into a fully automatic weapon. “Read useful literature, get useful skills,” he said in an interview with a podcast. “You are the revolutionary, so act like it.”

It was only a month after joining Beňadik’s Terrorgram chats that Krajčík first mentioned Tepláreň, the LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava he eventually attacked. On Sept. 18, 2019, he shared a link to a website called Queer Slovakia that featured an article on the bar.

Beňadik responded immediately, writing that he was having a “copeland moment” — a reference to David Copeland, a British neo-Nazi who planted a nail bomb at an LGBTQ+ pub in London in 1999. The explosion killed three people and wounded nearly 80 others.

“I DON’T ACTUALLY WANT TO NAIL BOMB THAT JOINT,” Beňadik continued. He wanted to do something far worse. “Hell,” Beňadik wrote, would be less brutal than what he had in mind.

Another Terrorgrammer offered a suggestion: What about a bomb loaded with “Nails + ricin + chemicals?”

Krajčík sounded a note of caution. “Just saying it will instantly make a squad of federal agents appear behind you and arrest you,” he wrote. Beňadik responded by complaining that Slovakia wasn’t producing enough “saints,” implicitly encouraging his mentee to achieve sainthood by committing a lethal act of terror.

Two days later, Krajčík posted photos of people holding gay pride flags in downtown Bratislava. They were “degenerates,” he wrote, repeatedly using anti-gay slurs.

One chat member told Krajčík he should’ve rounded up a group of Nazi skinheads and assaulted the demonstrators.

Then Krajčík posted a photo of Tepláreň.

Beňadik responded that “airborne paving stones make great gifts for such businesses.”

In the chat, Beňadik repeatedly posted a PDF copy of the self-published memoirs of Eric Rudolph, the American terrorist who bombed the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and several other sites before going on the run. The autobiography contains a detailed description of Rudolph’s bombing of a lesbian bar, which wounded five people.

Urging Krajčík to read the book, Beňadik described it as “AMAZING” and a “great read.” Rudolph, he wrote, had created the “archetype” for the “lone wolf” terrorist.

Eventually, Krajčík joined at least 49 extremist Telegram chats, many of them nodes in the Terrorgram network, according to analysis by Pierre Vaux, a researcher who investigates threats to democracy and human rights abuses.

While Terrorgram started as a loose collection of accounts, by 2021 Beňadik and some of his fellow influencers had created a more formal organization, which they called the Terrorgram Collective, according to interviews with experts and court records from Slovakia, the U.S. and Canada.

The organization began producing more sophisticated content — books, videos and a roster of potential assassination targets — and distributing the material to thousands of followers.

Krajčík was a fan of the collective’s books, which are loaded with highly pixelated black-and-white graphics and offer a raft of specific advice for anyone planning a terror attack.

By the summer of 2022, Krajčík had become a regular poster in a Terrorgram chat run by another alleged leader of the collective, Dallas Humber of Elk Grove, California, a quiet suburb of Sacramento.

Humber went by a series of usernames but was eventually publicly exposed by a group of activists, and later arrested and charged with terrorism-related offenses. ProPublica and FRONTLINE reviewed chat logs — provided by the anti-facist Australian research organization The White Rose Society — and other online materials, as well as court records, to independently confirm her identity.

Beňadik was arrested in Slovakia and charged with more than 200 terrorism offenses. He pleaded guilty and would be sentenced to six years in prison.

In his absence, Humber quickly slipped in as mentor and coach to Krajčík.

She was explicit about her intentions, constantly encouraging followers in her chats and channels to go out and kill their perceived enemies — including Jewish and Muslim people, members of the queer community and anybody who wasn’t white. Her job, she wrote in one post, was to embrace disaffected young white men and guide them “through the end of the radicalization process.”

On Aug. 2, 2022, Humber and Krajčík discussed a grisly incident that had occurred several days earlier: A white man had beaten to death a Nigerian immigrant on a city street in northern Italy.

The killing, which was documented on video, was “fucking glorious,” wrote Humber, using a racial slur to describe the victim. “Please send any more pics, articles, info to the chat as more details come out,” she posted.

Krajčík wrote that he didn’t know much about the circumstances surrounding the crime but was still convinced the murderer had chosen “the right path.”

The killer, wrote Humber, would make an “ideal” boyfriend. “Every girl wants a man who would kill a [racial expletive] for her 🥰 how romantic.”

Three days later, Humber’s chat was alive with tributes to and praise for another killer. Wade Page, a Nazi skinhead and former U.S. Army soldier, had murdered six Sikh worshippers at a temple outside of Milwaukee a decade earlier. (A seventh would later die of their injuries.)

When police confronted Page, he began shooting at them, hitting one officer 15 times before killing himself.

Humber was a big fan of the killer. Page, she wrote, planned the attack thoroughly and chose his targets carefully. “He even made a point to desocialize and cut ties with those close to him,” Humber noted. “No chance of them disrupting his plans.”

“Page did his duty,” Krajčík wrote.

During the same time period, Krajčík started doing reconnaissance on potential targets in his city, staking out the apartment of then-Prime Minister Eduard Heger, a Jewish community center and Tepláreň, the bar.

He posted photos of the locations on his private Twitter account. And in a series of cryptic tweets, Krajčík hinted at the violence to come:

“I don’t expect to make it. In all likelyhood I will die in the course of the operation.”

“Before an operation, you will have to mentally deal with several important questions. You will have to deal with them alone, to not jeopardize your mission by leaking it.”

“I want to damage the System to the best of my abilities.”

Then, on Oct. 11, 2022, he wrote:

“I have made my decision.”

The next evening, after spending a half-hour outside the prime minister’s apartment, Krajčík made his way to Tepláreň. The bar sat on a steep, winding street lined with cafes, clothing boutiques and other small businesses. For about 40 minutes he lurked in a shadowy doorway up the hill. Then, at about 7 p.m., he approached a small group of people sitting in front of the bar and began shooting.

He killed Matúš Horváth and Juraj Vankulič and wounded Radka Trokšiarová, shooting her twice in the leg.

Krajčík, then 19, fled the scene. He had just committed a terrorist attack that would shock the nation.

In court records, U.S. prosecutors have linked both Humber and another alleged Terrorgram leader, Matthew Allison of Boise, Idaho, to Krajčík’s crime. The pair were charged last fall with a raft of felonies related to their Terrorgram posts and propaganda, including conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and soliciting the murder of federal officials.

Krajčík “was active on Terrorgram and had frequent conversations with ALLISON, HUMBER, and other members of the Terrorgram Collective,” prosecutors allege in the indictment. In another brief, they say Krajčík shared his manifesto with Allison before the attack. Then, immediately after the murders, he allegedly sent Allison direct messages saying, “not sure how much time I have but it’s happening,” and “just delete all messages about this convo.”

The Terrorgram posts cited in court documents corroborate our team’s reporting.

Allison spoke with one of our reporters from jail against his lawyer’s advice. He said he did not incite anyone to violence and that prosecutors had misconstrued the communications with Krajčík. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and in a motion, his legal team indicated it would argue that all of his posts are protected by the First Amendment. Humber also pleaded not guilty. She declined to be interviewed and to comment through her lawyer.

While Krajčík was at large, Slovakian authorities tapped Madro, the psychologist, to try to communicate with the young man. “After 12 text messages, he finally picked up the phone,” Madro recalled.

The brief conversation ended with Krajčík killing himself. “The shot rang out and there was silence,” Madro said.

Within hours, Humber was making celebratory posts. Krajčík, she exclaimed, had achieved sainthood. “Saint Krajčík’s place in the Pantheon is undisputed, as is our enthusiastic support for his work,” she wrote on a Terrorgram channel where she posted a picture of the victims on the ground, blood streaking the pavement.

She and Allison also circulated his manifesto.

In it, Krajčík praised the Terrorgram Collective for its “incredible writing and art,” “political texts” and “practical guides.” And he thanked Beňadik: “Your work was some of the first that I encountered after making the switch to Telegram, and remains some of the greatest on the platform.”

While they were spreading Krajčík’s propaganda, the owner of Tepláreň, Roman Samotný, was mourning.

The bar “was kind of like a safe island for queer people here in Slovakia,” he recalled in an interview. “It was just the place where everybody felt welcomed and just accepted and relaxed.”

Before the attack, Samotný’s major concern was that some homophobe would smash the bar’s windows. After the murders, he said, “the biggest change is the realization that we are not anymore safe here. … I was never thinking that we can be killed because of our identity.”

Samotný has closed the bar.

The survivor, Trokšiarová, was left with lingering physical pain and emotional distress. “I was deeply confused,” she said. “Why would anyone do it?”