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by ProPublica

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With just days to go before Election Day, political coverage is everywhere. At ProPublica, we avoid horse race reporting and focus on telling stories about deeper issues and trends affecting the country.

Here are some stories from the last year about issues that are important to voters.

Abortion

Candace Fails visits the grave of her 18-year-old daughter, Nevaeh Crain, who_ _died after trying to get care for pregnancy complications in three visits to Texas emergency rooms. (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica)

When the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1970s-era ruling that guaranteed access to abortion throughout the country, states quickly enacted a patchwork of laws restricting the procedure. In all, 13 states now have a total ban on abortion.

ProPublica has thoroughly examined the impact of those laws over the last two years. Doctors have told ProPublica that confusion and fear about the potential for legal repercussions are changing the way their colleagues treat pregnant patients who have complications.

• In Tennessee, we followed one mother, Mayron Hollis, for a year after she was denied an abortion because of the state’s newly enacted ban. She had become addicted to drugs at 12, and the state had already taken away several of her children. Doctors were concerned that this latest pregnancy, which had implanted in scar tissue from a recent cesarean section, could kill her. The story and visual narrative follows Hollis’ struggles to get care following the birth of her daughter.

• In Georgia, Amber Thurman took abortion medication to end a pregnancy but died of an infection after her body failed to expel all of the fetal tissue, a rare complication that the suburban Atlanta hospital she went to was readily equipped to treat. But earlier that summer, the state had made abortion a felony, and with Thurman’s infection spreading, doctors waited nearly 20 hours before operating. When they finally did, it was too late. Thurman was the mother of a 6-year-old son. U.S. senators are examining whether the hospital broke federal law by failing to intervene sooner, and an official state committee concluded that her death was preventable. Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care declined to explain their thinking and did not respond to questions from ProPublica. Communications staff from the hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Georgia’s Department of Public Health, which oversees the state maternal mortality review committee, said it cannot comment on ProPublica’s reporting because the committee’s cases are confidential and protected by federal law.

• Most abortions in the U.S. take place in the early weeks of pregnancy, and roughly 63% are done using medication. We recently examined how abortion pills work and answered common questions about them.

• In Texas, Josseli Barnica is one of at least two pregnant women who died after doctors delayed emergency care. She’d told her husband that the medical team said it couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped. The doctors involved in Barnica’s care at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest did not respond to multiple requests for comment on her case. In a statement, HCA Healthcare said, “Our responsibility is to be in compliance with applicable state and federal laws and regulations,” and said that physicians exercise their independent judgment. The company did not respond to a detailed list of questions about Barnica’s care.

• In a second Texas case, 18-year-old Nevaeh Crain, who was six months pregnant, visited two emergency rooms a total of three times after experiencing abdominal cramps and other troubling symptoms. The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without evaluating her pregnancy. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave. On Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before offering a procedure called a dilation and curettage to remove the fetus. Hours later, Crain was dead. Doctors involved in Crain’s care did not respond to several requests for comment. The two hospitals, Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas and Christus Southeast Texas St. Elizabeth, declined to answer detailed lists of questions about her treatment.

Immigration

Delmis Jiménez stands on top of the international bridge that divides Ciudad Juárez and El Paso as her family waits for U.S. customs officers to allow them into the United States. Her husband died in a fire at an immigration detention facility while attempting to reach the U.S. eight months earlier. (Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

As the number of migrant encounters at the U.S. border has surged under the Biden administration, immigration has become a top issue for voters. ProPublica has recently explored how this increase differs in key ways from past surges. In recent years, more of the people crossing the border have been turning themselves in and claiming asylum rather than trying to avoid arrest.

• The U.S. faces a shortage of skilled workers, and immigrants have helped fill that gap. Even areas critical to national security, such as Navy shipbuilding, are struggling to find enough qualified workers. So undocumented workers have stepped in as contractors, but that means they get fewer protections if something goes wrong on the job.

• Cities and towns far from the southern border are facing new challenges with the arrival of significant numbers of immigrants. In the small town of Whitewater, Wisconsin, several hundred immigrants from Nicaragua have arrived — mostly looking for low-paying jobs in factories and farms. Police say the biggest challenge has been strained resources and immigrants driving without licenses — not a wave of crime, as falsely claimed by former President Donald Trump.

• For decades, lobbyists from the business community shaped immigration legislation and moderated the contours of the debate. But in the Trump era, businesses see far more risk in advocating for these policies, a change that’s made it even harder to get to consensus on immigration reforms, even as businesses in a variety of sectors say they need more immigrant workers.

Economy

Tire technician Juan Cantu works at Tire Town Auto Service in Picayune, Mississippi, last year. Customers there saw price hikes as the shop dealt with supply chain problems, the rising cost of raw materials and trouble finding workers. (Daniella Zalcman, special to ProPublica)

The condition of the U.S. economy is the top concern for voters, according to multiple polls. Across the world, inflation — the rate at which prices increase — surged beginning in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, brought on by supply chain disruptions, surges in demand for goods and services, and the war in Ukraine.

• Last year, ProPublica looked at inflation through the lens of the humble automobile tire, tracing the raw materials from a rubber plantation in Southeast Asia to a repair shop in Mississippi to try to answer the question: Why are prices so high?

• For a time in 2022, a cadre of ocean carriers were charging exorbitant, potentially illegal, fees on shipping containers stuck because of congestion at ports, another reason the price of goods rose so quickly. That congestion has now eased considerably.

• Surveys also suggest housing costs are a primary concern to many Americans. While most economists agree that the lack of housing supply and a decade of low interest rates have fueled increases in housing prices and rents, there may be another factor at work: the use of algorithms to determine the price of your rent through the company RealPage.

• Democrats, including Ohio’s Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Marcy Kaptur, face tough reelection fights in states that have shifted swiftly toward Trump, despite investments from the Biden administration in reviving manufacturing through the Inflation Reduction and CHIPS acts. National Democrats often overlook how important the place you live can be: Even if your own finances are secure, if you look out your window and see your city or town struggling, you believe you are, too. Some academics have referred to this as a sense of “shared fate,” and it could be a powerful force in this election, especially in small cities in the industrial Midwest.

Health Care

Dr. Debby Day said her bosses at Cigna cared more about being fast than being right: “Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,” Day said. (Andrea Bruce for ProPublica)

Fourteen years after the Affordable Care Act passed, more Americans have health care coverage, but the system itself remains as broken and fractured as ever. ProPublica has investigated various players in the health care system, from doctors accused of wrongdoing to insurers refusing to cover lifesaving treatments. We’ve also extensively explored mental health treatment this year and how, despite rising needs, America’s health care infrastructure can’t provide meaningful support.

• When companies such as Aetna or UnitedHealthcare want to rein in costs, they turn to EviCore, whose business model depends on turning down payments for care recommended by doctors for their patients. EviCore counters that it develops its guidelines for approvals with the input of peer-reviewed medical studies and professional societies, and that they are routinely updated to stay current with the latest evidence-backed practices. It said its decisions are based solely on the guidelines and are not interpreted differently for different clients.

• For Americans searching for mental health providers, many of the lists compiled by insurance companies are misleading or outdated. It’s a “ghost network” that leaves patients frustrated and unable to get timely care.

• Health insurer Cigna tracks every minute that its staff doctors spend deciding whether to pay for health care. One doctor who used to work for the company, Debby Day, said her bosses cared more about being fast than being right: “Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,” Day said. In written responses, Cigna has said its medical directors are not allowed to “rubber stamp” a nurse’s recommendation for denial. In all cases, the company wrote, it expects its doctors to “perform thorough, objective, independent and accurate reviews in accordance with our coverage policies.” In 2023, ProPublica revealed how Cigna rejects claims from patients without even reading them. In written responses about this program, Cigna said the reporting by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum was “biased and incomplete.” Cigna said its review system was created to “accelerate payment of claims for certain routine screenings,” Cigna wrote. “This allows us to automatically approve claims when they are submitted with correct diagnosis codes.”

Education

Angelica Zavala, a West Phoenix home cleaner and mother of two, considered sending her daughter to a private school using vouchers before deciding her neighborhood school was the better option. (Ash Ponders, special to ProPublica)

Few issues ignite as much passion as educating America’s schoolchildren. ​​School boards and districts are facing battles over school vouchers, book bans and COVID-19 — conflict that is slowly changing how the U.S. educates kids, leaving them on different and unequal paths at school.

Many states led by conservative legislators and governors have pushed a rapid expansion of school voucher programs that promise to allow students and their parents to put state money toward the school — private or public — of their choice.

• The model for voucher programs in the country has been Arizona, which now offers vouchers to all students. But the state has spent so much money paying private schoolers’ tuition that it’s now facing hundreds of millions in budget cuts to critical state programs and projects.

• A ProPublica analysis shows that low-income families are using the system far less than wealthier families, in part because the location of private schools and the additional costs for transportation, tuition and meals makes using the vouchers more difficult.

• School choice advocates are intent on expanding the availability of vouchers to fund private education at the expense of public schools, but they’re facing a surprising pocket of resistance: Some conservative, rural residents are fighting the program, fearing their tax dollars will flow from the only public school in their area to benefit people in cities.

• Texas, however, remains one of the biggest holdouts against a school voucher program in which state tax dollars could be used to pay for private schools. Gov. Greg Abbott aggressively campaigned against members of his own party who did not support voucher programs. This fall, Abbott may finally get the votes needed to pass a bill, fulfilling a decadeslong wish of conservative donors in the state.

• We told the story of Courtney Gore, a Texas school board candidate who won her seat after claiming on the campaign trail that children were being indoctrinated. She later disavowed her party’s far-right platform after finding no evidence of such efforts.

• After COVID-19 school closures ended, absenteeism nearly doubled. With state and federal governments largely abdicating any role in getting kids back into classrooms, some schools have turned to private companies for a reimagined version of the truant officer.

Foreign Policy

A relative holds the body of a 4-year-old Palestinian girl who died of malnutrition. Earlier this year, two U.S. government bodies concluded that Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, but Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. (Ashraf Amra/Anadolu/Getty Images)

The now yearlong war between Israel and Hamas has left tens of thousands dead, and Gaza is facing massive shortages of food, water and medical care. The war has sparked infighting in the Democratic Party and debates within the State Department over how best to manage the situation given the U.S.’s longtime trade and military ties to Israel. Both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have signaled their desire to end the war soon, though what will get both sides to agree isn’t entirely clear.

• The U.S. has long supported Israel with weapons. In January, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew urged Washington to give thousands more bombs to the Israelis because they have a “decades-long proven track record” of avoiding killing civilians, a request that came, at the time, amid the deaths of at least 25,000 Palestinians in the war.

• The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza. But Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding.

by Eli Hager

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

When Donald Trump was president, he repeatedly tried to raise the rent on at least 4 million of the poorest people in this country, many of them elderly or disabled. He proposed to cut the federal disability benefits of a quarter-million low-income children, on the grounds that someone else in their family was already receiving benefits. He attempted to put in place a requirement that poor parents cooperate with child support enforcement, including by having single mothers disclose their sexual histories, before they and their children could receive food assistance.

He tried to enact a rule allowing employers to pocket workers’ tips. And he did enact a rule denying overtime pay to millions of low-wage workers if they made more than $35,568 a year.

Trump and his vice presidential pick JD Vance have been running a campaign that they say puts the working class first, vowing to protect everyday Americans from an influx of immigrant labor, to return manufacturing jobs to the U.S., to support rural areas and families with children and, generally, to stick it to the elites.

Critics reply by citing Project 2025, a potential blueprint for a second Trump presidency that proposes deep cuts to the social safety net for lower-income families alongside more large tax breaks for the wealthy. But Trump, despite his clear ties to its authors, has said that Project 2025 doesn’t represent him.

Still, his views on working-class and poor people can be found in specific actions that he tried to take when, as president, he had the power to make public policy.

ProPublica reviewed Trump’s proposed budgets from 2018 to 2021, as well as regulations that he attempted to enact or revise via his cabinet agencies, including the departments of Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services, and also quasi-independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Social Security Administration.

We found that while Trump was in the White House, he advanced an agenda across his administration that was designed to cut health care, food and housing programs and labor protections for poor and working-class Americans.

“Trump proposed significantly deeper cuts to programs for low- and modest-income people than any other president ever has, including Reagan, by far,” said Robert Greenstein, a longtime federal poverty policy expert who recently published a paper for the Brookings Institution on Trump’s first-term budgets.

Get in Touch

No matter who wins the presidential election, ProPublica is planning to deepen its reporting on poverty issues, from housing to child support to Social Security benefits and Medicaid. We will be covering how the incoming administration handles federal poverty policy, as well as state and local social services agencies and private companies that profit off of the poor. Are you a current or former federal employee with insight into federal poverty programs? Are you someone with stories to pitch us on any of these topics? Reach out directly at Eli.Hager@propublica.org.

Trump was stymied in reaching many of these goals largely because he was inefficient about pursuing them until the second half of his term. According to reporters covering him at the time, he’d been unprepared to win the presidency in 2016, let alone to fill key positions and develop a legislative and regulatory strategy on poverty issues.

He did have control of both the House and Senate during his first two years in office, but he used his only shots at budget reconciliation (annual budget bills that can’t be filibustered by the opposing party) to cut taxes for the rich and to try to repeal Obamacare. By 2019, there wasn’t much time left for his cabinet agencies to develop new regulations, get them through the long federal rulemaking process and deal with any legal challenges.

Trump and his allies appear focused on not repeating such mistakes should he win the White House again. Republican leaders in Congress have said that this time, if they retake majorities in both chambers, they’ll use their reconciliation bills to combine renewed tax cuts with aggressive cuts to social spending. Meanwhile, Trump would likely put forward new regulations earlier in his term, in part so that legal challenges to them get a chance to be heard before a Supreme Court with a solid conservative majority he created.

If he relies on his first-term proposals, that would mean:

• Cutting the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, by billions of dollars.
• Rescinding nearly a million kids’ eligibility for free school lunches.
• Freezing Pell grants for lower-income college students so that they’re not adjusted for inflation.
• Overhauling and substantially cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, colloquially known as food stamps, in part by defining people with assets exceeding $2,250 as not being poor enough to receive aid and reducing the minimum monthly food stamp amount from $23 to zero.
• Eliminating multiple programs designed to increase the supply of and investment in affordable housing in lower-income communities.
• Eliminating a program that helps poor families heat their homes and be prepared for power outages and other energy crises.
• Shrinking Job Corps and cutting funding for work-training programs — which help people get off of government assistance — nearly in half.
• Restricting the collective bargaining rights of unions, through which workers fight for better wages and working conditions.

Trump also never gave up on his goal of dismantling the Affordable Care Act, which disproportionately serves lower-income Americans. He cut in half the open-enrollment windows during which people can sign up for health insurance under the ACA, and he cut over 80% of the funding for efforts to help lower-income people and others navigate the system. This especially affected those with special needs or who have limited access to or comfort with the internet.

As a result of these and other changes, the number of uninsured people in the U.S. increased in 2017 for the first time since the law was enacted, then increased again in 2018 and in 2019. By that year, 2.3 million fewer Americans had health insurance than when Trump came into power, including 700,000 fewer children.

President Joe Biden has reversed many of these changes. But Trump could reverse them back, especially if he has majorities in Congress.

Perhaps the main thing that Trump did with his administrative power during his first term — that he openly wants to do more of — is reduce the civil service, meaning the nonpolitical federal employees whom he collectively calls “the Deep State.”

This, too, would have a disproportionately negative impact on programs serving poor and working Americans. Agencies like the Social Security Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provide disability and survivor benefits and housing assistance to lower-income families in times of need, rely heavily on midlevel staff in Washington, D.C., and local offices to process claims and get help to people.

Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not respond to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica about whether Trump wants to distance himself from his first-term record on issues affecting working-class people or whether his second-term agenda would be different.

Instead, she focused on Social Security and Medicare, saying that Trump protected those programs in his first term and would do so again. “By unleashing American energy, slashing job-killing regulations, and adopting pro-growth America First tax and trade policies, President Trump will quickly rebuild the greatest economy in history,” Leavitt said.

One new ostensibly pro-worker policy that Trump, as well as his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, have proposed: ending taxes on tips.

Trump officials and Republican politicians have long said that more federal spending on safety net programs is not the solution to poverty and that poor people need to be less dependent on government aid and exercise more personal responsibility.

And working-class voters — especially white men without a college degree who feel that their economic standing has diminished relative to other demographic groups — have joined the Trump movement in increasing numbers. What’s more, some counties that have seen large upticks in food stamp usage in recent years continue to vote for him, despite his attempts to shrink that program and others that people in these places rely on. (All that said, Trump’s supporters are better off on average than the media often portrays them to be.)

Meanwhile, pandemic relief, including stimulus checks, did start during the Trump administration and helped reduce poverty rates. But those efforts were temporary responses to a crisis and were mostly proposed by Democrats in Congress; they were hardly part of Trump’s governing agenda.

Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

Amid a presidential race that has at times focused on forgotten, high-poverty communities — with Vance repeatedly touting his Appalachian-adjacent roots — it is surprising that journalists haven’t applied more scrutiny to Trump’s first-term budgets and proposals on these issues, said Greenstein, the poverty policy expert.

Would Trump, given a second term, continue the Biden administration’s efforts to make sure that the IRS isn’t disproportionately auditing the taxes of poor people? Would he defend Biden’s reforms to welfare, aimed at making sure that states actually use welfare money to help lower-income families?

Trump hasn’t faced many of these questions on the campaign trail or in debates or interviews, as the candidates and reporters covering them tend to focus more on the middle class.

by Emily Green for ProPublica

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TAPACHULA, Mexico — It was Jan. 17 when Nevy de Zelada, a migrant from Guatemala, and her family were walking on the edge of a four-lane highway in southern Mexico in blistering, 100-degree heat. It was the first leg of their journey to the United States, where they hoped to seek asylum. Her 21-year-old son was pushing her paraplegic husband in his manual wheelchair, and the family’s beloved dog was nestled on her husband’s lap. Earlier that day, they had crossed the river that divides Guatemala from Mexico on a rickety raft. But her husband’s condition made traveling difficult — he had been shot by gang members — and for now they just wanted to reach the closest city, a place 20 miles north of Mexico’s southern border where they could seek shelter and food.

Then, in broad daylight, a four-door truck sped by and slammed to a halt, blocking the family’s path. “Where are you going? I will help you get there,” one of three men inside yelled. But it wasn’t really a question. Their faces were covered with bandanas, except for their eyes. They wore bulletproof vests with a picture of a Mexican flag and a skull. The men got out of the truck and pointed guns at the family. “You can get in the car the easy way or the hard way,” one said. Zelada, crying, her ankles swollen and clothes soaked with sweat, didn’t try to fight. She and her nephew, son and daughter-in-law squeezed into the truck’s back seat after helping Zelada’s husband into the front. She estimates they drove for 45 minutes, mostly on isolated dirt roads, until they stopped at an abandoned ranch scattered with luxury cars and dozens of terrified migrants locked up in a large pen made for livestock.

“The first thing that came to my mind was my son,” Zelada said. “I had a life — my home, my children — but my son is just starting.

“I said to God, ‘Lord, please help us. Help us get out of here.’”

Mexico has long been known as a dangerous transit country for migrants because of the threat of cartel violence and extortion from immigration agents and police. But through interviews with more than 70 migrants over seven months this year, as well as U.S. and Mexican officials, ProPublica found that a new phase of mass kidnapping for profit has emerged at the country’s southern border that is different in character and scale than what has happened in the past, underscoring how effective Mexican cartels are in adapting their strategies to exploit new policies from Washington.

Along Mexico’s border with Guatemala, organized gangs affiliated with drug cartels have created an industrial-size extortion racket that involves kidnapping large numbers of migrants as soon as they set foot in the country. It is a volume business, one that its victims rarely denounce because of the relatively small ransom amounts and distrust of Mexican authorities. Immigrant advocates and church leaders say the criminal groups have created a virtual dragnet that makes kidnapping the rule rather than the exception.

Immigration has become a top issue for U.S. voters ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election — and a political liability for the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris. In December 2023, amid a record number of border crossings, the Biden-Harris administration sent a delegation to Mexico to push the Mexican government to drastically ramp up immigration enforcement, according to a high-ranking Mexican official with knowledge of the talks.

Mexico’s foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment about the negotiations.

In the months following the December negotiations, Mexico dramatically decreased the number of humanitarian visas it issued to asylum-seekers, which many used to transit the country on the way to the U.S. border, according to government data. Authorities also increased the number of checkpoints to detain more migrants, immigrant rights activists said.

This year through September, Mexican authorities reported a record 925,000 apprehensions, a number that likely includes people caught more than once and many who were only briefly detained.

But Mexico deports just a tiny fraction of the migrants it encounters — less than 2% of total encounters this year resulted in deportations, according to Mexican government data. Limited resources and court decisions restricting Mexico’s right to detain families has hampered the Mexican government’s ability to carry out wide scale returns of migrants to their home countries.

So instead, Mexican authorities are forcibly busing tens of thousands of migrants to southern Mexico, far from the U.S. border, and leaving them there. During the first nine months of this year, Mexico bused over 60,000 migrants from other parts of Mexico to the southern states of Chiapas and Tabasco, more than in all of 2023 and close to double the number bused there in 2022, according to an analysis of Mexican government data. The analysis did not include people bused from those two southern states to elsewhere in Mexico. The data was first reported by Reuters.

With the busing, migrants are circled around inside Mexican territory in a merry-go-round strategy that forces them to repeatedly pay off immigration agents, kidnappers and smugglers.

Migrants walk along a highway in southern Mexico. (Fred Ramos for ProPublica) Migrants pass a checkpoint on a highway in southern Mexico. (Fred Ramos for ProPublica)

It’s “designed to deter migrants by making it harder and even more expensive to get through Mexico,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a D.C.-based think tank, of the busing practice. But the result, he said, “gives organized crime groups a second bite at the apple to extort migrants.”

The busing strategy is also sending migrants back to a region that is increasingly violent, where they face threats not just from organized crime but from authorities. In October, Mexican soldiers opened fire on a tractor trailer just north of Tapachula, killing six migrants, including at least one from Egypt. Mexican authorities vowed to investigate the killings. The uptick in violence coincides with a pitched battle between the Sinaloa cartel and Jalisco New Generation cartel for control of migrant-, drug- and gun-smuggling routes in southern Mexico, sending the homicide rate soaring in the southern states of Chiapas and Tabasco, according to security experts and Mexican government data.

A trip to Mexico’s southern border earlier this year provided a glimpse of how brazen organized crime has become — and how easy it is to make money off migrants. ProPublica interviewed 35 migrants in eight families who were kidnapped trying to make their way over the 20-mile stretch from Ciudad Hidalgo, which borders Guatemala, to Tapachula, the closest nearby city. ProPublica interviewed another 16 migrants in Mexico City who were kidnapped along the same stretch. The victims were from Central America, Venezuela and Colombia and included mothers traveling with babies, elderly people and large families.

A migrant woman shows a photo of the stamp that kidnappers gave her after she paid to be released. She was kidnapped shortly after entering Mexico. (Fred Ramos for ProPublica)

They told nearly identical stories of being ambushed, often by bus and taxi drivers who turned them over to armed men on an abandoned ranch with fighting cocks, where they were ordered to pay a ransom for their freedom. Migrants who weren’t carrying cash, or who weren’t carrying enough of it, were given Wi-Fi and a Mexican bank account number so that they could call their families and ask them to cover the ransom. The kidnapping is so widespread and open that migrants walk around Tapachula with stamps of a bird on their forearms as a sign that they paid the ransom. Many refer to the kidnapping ranch they were brought to as the “gallinero,” or chicken coop.

The mass kidnappings in southern Mexico started in mid-2023 and began picking up by the end of that year, according to immigrant rights activists monitoring the situation. By 2024 — after Mexico and the U.S. entered into the agreement to stop migrants from reaching the U.S. border — nearly every migrant who attempted to cross into Mexico through Ciudad Hidalgo without a smuggler was kidnapped and held on an isolated ranch, they said.

U.S. officials have indicated that they’re aware of the extent of the dangers migrants face in Mexico but they say they cannot interfere with how or whether the government there protects them. Blas Nuñez-Neto, a senior administration official, said in a Spanish-language call with reporters in July that it is “impossible” for migrants traveling by “illegal means” to the U.S. border to arrive without “passing through the cartels’ hands.”

Still, senior U.S. and Mexican officials credit the busing and stepped-up enforcement cooperation between the two governments — coupled with new restrictions on asylum put in place by the Biden administration — with contributing to the dramatic decline in migrants illegally crossing the U.S.’ southwest border. Migrant apprehensions by U.S. Border Patrol have fallen 78%, from around 250,000 in December 2023 to nearly 54,000 in September 2024, U.S. data shows.

White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández said the “administration’s coordination and collaboration with Mexico is incredibly strong, built on mutual respect, shared interests, and common goals.”

A spokesperson for the Mexican president’s office referred questions to the Interior Department, which did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Mexico’s national immigration agency said that it does not receive any economic support from the U.S. for the busing operation and referred questions about the kidnappings to Chiapas’ state prosecutor.

The Chiapas state prosecutor’s unit in charge of investigating crimes against migrants said it has not received any complaints about individual or mass kidnappings in the stretch between Ciudad Hidalgo and Tapachula. The unit, however, said that it had facilitated the rescue of nine migrants from Nepal, India and Bangladesh who had been victims of a suspected kidnapping in Tapachula.

Enrique Vidal Olascoaga, director of the Fray Matías de Córdova human rights center in Tapachula, said that in September Mexican authorities raided and closed down one of the principal kidnapping ranches in the region. But, he said, others continue to operate, and migrants are still regularly kidnapped and extorted trying to reach Tapachula.

A young girl holds a dove at a basketball court where migrants shelter in the town of Huixtla, Chiapas. (Fred Ramos for ProPublica) First image: Children play at a park in Tapachula, Chiapas, the first city many migrants arrive at in Mexico. Second image: Sisters from El Salvador show the sandals they wear while they walk for miles in an effort to leave southern Mexico. (Fred Ramos for ProPublica) Ransom in Bulk

Trapped at the ranch on that January day, Zelada worried she’d made a fatal mistake. Her family wasn’t wealthy, but back in Guatemala, her husband had sold bananas out of a truck and they had never wanted for “a plate of beans,” she said. Then, in October 2021, members from the powerful street gang Barrio 18 attacked her husband because he couldn’t pay the gang’s extortion fees, shooting him and leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Still, the family stayed — until gang members started harassing her 19-year-old daughter. Zelada’s family scraped together money for her daughter to travel with a smuggler to the U.S. on her own while the rest of the family fled two months later. Zelada didn’t think traveling through Mexico could be any more dangerous than the life they’d left behind.

But as Zelada and her family found themselves held hostage on the abandoned ranch hours after entering Mexico, she questioned their decision to make the risky journey north. Most of the migrants on the ranch were Spanish speaking, but a handful of others appeared to be from China, and she saw the kidnappers using a translation app on their cellphones to communicate with them, she said. One guard told them that if they turned over all their cash, they would be released to continue on their way. Zelada and her relatives gathered all the money they had brought with them — $2,700 — and handed it over.

Isabel, a Colombian woman who agreed to be identified only by her middle name, said that as soon as she crossed Mexico’s southern border in May with her husband and two young children — a 3-year-old and an 11-month-old — two motorcycle taxi drivers offered to take her family to Tapachula. She realized they’d been tricked when the drivers approached a dilapidated ranch. She tried to run, but gunmen forced her back. The guards used two-way radios to communicate with one another and monitored the hostages’ phones for any signs they were trying to take photos, she said. She and her family were fed rice twice a day for three days while she waited for her mother-in-law in Venezuela to scrounge together the ransom demanded by the kidnappers.

Most migrants said the kidnappers had a set rate: $75 per person, half-price for kids under 10. But the exact price depended on the day, the circumstances and the victims’ nationality — Cubans and Haitians were charged more because it is assumed they have family in the U.S., and Chinese migrants were also quoted a higher price because they tend to have more money, according to immigrant activists who work in the region. Still, the kidnappings in southern Mexico are a volume business. By charging even relatively small amounts of money and moving migrants through as quickly as possible, the criminal groups make enormous profits with little risk.

Heyman Vázquez, a Catholic priest working in southern Mexico, has been alarmed by the new phenomenon of mass kidnappings. (Fred Ramos for ProPublica)

Heyman Vázquez, a Catholic priest who works in Ciudad Hidalgo, along the Guatemalan border, said criminal groups in southern Mexico have gone so far as to set up checkpoints along the main highway in an effort to identify migrants. “The authorities are involved,” he said about the kidnappings, adding that there’s a blurry line between the authorities charged with protecting migrants and the cartels exploiting them. “You never know who you’re talking to,” he said.

The state of Chiapas’ anti-kidnapping unit said it had no information about Mexican authorities being involved in migrant kidnappings.

Migrants crossing Mexico have long faced horrific acts of violence in their efforts to reach the U.S., mostly in northern Mexico. In 2022, 12 Mexican police officers were charged with murdering 16 Guatemalan migrants, including one who was identified as working with the smugglers, whose bodies were found shot and incinerated south of the U.S. border.

No one knows exactly how much money Mexican criminal groups make off of migration, including smuggling and kidnapping. According to a 2021 congressional statement from the acting director of Homeland Security Investigations, U.S.-bound human smuggling and related criminal activities produce an estimated $2 billion to $6 billion in yearly revenue. But most officials believe those profits have surged as the numbers of migrants passing through Mexico soared in recent years — a record 2.5 million people arrived at the southern U.S.border in fiscal year 2023.

Dana Graber Ladek, chief of mission for the International Organization for Migration in Mexico, said cartels see migrants purely as “opportunities to make money at a very grand scale.” She said because of this, some of the migrants that the organization has encountered in Mexico describe the country as a “second jungle” after the dangerous stretch of rainforest, called the Darién Gap, between Colombia and Panama that has become a major thoroughfare for migrants trying to reach the U.S.

Nature is one of the main threats in the Darién Gap, she said. “In Mexico,” she said, “the main threat is people.”

The dozens of migrants who spoke to ProPublica after being abducted in southern Mexico said that in most cases, after paying the ransom, the kidnappers arranged for them to be driven to Tapachula. They said they were squeezed into sedans — sometimes 10 or more people in a car — and dropped at a corner store near one of the city’s main plazas.The kidnappers told them the stamp on their forearm would protect them from being kidnapped again in the Tapachula area. But that protection lasted only as long as they stayed in town.

After handing over all their money, Zelada’s family was held at the ranch for less than half an hour, she estimates. Still, she said, “it felt like an eternity.”

She and her family then spent two months trying to apply for asylum in Mexico before giving up and joining a group of around 2,000 other migrants walking north as part of a caravan. From March through July, Zelada and her family walked more than a thousand miles through sweltering summer days, sleeping outside in parks and beside train tracks, until they were finally able to cross into the U.S. using a U.S. government mobile app called CBP One. They are currently living in South Carolina while they apply for asylum.

But for other migrants, the kidnapping in southern Mexico derailed their lives. Jennifer, a 23-year-old Honduran woman who asked to be identified only by her first name, said that her daughters, ages 4 and 5, were traumatized after being held at gunpoint for four hours in a livestock pen. When kidnappers dropped the three of them off in Tapachula after paying the ransom, they found a spot at a migrant shelter. But she and her children are too terrified to leave. Seven months later, they are still living in the shelter. Smugglers have offered to ferry the family to the U.S. border, but she doesn’t have enough money to pay. They are scared to move forward on their own for fear of being kidnapped again, but also can’t fathom returning to Honduras. “You can’t trust anyone,” she said.

Help ProPublica Reporters Investigate the Immigration System

Update, Nov. 5, 2024: This story has been updated to include comments from the prosecutor’s office in Chiapas, Mexico.

by Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana

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Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.

Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.

The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.

Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.

By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.

Hours later, she was dead.

Fails, who would have seen her daughter turn 20 this Friday, still cannot understand why Crain’s emergency was not treated like an emergency.

But that is what many pregnant women are now facing in states with strict abortion bans, doctors and lawyers have told ProPublica.

“Pregnant women have become essentially untouchables,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a health law and policy professor emerita at George Washington University.

Texas’s abortion ban threatens prison time for interventions that end a fetal heartbeat, whether the pregnancy is wanted or not. It includes exceptions for life-threatening conditions, but still, doctors told ProPublica that confusion and fear about the potential legal repercussions are changing the way their colleagues treat pregnant patients with complications.

In states with abortion bans, such patients are sometimes bounced between hospitals like “hot potatoes,” with health care providers reluctant to participate in treatment that could attract a prosecutor, doctors told ProPublica. In some cases, medical teams are wasting precious time debating legalities and creating documentation, preparing for the possibility that they’ll need to explain their actions to a jury and judge.

Dr. Jodi Abbott, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston University School of Medicine, said patients are left wondering: “Am I being sent home because I really am OK? Or am I being sent home because they’re afraid that the solution to what’s going on with my pregnancy would be ending the pregnancy, and they’re not allowed to do that?”

There is a federal law to prevent emergency room doctors from withholding lifesaving care.

Passed nearly four decades ago, it requires emergency rooms to stabilize patients in medical crises. The Biden administration argues this mandate applies even in cases where an abortion might be necessary.

No state has done more to fight this interpretation than Texas, which has warned doctors that its abortion ban supersedes the administration’s guidance on federal law, and that they can face up to 99 years in prison for violating it.

ProPublica condensed more than 800 pages of Crain’s medical records into a four-page timeline in consultation with two maternal-fetal medicine specialists; reporters reviewed it with nine doctors, including researchers at prestigious universities, OB-GYNs who regularly handle miscarriages, and experts in emergency medicine and maternal health.

Some said the first ER missed warning signs of infection that deserved attention. All said that the doctor at the second hospital should never have sent Crain home when her signs of sepsis hadn’t improved. And when she returned for the third time, all said there was no medical reason to make her wait for two ultrasounds before taking aggressive action to save her.

“This is how these restrictions kill women,” said Dr. Dara Kass, a former regional director at the Department of Health and Human Services and an emergency room physician in New York. “It is never just one decision, it’s never just one doctor, it’s never just one nurse.”

While they were not certain from looking at the records provided that Crain’s death could have been prevented, they said it may have been possible to save both the teenager and her fetus if she had been admitted earlier for close monitoring and continuous treatment.

There was a chance Crain could have remained pregnant, they said. If she had needed an early delivery, the hospital was well-equipped to care for a baby on the edge of viability. In another scenario, if the infection had gone too far, ending the pregnancy might have been necessary to save Crain.

Doctors involved in Crain’s care did not respond to several requests for comment. The two hospitals, Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas and Christus Southeast Texas St. Elizabeth, declined to answer detailed lists of questions about her treatment.

Fails and Crain believed abortion was morally wrong. The teen could only support it in the context of rape or life-threatening illness, she used to tell her mother. They didn’t care whether the government banned it, just how their Christian faith guided their own actions.

When they discovered Crain was pregnant with a girl, the two talked endlessly about the little dresses they could buy, what kind of mother she would be. Crain landed on the name Lillian. Fails could not wait to meet her.

But when her daughter got sick, Fails expected that doctors had an obligation to do everything in their power to stave off a potentially deadly emergency, even if that meant losing Lillian. In her view, they were more concerned with checking the fetal heartbeat than attending to Crain.

“I know it sounds selfish, and God knows I would rather have both of them, but if I had to choose,” Fails said, “I would have chosen my daughter.”

Fails says that Crain, shown here as a child with her mother, was “the gravity” in her life. “She would put her arms around me like she was the adult and I was the kid and tell me I was strong.” (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica) “I’m in a Lot of Pain”

Crain had just graduated from high school in her hometown of Vidor, Texas, in May of 2023 when she learned that she was pregnant.

She and her boyfriend of two years, Randall Broussard, were always hip to hip, wrestling over vapes or snuggling on the couch watching vampire movies. Crain was drawn to how gentle he was. He admired how easily she built friendships and how quickly she could make people laugh. Though they were young, they’d already imagined starting a family. Broussard, who has eight siblings, wanted many kids; Crain wanted a daughter and the kind of relationship she had with her mom. Earlier that year, Broussard had given Crain a small diamond ring — “a promise,” he told her, “that I will always love you.”

On the morning of their baby shower, Oct. 28, 2023, Crain woke with a headache. Her mom decorated the house with pink balloons and Crain laid out Halloween-themed platters. Soon, nausea set in. Crain started vomiting and was running a fever. When guests arrived, Broussard opened gifts — onesies and diapers and bows — while Crain kept closing her eyes.

Around 3 p.m., her family told her she needed to go to the hospital.

Broussard drove Crain to Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas. They sat in the waiting room for four hours. When Crain started vomiting, staff brought her a plastic pan. When she wasn’t retching, she lay her head in her boyfriend’s lap.

A nurse practitioner ordered a test for strep throat, which came back positive, medical records show. But in a pregnant patient, abdominal pain and vomiting should not be quickly attributed to strep, physicians told ProPublica; a doctor should have also evaluated her pregnancy.

Instead, Baptist Hospitals discharged her with a prescription for antibiotics. She was home at 9 p.m. and quickly dozed off, but within hours, she woke her mother up. “Mom, my stomach is still hurting,” she said into the dark bedroom at 3 a.m. “I’m in a lot of pain.”

Fails drove Broussard and Crain to another hospital in town, Christus Southeast Texas St. Elizabeth. Around 4:20 a.m., OB-GYN William Hawkins saw that Crain had a temperature of 102.8 and an abnormally high pulse, according to records; a nurse noted that Crain rated her abdominal pain as a seven out of 10.

Her vital signs pointed to possible sepsis, records show. It’s standard medical practice to immediately treat patients who show signs of sepsis, which can overtake and kill a person quickly, medical experts told ProPublica. These patients should be watched until their vitals improve. Through tests and scans, the goal is to find the source of the infection. If the infection was in Crain’s uterus, the fetus would likely need to be removed with a surgery.

In a room at the obstetric emergency department, a nurse wrapped a sensor belt around Crain’s belly to check the fetal heart rate. “Baby’s fine,” Broussard told Fails, who was sitting in the hallway.

After two hours of IV fluids, one dose of antibiotics, and some Tylenol, Crain’s fever didn’t go down, her pulse remained high, and the fetal heart rate was abnormally fast, medical records show. Hawkins noted that Crain had strep and a urinary tract infection, wrote up a prescription and discharged her.

Hawkins had missed infections before. Eight years earlier, the Texas Medical Board found that he had failed to diagnose appendicitis in one patient and syphilis in another. In the latter case, the board noted that his error “may have contributed to the fetal demise of one of her twins.” The board issued an order to have Hawkins’ medical practice monitored; the order was lifted two years later. (Hawkins did not respond to several attempts to reach him.)

All of the doctors who reviewed Crain’s vital signs for ProPublica said she should have been admitted. “She should have never left, never left,” said Elise Boos, an OB-GYN in Tennessee.

Kass, the New York emergency physician, put it in starker terms: When they discharged her, they were “pushing her down the path of no return.”

“It’s bullshit,” Fails said as Broussard rolled Crain out in a wheelchair; she was unable to walk on her own. Fails had expected the hospital to keep her overnight. Her daughter was breathing heavily, hunched over in pain, pale in the face. Normally talkative, the teen was quiet.

Crain’s boyfriend, Randall Broussard, and mother at Fails’ home in Vidor, Texas (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica)

Back home, around 7 a.m., Fails tried to get her daughter comfortable as she cried and moaned. She told Fails she needed to pee, and her mother helped her into the bathroom. “Mom, come here,” she said from the toilet. Blood stained her underwear.

The blood confirmed Fails’ instinct: This was a miscarriage.

At 9 a.m, a full day after the nausea began, they were back at Christus St. Elizabeth. Crain’s lips were drained of color and she kept saying she was going to pass out. Staff started her on IV antibiotics and performed a bedside ultrasound.

Around 9:30 a.m., the OB on duty, Dr. Marcelo Totorica, couldn’t find a fetal heart rate, according to records; he told the family he was sorry for their loss.

Standard protocol when a critically ill patient experiences a miscarriage is to stabilize her and, in most cases, hurry to the operating room for delivery, medical experts said. This is especially urgent with a spreading infection. But at Christus St. Elizabeth, the OB-GYN just continued antibiotic care. A half-hour later, as nurses placed a catheter, Fails noticed her daughter’s thighs were covered in blood.

At 10 a.m., Melissa McIntosh, a labor and delivery nurse, spoke to Totorica about Crain’s condition. The teen was now having contractions. “Dr. Totorica states to not move patient,” she wrote after talking with him. “Dr. Totorica states there is a slight chance patient may need to go to ICU and he wants the bedside ultrasound to be done stat for sure before admitting to room.”

Though he had already performed an ultrasound, he was asking for a second.

The first hadn’t preserved an image of Crain’s womb in the medical record. “Bedside ultrasounds aren’t always set up to save images permanently,” said Abbott, the Boston OB-GYN.

The state’s laws banning abortion require that doctors record the absence of a fetal heartbeat before intervening with a procedure that could end a pregnancy. Exceptions for medical emergencies demand physicians document their reasoning. “Pretty consistently, people say, ‘Until we can be absolutely certain this isn’t a normal pregnancy, we can’t do anything, because it could be alleged that we were doing an abortion,’” said Dr. Tony Ogburn, an OB-GYN in San Antonio.

At 10:40 a.m, Crain’s blood pressure was dropping. Minutes later, Totorica was paging for an emergency team over the loudspeakers.

Around 11 a.m., two hours after Crain had arrived at the hospital, a second ultrasound was performed. A nurse noted: “Bedside ultrasound at this time to confirm fetal demise per Dr. Totorica’s orders.”

When doctors wheeled Crain into the ICU at 11:20 a.m., Fails stayed by her side, rubbing her head, as her daughter dipped in and out of consciousness. Crain couldn’t sign consent forms for her care because of “extreme pain,” according to the records, so Fails signed a release for “unplanned dilation and curettage” or “unplanned cesarean section.”

But the doctors quickly decided it was now too risky to operate, according to records. They suspected that she had developed a dangerous complication of sepsis known as disseminated intravascular coagulation; she was bleeding internally.

Frantic and crying, Fails locked eyes with her daughter. “You’re strong, Nevaeh,” she said. “God made us strong.”

Crain sat up in the cot. Old, black blood gushed from her nostrils and mouth.

Fails visits the grave of her daughter and granddaughter, Lillian Faye Broussard, in Buna, Texas. (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica) “The Law Is on Our Side”

Crain is one of at least two pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, ProPublica found.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has successfully made his state the only one in the country that isn’t required to follow the Biden administration’s efforts to ensure that emergency departments don’t turn away patients like Crain.

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, the administration issued guidance on how states with bans should follow the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. The federal law requires hospitals that receive funding through Medicare — which is virtually all of them — to stabilize or transfer anyone who arrives in their emergency rooms. That goes for pregnant patients, the guidance argues, even if that means violating state law and providing an abortion.

Paxton responded by filing a lawsuit in 2022, saying the federal guidance “forces hospitals and doctors to commit crimes,” and was an “attempt to use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”

Part of the battle has centered on who is eligible for abortion. The federal EMTALA guidelines apply when the health of the pregnant patient is in “serious jeopardy.” That’s a wider range of circumstances than the Texas abortion restriction, which only makes exceptions for a “risk of death” or “a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”

The lawsuit worked its way through three layers of federal courts, and each time it was met by judges nominated by former President Donald Trump, whose court appointments were pivotal to overturning Roe v. Wade.

After U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix, a Trump appointee, quickly sided with Texas, Paxton celebrated the triumph over “left-wing bureaucrats in Washington.”

“The decision last night proves what we knew all along,” Paxton added. “The law is on our side.”

This year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the order in a ruling authored by Kurt D. Engelhardt, another judge nominated by Trump.

The Biden administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, urging the justices to make it clear that some emergency abortions are allowed.

Even amid news of preventable deaths related to abortion bans, the Supreme Court declined to do so last month.

Paxton called this “a major victory” for the state’s abortion ban.

He has also made clear that he will bring charges against physicians for performing abortions if he decides that the cases don’t fall within Texas’ narrow medical exceptions.

Last year, he sent a letter threatening to prosecute a doctor who had received court approval to provide an emergency abortion for a Dallas woman. He insisted that the doctor and her patient had not proven how, precisely, the patient’s condition threatened her life.

Many doctors say this kind of message has encouraged doctors to “punt” patients instead of treating them.

Since the abortion bans went into effect, an OB-GYN at a major hospital in San Antonio has seen an uptick in pregnant patients being sent to them from across Southern Texas, as they suffer from complications that could easily be treated close to home.

The well-resourced hospital is perceived to have more institutional support to provide abortions and miscarriage management, the doctor said. Other providers “are transferring those patients to our centers because, frankly, they don’t want to deal with them.”

After Crain died, Fails couldn’t stop thinking about how Christus Southeast Hospital had ignored her daughter’s condition. “She was bleeding,” she said. “Why didn’t they do anything to help it along instead of wait for another ultrasound to confirm the baby is dead?”

It was the medical examiner, not the doctors at the hospital, who removed Lillian from Crain’s womb. His autopsy didn’t resolve Fails’ lingering questions about what the hospitals missed and why. He called the death “natural” and attributed it to “complications of pregnancy.” He did note, however, that Crain was “repeatedly seeking medical care for a progressive illness” just before she died.

Last November, Fails reached out to medical malpractice lawyers to see about getting justice through the courts. A different legal barrier now stood in her way.

If Crain had experienced these same delays as an inpatient, Fails would have needed to establish that the hospital violated medical standards. That, she believed, she could do. But because the delays and discharges occurred in an area of the hospital classified as an emergency room, lawyers said that Texas law set a much higher burden of proof: “willful and wanton negligence.”

No lawyer has agreed to take the case.

Mariam Elba contributed research. Cassandra Jaramillo contributed reporting. Andrea Suozzo contributed data reporting.

by Max Nesterak, Minnesota Reformer, and Jessica Lussenhop, 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.

At the vice presidential debate against Republican Sen. JD Vance this month, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz did something he’s done throughout his nearly 20-year career in politics: name-drop the Mayo Clinic.

“If you need heart surgery, listen to the people at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, not Donald Trump,” Walz said.

Later in the debate, he did it again, after Vance criticized the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 law that expanded access to health coverage.

“I come from a major health care state, home of the Mayo Clinic,” said Walz. “We understand health care.”

Walz’s high regard for the world-renowned hospital system in southeastern Minnesota makes sense — he represented the Rochester area in Congress for 12 years, and it’s where he and his wife, Gwen, sought fertility treatment before having their daughter, Hope. The nonprofit Mayo is the state’s largest employer with more than 50,000 employees.

On various occasions, Walz has also acquiesced to the wishes of Mayo, even when those were at odds with the goals of other allies. In 2023, for example, Mayo leveraged its plans for a $5 billion expansion in Minnesota to muscle Walz into helping kill a bill aimed at slowing the speed of rising health care costs, which had passed the state House and Senate.

Years earlier, while still in Congress, Walz tried to push back against Mayo when it consolidated services after gobbling up local hospitals across southern Minnesota. When Mayo announced in 2017 that it intended to close labor and delivery, surgery and intensive care units in the city of Albert Lea, Walz supported workers protesting the reductions as a part of a contract fight with the hospital. But Mayo did not change course.

“He probably could have done more,” said Brad Arends, one of the leaders of a group in Albert Lea called Save Our Hospital that tried to preserve services. “Mayo was the bright shining star and now Mayo is literally a four-letter word in Albert Lea.”

“Mayo," he added, "has a way of hypnotizing people, especially probably politicians."

Gov. Tim Walz, center front, poses for a photo with Mayo Clinic leaders at a celebration for a $5 billion expansion at its flagship Rochester campus on Nov. 28, 2023. (Max Nesterak/Minnesota Reformer)

Mayo’s lobbying abilities extend beyond Walz and Minnesota’s borders. The hospital system has resisted proposals aimed at reining in the cost of health care, and has found success with Democrats in getting its way. Vice President Kamala Harris is running for president in part on lowering health care costs — it's listed third on her policy agenda — and her plan is built around expanding government subsidies and the Affordable Care Act.

When the ACA was first being debated, Mayo helped beat back an attempt to include a national public option, or an insurance plan run by the government. Today, the cost of care at Mayo is 88% higher than the state average, according to health care industry analysts at the nonprofit MN Community Measurement.

“Moderate Democrats, they haven’t been able to stand up to the hospital industry. That’s a pattern all over the country,” said Gillian Mason, the executive director of Healthcare NOW, which advocates for the creation of single-payer, federally managed universal healthcare coverage.

Kendall Witmer, the Minnesota senior communications adviser for the Harris-Walz campaign, said in a statement that Walz “has championed expanding access to affordable and high-quality healthcare, particularly for rural Minnesotans and veterans across the country.” She added that, under Walz, “Minnesota is recognized as a top 5 business state, a top 3 state to raise a child, and the best state for health care in the country.”

Andrea Kalmanovitz, director of communications for the Mayo Clinic, said its physicians treat “some of the most serious and complex medical conditions in the world.” The MN Community Measurement analysis that shows Mayo’s costs are higher than the state average does take into account how sick a hospital’s patients are.

“Mayo Clinic is guided in all we do by our primary value — the needs of the patient come first,” Kalmanovitz said in a statement. “As a nonprofit, we are strongly nonpartisan and work with policymakers to promote understanding of how policy proposals affect our patients and impact Mayo Clinic’s ability to fulfill its mission and further advance the transformation of healthcare.”

Walz siding with the Mayo Clinic reflects the deference he sometimes pays industry giants in Minnesota, a state that claims the fifth-most Fortune 500 companies per capita in the U.S. The headquarters of General Mills, U.S. Bancorp, 3M and Target are in Minnesota. UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest health insurance company, and the food conglomerate Cargill, which is estimated to be the largest private company in the country, also have their headquarters in the state.

Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said the governor has demonstrated a willingness to water down progressive policies to appease big business.

“Is that caving or is that pragmatism?” asked Jacobs. “I think what you're seeing is how you govern the progressive way in the real world.”

During the 2023 Legislative session, the Minnesota Nurses Association felt confident that it could finally pass legislation requiring hospitals to increase nurse staffing levels after 15 years of losing that fight to the hospital lobby. The 2022 elections months earlier had handed Walz a second term as governor, and for the first time in a decade, voters also gave control of both the state Senate and House to Democrats. The Keeping Nurses at the Bedside Act seemed destined to become law after it sailed through the House and Senate.

But two and a half weeks before the end of the session, an email from a Mayo lobbyist landed in the inboxes of Walz’s most senior advisers and set off a panic. “Mayo has long been planning significant facilities and infrastructure investments in Minnesota,” the lobbyist, Kate Johansen, wrote. Without changes to the bill, she added, Mayo would need to take its “enormous investment to other states.”

Mayo was asking for a special exemption from the nurse staffing bill, and it said that it wanted a second bill, which would empower the state to penalize hospitals for raising prices faster than targets set by a newly created commission, scrapped entirely.

If the pressure on Walz wasn’t enough, Johansen also forwarded the message to the state’s top Democratic leaders stressing the urgency. “The decision to withdraw the planned investment described below is, unfortunately, time sensitive and will be resolved in the next few days,” she wrote.

According to Mary Turner, then president of the state nurses union, Walz reached out the next day. He told her he supported the nurses — he had walked a picket line with them months earlier during what was then the largest private sector nurses strike in U.S. history — but that Mayo doesn’t bluff.

Nurses organized a sit-in at the governor’s Capitol office, an effort they nicknamed “Occupy Walz Street.” Although Walz met with some of the nurses, by all accounts the Mayo ultimatum became the final word on the matter. After initially resisting, the bill’s authors drafted the exemption Mayo demanded in response to pressure from Walz.

Minnesota Nurses Association President Mary Turner speaks at a news conference on April 26, 2023, before the House debate of a bill giving nurses more power over hospital staffing levels. (Max Nesterak/Minnesota Reformer)

Mayo said that all hospitals should be able to earn exemption from the law by using advanced staffing software, which Mayo said was more effective in determining staffing needs. But the bill’s authors rejected that proposal, choosing to only carve out Mayo. That upset other hospital leaders, who’d been lobbying against the bill for months. The measure then unraveled in the Senate.

Mayo has another leg up when it comes to influence: Mayo lobbyist Sarah Erickson, who’s with the firm United Strategies, was previously the operations director of Walz’s campaign for governor.

That close contact with the governor’s office can be in the public’s interest. The Mayo Clinic was instrumental in Walz’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, providing regular updates and expertise on infection rates. It also helped roll out the COVID-19 vaccine.

Setting aside his relationship with Mayo, Walz’s record of standing up to big business is mixed. His sole veto in the 2023 Legislative session was for a bill setting minimum wages and labor standards for Uber and Lyft drivers, after Uber threatened to pull out of Minnesota entirely and set off fears that residents with disabilities and tourists would be left stranded. The following year he signed a compromise version of the bill with lower pay rates that Uber and Lyft ultimately agreed to.

He’s also drawn criticism from the state’s environmental community for not challenging permits issued for a proposed copper-nickel mine formerly known as PolyMet (now called NewRange Copper Nickel), owned by Glencore, one of the largest multinational corporations in the world, which pleaded guilty in 2022 to bribery and corruption charges brought by the U.S. government.

Uber, Lyft and Glencore declined to comment.

Walz signed one of the nation’s strictest bans on PFAS, the forever chemical born at 3M, although the company had already said it would “exit all PFAS manufacturing globally by the end of 2025.” He also signed another prohibiting for-profit health insurance companies from selling plans as a part of Minnesota’s Medicaid program. The only company affected was UnitedHealthcare, the health insurance arm of UnitedHealth Group, which sued the state over the law. That lawsuit is pending and the company said in a statement that it strongly believes “that Minnesotans deserve the right to choose among health plans that offer the broadest access to care, the most innovative services and the highest quality benefits to meet their health care needs.”

Walz’s relationship with Mayo, however, has potentially far-reaching implications for federal health care reform. Mayo was hugely influential on the Obama administration when the ACA was being drafted, arguing that the focus of new policy should be delivering more efficient care, not lowering prices. In the summer of 2009, Mayo Clinic leaders voiced strong opposition to the creation of a public option, which advocates say would have helped pull down the ballooning price of both health care treatments and insurance.

Rather than risk losing the hospital’s support, the Obama administration drew Mayo even closer into the process. “They said, ‘Tell us exactly what you want,’” Denis Cortese, Mayo’s CEO at the time, told the Washington Post. By the end of 2009, any plans for including a public option were dead.

In the roughly 15 years since the ACA was born, Mayo Clinic has demonstrated resistance to further efforts to rein in health care spending while stirring up repeated questions about its commitment to rural health care and serving poor patients.

Since 2017, Mayo has closed at least more than a dozen rural clinics and a hospital in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa, citing staffing issues. In 2017, the Star Tribune reported that then-CEO Dr. John Noseworthy told employees that patients with private insurance would be given preference over those with Medicaid or Medicare, which pay less for care than private plans.

The hospital has also sued low-income patients for medical debt even though they were eligible for free or discounted care, which nonprofit hospitals are required to offer under the ACA, according to an investigation by the Rochester Post Bulletin. In response, Minnesota lawmakers passed a bill requiring hospitals to screen patients for eligibility for financial assistance before pursuing collections, which Walz signed.

Mayo Clinic's higher costs don’t just affect its patients. The hospital’s significant market share and high prices have contributed to a higher cost of living for families without employer-funded insurance in the Rochester area than in the Twin Cities, even though housing, food and other necessities are cheaper, according to the nonprofit economic think tank Economic Policy Institute’s family budget calculator.

That’s true even for healthy residents who rarely see their doctor, because insurance premiums for individual plans are higher in the Rochester area, which is about 90 miles from St. Paul and Minneapolis. Southeastern Minnesota has the highest average premiums for individual insurance plans in the state, with residents paying nearly 60% more before subsidies than people living in the Twin Cities metro area, according to data from MNsure.

Arends, now the president of the nonprofit Albert Lea Healthcare Coalition, said he would like to see politicians from both parties spend more time pressuring Mayo to lower their costs. “All of them — not just Tim Walz,” he said.

In response to questions about the higher cost of health care plans in southern Minnesota, Kalmanovitz wrote that the premium costs are beyond Mayo’s control. “Providers do not have any input into this process.” She said Mayo has a “robust” financial assistance program that patients can apply for online.

Whether a Harris-Walz administration would try to enact the kind of aggressive cost-saving reforms that Mayo might oppose remains to be seen. While Walz supports a state public option in Minnesota, Harris has backed off of previous support for a federal single-payer system such as Medicare for all. Instead, the campaign has pledged to renew the tax credits that President Joe Biden enacted to lower insurance premium payments, which are set to expire after 2025.

“Vice President Harris’s plans will make prescription drugs less expensive, expand access to health care, reduce medical debt, and continue strengthening the Affordable Care Act, while Donald Trump’s ‘concept’ of a health care plan will raise costs and remove peace of mind for millions of Americans,” Witmer, the campaign spokesperson, said in a statement.

Absent from Harris’ plan, however, is any mention of lowering hospital rates.

Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the nonprofit KFF, adds that Democrats forged bonds with the hospital industry to beat back nearly 15 years’ worth of efforts by Republicans to repeal the ACA.

“Democrats and hospitals have fought side by side during the battles over the ACA,” he said. “I'm sure that goodwill will help the industry in the future.”

In November 2023, Walz attended Mayo Clinic’s unveiling of its $5 billion expansion, a project that CEO Dr. Gianrico Farrugia called a once-in-three-generations opportunity to “redefine the future of health care.”

“There is no more important place on the planet and no more important work being done for humanity than is being done in this spot in Rochester, Minnesota,” Walz said at the event.

Turner, the former Minnesota nurses union leader who is now a president of National Nurses United, anticipates that what was once a local political fight for Walz will travel with him to a national stage should he and Harris take the White House.

“The bean counters are running health care right now. And they're trying to run it, and I've said this before, they're trying to run it like it's a frickin’ factory,” she said. “Once it gets to the federal level, if it isn't Mayo that's going to try to influence it, it's going to be Kaiser or Sutter, or any other huge, huge health care operation.”

by Craig Silverman, ProPublica, and Priyanjana Bengani, Tow Center for Digital Journalism

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

This story was reported in collaboration with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.

In December, the verified Facebook page of Adam Klotz, a Fox News meteorologist, started running strange video ads.

Some featured the distinctive voice of former President Donald Trump promising “$6,400 with your name on it, no payback required” just for clicking the ad and filling out a form.

In other ads with the same offer, President Joe Biden’s well-known cadence assured viewers that “this isn’t a loan with strings attached.”

There was no free cash. The audio was generated by AI. People who clicked were taken to a form asking for their personal information, which was sold to telemarketers who could target them for legitimate offers — or scams.

Klotz’s page ran more than 300 of these ads before ProPublica contacted the weather forecaster in late August. Through a spokesperson, Klotz said that his page had been hacked and he was locked out. “I had no idea that ads were being run until you reached out.”

Klotz’s page had been co-opted by a sprawling ad account network that has operated on Facebook for years, churning out roughly 100,000 misleading election and social issues ads despite Meta’s stated commitment to crack down on harmful content, according to an investigation and analysis by ProPublica and Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, as well as research by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit that researches large tech platforms. The organizations combined data and shared their analyses. TTP’s report was produced independently of ProPublica and Tow’s investigation and was shared with ProPublica prior to publication.

The network, which uses the name Patriot Democracy on many of its ad accounts, is one of eight deceptive Meta advertising operations identified by ProPublica and Tow. These networks have collectively controlled more than 340 Facebook pages, as well as associated Instagram and Messenger accounts. Most were created by the advertising networks, with some pages masquerading as government entities. Others were verified pages of people with public roles, like Klotz, who had been hacked. The networks have placed more than 160,000 election and social issues ads on these pages in English and Spanish. Meta showed the ads to users nearly 900 million times across Facebook and Instagram.

The ads are only a fraction of the more than $115 billion Meta earns annually in advertising revenue. But at just over $25 million in total lifetime spend, the networks collectively rank as the 11th-largest all-time advertiser on Meta for U.S. elections or social issues ads since the company began sharing data in 2018. The company’s failure to block these scams consistently highlights how one of the world’s largest platforms struggles to protect its users from fraud and deliver on its nearly decadelong promise to prevent deceptive political ads.

Most of these networks are run by lead-generation companies, which gather and sell people’s personal information. People who clicked on some of these ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges, among many other schemes. Some, for example, were conned by an unscrupulous insurance agent into changing their Affordable Care Act health plans. While the agent earns a commission, the people who are scammed can lose their health insurance or face unexpected tax bills because of the switch.

The ads run by the networks employ tactics that Meta has banned, including the undisclosed use of deepfake audio and video of national political figures and promoting misleading claims about government programs to bait people into sharing personal information. Thousands of ads illegally displayed copies of state and county seals and the images of governors to trick users. “The State has recently approved that Illinois residents under the age of 89 may now qualify for up to $35,000 of Funeral Expense Insurance to cover any and all end-of-life expenses!” read one deceptive ad featuring a photo of Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois state seal.

More than 13,000 ads deployed divisive political rhetoric or false claims to promote unofficial Trump merchandise.

A deceptive ad used the image of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and the state seal. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Meta removed some of the ads after initially approving them, the investigation found, but it failed to catch thousands of others with similar or even identical content. In many cases, even after removing the violating ads, it allowed the associated Facebook pages and accounts to continue operating, enabling the parent networks to spawn new pages and ads.

Meta requires ads related to elections or social issues like health care and immigration to include “paid for by” disclaimers that identify the person or entity behind the ads. But its rules for verifying advertisers and publicly disclosing who paid for such ads are less stringent than those of its main competitor, Google, ProPublica and Tow found. Many of the disclaimers on Facebook ads listed nonexistent entities.

A Meta spokesperson said it invests heavily in trust and safety and uses a mix of humans and technology to review election and social issues ads.

“We welcome ProPublica’s investigation into this scam activity, which included deceptive ads promoting Affordable Care Act tax credits and government-funded rent subsidies,” spokesperson Margarita Franklin said in an emailed statement. “... [A]s part of our ongoing work against scams, impersonation and spam, our enforcement systems had already detected and disabled a large portion of the Pages — and we reviewed and took action against the remainder of these Pages for various policy violations.”

Our analysis showed that while Meta had removed some pages and ads, its enforcement often lagged or was haphazard. Prior to being contacted by ProPublica and Tow, Meta had taken action against roughly 140 pages affiliated with these eight networks, representing less than half of the total identified in the investigation.

By then, the ads on those pages had been shown hundreds of millions of times, resulting in financial losses for an untold number of people.

Meta ultimately removed a substantial portion of pages flagged by this investigation. But after that enforcement, ProPublica and the Tow Center found that four of the networks ran more than 5,000 ads in October. Patriot Democracy alone activated two pages a day on average in the first half of this month.

“Their enforcement here is just super spotty and inconsistent, and they’re not actually attacking root problems,” said Jeff Allen, the chief research officer of the Integrity Institute, a nonprofit organization for trust and safety professionals.

He said networks like Patriot Democracy exploit the fact that a single Facebook page can be connected to multiple ad accounts and user profiles, creating a complex challenge for enforcement. “But these cracks have existed for the past eight years,” said Allen, a former Meta data scientist who worked on integrity issues before departing in 2019.

“There are a lot of gaps in the system, and Facebook’s overall strategy is to play Whac-A-Mole.”

Franklin noted that scammers use a variety of tactics to conceal their activity. Meta constantly updates its detection and enforcement systems and works with industry and law enforcement partners to combat fraudulent activity, she said.

“This is a highly adversarial space, and we continue to update our enforcement systems to respond to evolving scammer behavior,” Franklin said. She added that Meta has taken legal action against several operators.

Meta’s Rules

Misleading election ads have posed a challenge for Meta since at least 2016, when Russian trolls purchased thousands of Facebook and Instagram ads targeting Americans ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Amid public outcry and pressure from Congress, Meta has created special rules for political and social issues advertisers, launched a public Ad Library to archive such ads and hired additional people to review ads. An integrity team has been tasked with enforcing Meta’s community and advertising standards.

In 2022 and 2023, Meta laid off over 20,000 employees, including members of its integrity team. The company said it has more than 40,000 people working on safety and security around the world, an increase since 2020. It declined to say whether it has more people working on election ad reviews this cycle compared with the last presidential election.

One of the team’s key responsibilities is to verify that election and social issues advertisers are who they say they are, and that their ads adhere to the company’s rules. Since 2019, Meta has required political and social issues advertisers to submit an Employer Identification Number, a government or military website and an associated email address, or a Federal Election Commission registration number.

Meta also allowed state and local organizations and candidates who aren’t federally registered to run ads by providing a corresponding website and email address, a “valid” phone number and a mail-deliverable address. It later relaxed the rules to allow advertisers to simply display the name of their Facebook page as the entity that paid for the ad.

Google, Meta’s main U.S. election ads competitor, doesn’t have similar carve-outs for ad disclaimers. It accepts only an FEC registration number, state elections ID or EIN to verify an organization. Google’s political ad disclaimers list the organization name or the name of a person who completed the ID verification process.

Franklin said Meta has rules to ensure that page name disclaimers aren't abused. The company’s guidelines say that regardless of how much information advertisers disclose, the ads must “Accurately represent the name of the entity or person responsible for the ad.” But more than 100,000 ads identified by ProPublica and the Tow Center did not.

Patriot Democracy

Adam Klotz’s Facebook page and an example of an ad featuring a deepfake version of President Donald Trump’s voice (Screenshots by ProPublica)

The “paid for by” disclaimers on the ads that mysteriously started appearing on weather forecaster Klotz’s hijacked page listed “Klotz Policy Group” as the advertiser. Klotz Policy Group is not affiliated with Adam Klotz, and the email and website address in the disclaimer do not point to a dedicated website. The group is also not listed in OpenCorporates or other business registration databases.

The advertiser disclaimer information for Klotz’s page listed the email admin@patriotdemocracy.com and the website patriotdemocracy.com/klotzpolicygroup. That URL led to a page that promoted dental coverage for Medicare recipients and used the branding of a site called Saving Tips Daily. Similar URLs with the patriotdemocracy.com domain appeared across other pages in the network, which enabled ProPublica, Tow and the Tech Transparency Project to link them to the same network. (For more details on how the ads and networks were identified, see the methodology section at the end of this story.)

Patriot Democracy is the biggest of the eight networks identified during the course of the investigation and has been active on Meta’s platforms for nearly five years. It includes 232 pages that have spent more than $13 million on more than 110,000 ads.

Allen said operations like Patriot Democracy spend millions on Meta ads because it helps them find victims.

“If they gave over $10 million to Facebook, then they may have extracted $15 million from American seniors with this garbage,” he said. “The harms add up.”

The pages often have official-sounding names such as “Government Cash Program,” “US Financial Relief” and “USA Stimulus Fund,” and their ad disclaimers list organization names that do not correspond to registered entities or websites.

Meta also allowed the page owners to falsely identify themselves as affiliated with the federal government. If a user looked up the page details of “Government Cash Program,” they would see a notation showing that it’s a “Government Website.” US Financial Relief is listed as a “Government organization.” More than 20 pages claimed to be a “Public Service.”

The Government Cash Program Facebook page falsely listed itself as a “Government Website.” (Screenshot by ProPublica)

One of the most common types of ads run by Patriot Democracy pages is for Trump merchandise, including coins, flags and hats.

One of these ads ensnared Sam Roberson, a 57-year-old Texas resident, last month. While browsing Facebook, Roberson was drawn to an offer for a Trump coin from a page called Stars and Stripes Supply. The coin was embossed with an image of the former president raising his fist after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. One click took him to the site patriotprosnetwork.com, where Roberson paid $39.99 for 11 coins that he planned to give to his grandkids. He received the coins. But two weeks later, his card was charged another $29.99.

Roberson told ProPublica that he didn’t realize that he had signed up for a subscription. He contacted customer support to request a refund, but is skeptical the company will follow through.

“With these knuckleheads and how deep they are dug in, I may end up having to cancel the card,” he said.

When ProPublica called the site’s customer service line, a person who did not give their name said that customers who choose the “VIP” checkout option receive a discount on their purchases and are automatically enrolled in a monthly membership. The spokesperson said that customers are informed on the site and by email “how they got involved [in the membership] and how they can cancel.”

They said that someone else from the company could answer questions about advertising but hung up when asked how often they receive customer complaints about the membership fee.

An example of a Trump coin ad run by the Stars and Stripes Supply Facebook page (Screenshot by ProPublica)

ProPublica also sent an email with detailed questions about the coin offer and the subscription but did not receive a response.

The Stars and Stripes Supply page spent over $700,000 on Meta ads for Trump merchandise and ran ads as recently as Sept. 28 before it was removed by Meta. The page and the store have received online complaints about the billing scheme. It’s unclear who controls the page or the store, or how they are connected.

In addition to the billing schemes, the Trump merchandise ads often draw clicks with false claims and divisive language. Stars and Stripes Supply ran ads for Trump and JD Vance yard signs that falsely claimed “liberal activists are ripping Trump-Vance yard signs from the ground, sparking a wave of controversy across the nation.”

A page called Truly American ran a video ad for a “free” Trump flag and coin offer that was narrated by a female voice claiming to be Melania Trump. “Today we see free thinkers and independent voices like gay conservatives and Log Cabin Republicans silenced, censored and bullied by cancel-culture mobs. Donald stood against this and they tried to silence him for good,” the voice intoned, as the ad showed an image of Trump with his bloodied ear.

It’s unclear who ultimately controls the Patriot Democracy pages and associated Instagram accounts or who paid for the ads. Along with listing fake advertiser names, Patriot Democracy ad disclaimers show addresses that often correspond to WeWork co-working spaces or UPS stores. And the phone numbers, which are shared among multiple pages, led to generic voicemail messages — with one exception.

A man who answered one number said he’d never run ads on Meta and didn’t know why his phone number was listed. He said he was on his way to court and asked the reporter to call back later. He did not answer a subsequent call, and the phone number was soon disconnected.

The ownership information for patriotdemocracy.com and its related domains is also private, making it impossible to know who registered the domain. Meta did not answer specific questions about the network.

Before ProPublica and Tow reached out, Meta had removed less than half of Patriot Democracy pages for violating its advertising standards. It also failed to take action against the larger network, even after some of its pages were exposed in earlier reports by Forbes and researchers at Syracuse University.

Of the more than 110,000 ads on Patriot Democracy pages identified by ProPublica and Tow, Meta stopped just over 7,000, or roughly 6%, from running for violating standards. These ads were shown nearly 60 million times before Meta took action. Meta also consistently failed to detect and remove copies of ads it had previously banned due to policy violations, according to the analysis.

Franklin said Meta uses a variety of automated approaches to detect and remove duplicate ads. This includes training systems to recognize the images and videos used in previously removed ads in order to prevent them from running again. It also looks at a variety of signals, including user and payment information and the devices used to access accounts, to restrict or ban people who break its rules, she said.

Two ads run by the Patriot Democracy network falsely promised government subsidy checks. (Screenshots by ProPublica)

One of the most popular lures used by Patriot Democracy and other networks is the promise of free government cash.

More than 30,000 ads across the networks identified by ProPublica and Tow falsely claimed that nearly all Americans could receive government subsidies or are eligible for a “FREE Health Insurance Program.” People who clicked were often directed to unethical insurance agents who altered their existing ACA plan details or signed them up for plans they weren’t eligible for, pocketing a commission in the process. These ads were shown to users at least 38 million times.

The scheme has caused victims to lose their existing ACA health insurance or to be hit with unexpected tax bills from the IRS. In those cases, the agent falsely reported a lower income to enroll clients and secure a commission. In response to the surge in fraudulent enrollments, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the federal agency that administers the ACA, implemented stricter rules this summer for insurance agents.

A CMS spokesperson declined to comment on specific ads or platforms. But insurance marketers and other industry experts told ProPublica that Facebook ads are a scammer’s preferred method for ensnaring victims. Meta declined to comment on whether it’s in touch with CMS.

“It’s clear from speaking with a lot of different consumers that were ripped off that the Facebook ads played a big part,” said Jason Doss, an Atlanta lawyer who filed a class-action suit against a group of companies and individuals who allegedly used online ads, high-pressure insurance call centers and other methods to commit mass ACA enrollment fraud. The companies have moved to dismiss the case, citing a lack of jurisdiction and failure to show that any laws were broken, among other defenses. “We deny the allegations made and will be defending the case,” the CEO of one company named in the suit told ProPublica. The suit is ongoing.

Since 2021, Google has required U.S. health insurance advertisers to verify their identity and license status prior to running ads. Meta does not have this requirement. The company did not respond to questions about health insurance advertisers.

Taking on a Network

Meta’s failure to stop deceptive ads about government programs has forced some state and local officials to step in.

In January 2023, investigators in the Alaska Division of Insurance received complaints from consumers who said they were shown misleading ads on Facebook.

The ads used the state seal of Alaska and in some cases a photo of the governor to falsely claim that the state was offering new funeral and burial benefits. “The State of Alaska approved NEW affordable Funeral programs, designed to cover 100% final expenses up to 25,000 or more. Not just a portion,” read one ad.

As with other types of deceptive ads, the burial ads tricked people into filling out a form. In this case, they often ended up on the phone with someone trying to sell life insurance.

Alex Romero, Alaska’s chief insurance investigator, was alarmed. There weren’t any “new” state benefits. It’s also illegal in Alaska, and just about every state, to use a state seal without permission.

Searching the Meta Ad Library, he found hundreds of deceptive ads that used state seals. Romero warned his fellow state insurance investigators on a scheduled conference call soon after his discovery. “There was a proliferation of advertising using the same deceptive marketing,” Romero told ProPublica.

Around the same time, officials in Ventura County, California, were alerted to the unauthorized use of its county seal in Facebook ads. A local news outlet sent the county examples of burial insurance ads that used the Ventura County seal. Tiffany North, the county counsel, began an inquiry. She and Romero connected last spring and realized the same person was connected to the Facebook ads: a lead-generation marketer and insurance broker named Abel Medina.

Officials in Alaska and Ventura County, California, were alarmed by ads that used their seals without permission. (Screenshots by ProPublica)

Public records show that Medina, 35, owns companies such as Heartwork Global and Kontrol LLC, which have run election and social issues ads on several Facebook pages.

Romero said his research showed that Kontrol LLC was a key source of Facebook ads with state seals and images of governors. “Practically every state, a bunch of counties, several cities, they’re all getting tagged by this guy Medina,” he said.

Two other companies, Final Expense Authority LLC and American Benefits & Services LLC, ran similar ads on some of the same Facebook pages, ProPublica and Tow found. Their websites had text that was nearly identical to text on Heartwork Global’s site.

Corporate records show that Final Expense Authority LLC is registered to Tiffani Panyanouvong, a 24-year-old former insurance broker. She told ProPublica that Medina registered the entity in her name without her permission when they were dating.

American Benefits & Services LLC is registered in Delaware and does not publicly list an owner. Panyanouvong said that Medina used that company and Final Expense Authority to run ads on Meta and that she “had nothing to do with his lead-generation services.”

“This is all because of him, and I was just his girlfriend at the time,” Panyanouvong told ProPublica in a WhatsApp message. “And he used me as another person to hide behind to get through the Facebook advertising loop holes.”

On his LinkedIn profile, Medina touts his Facebook ad expertise. He says he generated “$1.6 Million in sales in under eight months with only Facebook Final Expense Media Buying and growing other verticals.”

He’s also teaching others how to do it — for a fee. His profile points to a website, Scale Kontrol, which promises to help clients create a “cash cow advertising machine” by using Facebook ads to generate customer leads. The site also assures customers that it knows “work arounds” to avoid having ads “flagged, banned, restricted.”

Medina did not respond to phone messages or to a detailed list of questions sent to three email addresses, his Facebook account and a home address.

ProPublica and Tow found that the four companies have operated at least 40 Facebook pages and spent $2.1 million on more than 21,000 election and issues ads. Thousands of ads reviewed by ProPublica and Tow across pages linked to the companies made deceptive claims and appeared to break one or more Meta rules.

A deceptive ad for car insurance falsely suggested that President Joe Biden was sending government checks to pay for gas. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

The pages used deepfake audio of Biden to make false claims about government subsidies, ran deceptive auto insurance ads that promoted nonexistent “Biden Gas Relief Checks” using images of a U.S. Treasury check, and falsely claimed that “The State has approved a NEW Mortgage Protection Plan that protects your home and family in the event of an unexpected tragedy.” No such state plan exists.

Prior to being contacted by ProPublica, Meta had removed about half of the pages. Ten pages connected to these companies ran ads in the last three months.

In March 2023, North sent a cease-and-desist letter to Final Expense Authority. “Your use of the County’s official seal and your actions in misleading the public are unauthorized and unlawful,” she wrote.

The following month, Romero sent a similar letter to Medina, Panyanouvong and three of the companies. It cited five criminal and civil statutes that the state of Alaska believed they had violated and demanded they stop running ads with the state seal and images of the governor.

North and Romero said the ads with their respective seals stopped soon after the letters were sent. (Neither contacted Meta directly, telling ProPublica they focused on the companies running the ads.)

Final Expense Authority, the company registered to Panyanouvong, is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Monterey County district attorney’s office over its use of the California county’s seal. Emily Hickok, Monterey County’s chief deputy district attorney, confirmed the investigation to ProPublica and said her office reported the ads to Meta in February. She declined to comment further, citing the ongoing investigation.

Panyanouvong’s California insurance license was revoked in January. An attorney for the state Department of Insurance cited the use of Ventura County and Alaska seals in ads, among other alleged violations, state records show. Due to a prior criminal conviction for petty theft, records show that in 2019 Medina received a California insurance license on a probationary basis. It has been inactive since last November. He holds an active license in Texas.

Panyanouvong, who now works as a waitress, said she hopes to get her license back. “I’m pretty disheartened about this matter constantly haunting me,” she said.

The California Department of Insurance declined to comment on any investigations into the companies. “While we do not comment on open investigations, deceptive advertising on social media platforms can be a cause for licensing action or criminal prosecution,” it said in a statement to ProPublica.

Meta removed all of the active pages linked to the four companies after ProPublica and Tow shared them. It declined to say whether it had taken additional action. But as recently as early October, an ad from American Benefits & Services offered $100K to homeowners: “Claim cash back with these new home owners benefits programs that just became available.”

Still Locked Out

After ProPublica emailed Klotz, the meteorologist, in August to ask about the ads running via his page, his employer, Fox News, contacted Meta to get the ads removed and to restore his access. His verified page continued running ads promising easy money to Americans until early October. As of this week, he still doesn’t have access to his page.

“As far as I know the account is still hacked and in their control,” Klotz said.

Methodology

The pages and networks included in this investigation were identified by searching Meta’s Ad Library for keywords including “benefits,” “subsidy,” “stimulus,” “$6400” and “burial.” The initial keywords were chosen based on examples sourced from reports, FTC investigations and lawsuits. Each page added to the initial seed set was vetted by viewing its ads, advertiser disclaimer information, and page content and manager information.

Using this initial set, we expanded the list of keywords based on ads run by the pages and by searching the Ad Library for websites that the ads linked to. We then used the Ad Library Report interface to identify all pages for each advertiser. We also looked for pages that ran ads using the same advertiser disclaimer information.

Patriot Democracy

In the case of the Patriot Democracy network, we connected the pages and ads together via three domains that were used in “paid for by” ad disclaimers: informedempowerment.com, tacticalempowerment.com and patriotdemocracy.com. The disclaimers that used these domains often used the same phone numbers or addresses. Additionally, a Domain Name System analysis showed that all three domains resided on the same server.

Pages in the Patriot Democracy network often used identical advertiser disclaimer information such as addresses and phone numbers. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Determining Metrics

To determine the total number of ads, ads removed and impressions, we relied on the Meta Ad Library application programming interface. For each page identified using the above methodology, we pulled all the ads via the API. To ascertain which ads had been removed, we filtered out ads that had the text “This content was removed because it didn’t follow our Advertising Standards.” However, if Meta had taken action at the page level, this ad text would not update.

Meta’s Ad Library does not offer exact numbers for impressions of individual election and social issues ads. Instead, it offers ranges. We used the most conservative number offered by Meta, the “lower bound.” This means that cumulatively, these ads likely had tens of thousands more impressions.

The Ad Library provides the total spending for election and social issues ads run on a page, which is the source of all of the dollar amounts cited in this investigation.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

Data collection and analysis for this story was done in conjunction with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.

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

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

In late September, Torri was driving down the highway with her 11-year-old son Junior in the back seat when her phone started ringing.

It was the Hamilton County Sheriff’s deputy who worked at Junior’s middle school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Deputy Arthur Richardson asked Torri where she was. She told him she was on the way to a family birthday dinner at LongHorn Steakhouse.

“He said, ‘Is Junior with you?’” Torri recalled.

Earlier that day, Junior had been accused by other students of making a threat against the school. When Torri had come to pick him up, she’d spoken with Richardson and with administrators, who’d told her he was allowed to return to class the next day. The principal had said she would carry out an investigation then. ProPublica and WPLN are using a nickname for Junior and not including Torri’s last name at the family’s request, to prevent him from being identifiable.

When Richardson called her in the car, Torri immediately felt uneasy. He didn’t say much before hanging up, and she thought about turning around to go home. But she kept driving. When they walked into the restaurant, Torri watched as Junior happily greeted his family.

Soon her phone rang again. It was the deputy. He said he was outside in the strip mall’s parking lot and needed to talk to Junior. Torri called Junior’s stepdad, Kevin Boyer, for extra support, putting him on speaker as she went outside to talk to Richardson. She left Junior with the family, wanting to protect her son for as long as she could.

Richardson quickly made his intentions clear. “We’re coming to arrest him,” he told the parents.

In Torri’s memory, everything that happened next is a blur. Both parents began pleading with the officer: They told him Junior is autistic and would feel claustrophobic in the back of a police car in handcuffs. They said he wasn’t a danger to anyone. Could they drive him to the juvenile detention center themselves? “‘There’s no reason for you to put bracelets on an 11-year-old. He doesn’t understand,’” Boyer recalls saying.

It didn’t work. Torri went inside to get Junior, holding back tears as she tried to explain what was happening. Boyer heard Junior crying on the other end of the phone and began to give him a pep talk. “‘Hey, listen, they got it wrong. I’m on my way down to the jail, and I will not leave until you come home with us. But you have to go with them,’” he recalls telling Junior. “‘Just let them take you.’” Family members followed Torri and Junior into the parking lot to see what was happening, and strangers watched from their cars. Junior’s 5-year-old brother was sobbing.

Richardson put handcuffs on the 11-year-old and locked him in the back of the patrol car. In a police report written later that day, Richardson cited a new state law as the basis for the arrest. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment or to a detailed list of questions.

After a shooter killed six people at Nashville’s Covenant School in 2023, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature ignored calls to pass gun control measures. Instead, they passed a series of increasingly punitive laws aimed not only at preventing future violence but dissuading kids from making threats that disrupt school and terrify other students.

Two contradictory laws went into effect before this school year began. One requires school officials to expel a student only if their investigation finds the threat is “valid,” a term that the law does not define. The other mandates that police charge people, including kids, with felonies for making threats of any kind, credible or not. As a result, students across the state can be arrested for statements that wouldn’t even get them expelled.

Police in Tennessee say that even when kids make threats that are not credible, they need to be held accountable for their actions — including with arrests and felony charges. The Tennessee Sheriffs’ Association announced in September that law enforcement would “not tolerate anyone making threats and inciting fear within our schools and our community. Those responsible will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Rep. Cameron Sexton, Tennessee House speaker and the Republican sponsor of the felony law, said his legislation is working as intended and will lead to safer schools. “Unfortunately sometimes you have to make examples of the first few who are doing it so that others know that it’s going to be taken seriously,” he said.

Tennessee has not yet released statewide data on how many arrests for threats of mass violence have been made since school started in August. But Hamilton County arrested 18 students in the first six weeks of the school year, more than twice as many as Nashville’s Davidson County — despite Hamilton having far fewer students. Data that ProPublica and WPLN obtained through a records request shows that at least 519 students were charged with threats of mass violence last school year, when it was a misdemeanor, an increase from 442 the prior year. Many of them were middle schoolers and most were boys. The youngest child charged last school year was 7 years old.

Juvenile defense lawyers, judges, school officials and parents criticized the felony law for casting too wide a net — unnecessarily traumatizing kids by arresting and handcuffing them over jokes, rumors and misunderstandings. Ben Connor, a school board member in Junior’s district, said the new law has muddied the waters, making it more difficult to spot real threats when so much time is spent punishing kids who don’t have the intent or the means to carry out violence.

“We may not even be keeping the kids safer by choosing to just send everyone to jail,” Connor said. “At some point you’re going to get desensitized to so many children going to jail for silly things that a credible threat could easily pass through the cracks of that system.”

Junior at home in Chattanooga (Andrea Morales for ProPublica) “We Don’t Pick and Choose”

The incident that got Junior in trouble happened in science class, during the last hour of the school day. As he would later describe it to his parents, he overheard two other students talking. One was asking if the other was going to shoot up the school tomorrow. Junior looked at the other student, who seemed like he was going to say yes. So Junior answered for him. “Yes,” Junior recalls saying.

According to the police report, other students went to the teacher and told her that Junior said he was going to shoot up the school. Junior denies ever having said that. He lives with his mom, who doesn’t own guns.

It was the type of misunderstanding that, in past years, might have been sorted out by the teacher or a school counselor. But Tennessee law now requires school staff to report threats, credible or not, to law enforcement. If they don’t, they could be charged with a misdemeanor.

Junior was called to the principal’s office to give his version of events. Since it was the end of the day, Torri joined him there when she came to pick him up. The principal, the dean and Richardson questioned Junior about what happened.

After he retold the story, Torri asked what to expect the next day. Torri said the principal responded: “‘Oh, he can attend school,’ as if he was not a threat. No hesitation.”

Relieved by what the principal said, Torri took Junior home to get ready for the birthday party.

Hamilton County Schools did not respond to questions from ProPublica and WPLN about their general approach to threats of mass violence or Junior’s case, even though Torri signed a form giving school officials permission to speak about what happened to her son. Instead, Superintendent Justin Robertson emailed his communications team asking them to send the news organizations a “generic quote” on the district’s position.

“We recognize the critical importance of identifying and assessing any threat of mass violence made within our schools and advocating for a system of assessment that prioritizes our value of care,” a spokesperson wrote in a subsequent email. “It is critical that we work in partnership with our local law enforcement agencies to conduct threat assessments to determine their severity level and hold individuals accountable for valid threats.”

Junior’s parents felt it was overzealous of Richardson to track down Junior and arrest him at the party, especially since the officer knew he would be at school the next day. They later filed a citizen’s complaint against Richardson, stating that he “arrested their son on hearsay” and “wanted glory for making that arrest.” The complaint is still under investigation by the sheriff’s department.

Under the law, Richardson did not need to consider the context or intent before making an arrest.

“We don’t pick and choose,” Hamilton County Sheriff Austin Garrett told a panel of county commissioners at a public hearing in mid-September. His officers “know to make an arrest and charge the person making that threat, child or adult.” When Garrett was elected in 2022, one of his biggest priorities was installing more police in public schools, in part through state grants. Within a year, he succeeded. Garrett turned down requests to be interviewed for this story.

Boyer, Junior’s stepfather, spoke on the phone twice in late October with Richardson’s boss, Hamilton County Sheriff’s Lt. Jeremy Durham. During the calls, which Boyer recorded, Durham said he had reviewed camera footage of the arrest and thought Richardson “did not violate policy.”

“He was not out to get anybody,” Durham said. “None of us like doing this. There’s no high-five or big honor in putting a child in jail.”

Durham said that ultimately internal affairs would review whether the case was handled properly. “We do have discretion, but it puts a little bit more burden on the deputy when it is a felony, especially one like threats of mass violence on school,” Durham said on one of the calls. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

ProPublica and WPLN requested data from Hamilton County Schools on their response to threats in the first six weeks of school. The district investigated 38 threats from students in nearly all grade levels, including finger guns pointed at other classmates and remarks about burning down the classroom. One fourth grader was hit with a soccer ball at recess and angrily told students he would blow up the school.

Police arrested 18 students, even though school officials labeled most of the threats as “low level” with “no evidence of motive.” Of the students arrested, 39% were Black, compared to 30% of students in the district overall. And 33% had disabilities, more than double the share of disabled students in the district’s population.

Junior is Black. But his stepdad thought they had more time before they’d have to have the talk about how the police are not always looking out for his best interests. It was a lesson Boyer learned himself when he was a few years older than Junior. At age 13, Boyer was walking his dog when police officers stopped him and slammed him against a fence, saying he “fit the description” of a boy who had escaped from the nearby juvenile detention center.

When he stumbled home, nose bleeding, he sought reassurance from his dad, who greeted him from the porch. His dad’s response has echoed in his head for years: “Yeah, boy, you’re going to deal with that your whole life.” Boyer is determined to avoid making the same mistake with his son. “I’m going to go to the end of the earth for my kids,” he said.

Hundreds of children across the country are facing charges this year similar to Junior’s, especially after a deadly school shooting in Georgia this September fueled a frenzied response. School officials and law enforcement reported immediate increases in the number of school threats on social media and vowed to crack down on anyone making them.

A Judicial Safety Net

As soon as Boyer got to Hamilton County’s juvenile detention center the night of the arrest, he started making his case. Junior has autism, he told the man at the front desk. He’s probably scared out of his mind right now. He’s only 11 years old. Is there any way the man could tell Junior his parents were there, so that he knows he’s not alone?

The man offered to bring Junior into a room with a window that was visible from the waiting room so that he could see Boyer. Hours passed like that, father and son trading half-hearted waves and thumbs ups while they waited.

Boyer started to worry that the detention center might try to keep Junior overnight.

But when he asked an employee, he found out that the detention center wouldn’t hold Junior overnight at all — he was too young. According to state records, the detention center holds children ages 12 through 18. Once Richardson finished writing his report, Junior was free to go.

“So all of this is unnecessary. Putting the handcuffs on the kid, this whole show that you guys are trying to have,” Boyer said. “You’re not even gonna accept the 11-year-old.”

Junior was only detained for a few hours before he got to go home, but other kids have been locked in juvenile detention for days. A recent lawsuit against the school board and district attorney in Williamson County, outside of Nashville, alleges that last September a high school junior was handcuffed, taken to juvenile detention and strip searched before being placed in solitary confinement. His requests to speak with his parents or a lawyer were denied, the lawsuit claims. He was held in juvenile detention for three nights, until he was released on house arrest.

The arrest stemmed from an incident in his chemistry class. The principal asserted the student had raised his hand in a “Hilter salute” and made a threat against the school. According to the lawsuit, this claim was baseless and the teacher present denied that the student had done anything inappropriate.

Williamson County’s school board disputed some of the facts of the lawsuit in a court filing in early October, including that a Hitler salute was the reason for the student’s discipline and that the teacher said he’d done nothing wrong. The school board did not describe what happened but said in the filing that the student’s “comments and actions warranted” discipline. A school district spokesperson declined to answer further questions about pending litigation, and the district attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s unclear what will happen with Junior’s case in juvenile court. He was charged with a felony, which could mean imprisonment in a state facility, though it wouldn’t follow him into adulthood because juvenile records are sealed. His case will be heard in juvenile court in December.

“Because the charge has been enhanced to a felony level, some law enforcement officers started the school year thinking they had no choice but to make an arrest,” said Robert Philyaw, Hamilton County’s juvenile court judge and the president of the Tennessee Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

Many of the threats of mass violence cases he’s seen should never have made it to his court, he said. One child held up a battery and called it a bomb. He was arrested. Another said he was going to nuke the place. That child was arrested too, even though he realistically “didn’t have any plutonium in his backpack,” Philyaw said.

“If some child says, ‘I’m going to run an elephant through here and it’s going to tear the school up,’ are they going to be arrested?” Philyaw asked. “Even though there’s no elephant in sight or within that child’s control? I don’t know.” Most of these cases in his court this school year have been dismissed after a thorough review, he said.

According to a ProPublica and WPLN analysis of state data, juvenile court judges are rarely finding students “delinquent,” a term equivalent to “guilty” in adult court. In fact, about 80% of young people charged with threats in the past three school years have either had their charges completely dismissed or were sent through diversion programs, which could require them to complete community service hours, therapy or other interventions.

Judges are, in effect, acting as safety nets at the end of a harsh process. In some cases, they’ve overruled district attorneys seeking harsher treatment of children. In Knox County, located in East Tennessee, judges largely rejected the local district attorney’s request to detain all children charged with making threats until trial — which could be up to 30 days.

Rep. Bo Mitchell, a Nashville Democrat who co-sponsored the felony law, acknowledged that children who do not pose any danger are being arrested. But he said that district attorneys and judges should use good judgment when determining how to handle the charge.

But Matt Moore, a defense lawyer in West Tennessee, said the stakes for children are too high to rely on the discretion of individual prosecutors and judges as protection from an overly punitive law.

“The whole point is, these are juveniles. They’re supposed to make mistakes. They’re supposed to be young and dumb,” he said. “And if you don’t have a judge or a district attorney who take that into account, these kids’ lives are basically over.”

Junior loves watching and playing football, and when he can’t be on the field, he often plays football video games. (Andrea Morales for ProPublica) “Who Takes Responsibility?”

The only thing Junior loves more than talking about football is playing it. When the weather is too harsh to get outside, he plays his favorite football video game.

His parents sat high up in the bleachers one day in early October as he ran drills alongside his teammates. They picked him out from the other students easily, his height and stocky build adding to his talent as a lineman. He often encourages the younger players on the team, an unofficial mentor.

“This field is his place,” Torri said, smiling. “He’s the gentle giant of the field.”

That night, Hamilton County Schools had been planning to host a town hall about the threats and arrests. Junior’s parents were hoping to attend and share their story as a way to advocate for their son while the charge against him remains pending in court. But the board canceled the meeting at the last minute without giving a clear explanation.

By the time the two parents found out about the regularly scheduled school board meeting later that week, it was too late to sign up to make a public comment. They felt like they were constantly bumping up against roadblocks in a system that wasn’t designed to let them be heard.

The school district has been grappling with the state laws since the start of the school year. Connor, a school board member, is the father of four daughters in the public school system. He drafted a resolution in an attempt to convince legislators to align the way schools and police handle threats of mass violence. Most importantly, he said, police should have to consider whether a threat is valid before making an arrest, just like schools are required to do before expulsions.

“As a result of this unfortunate disparity,” the resolution reads, “students who have not made valid, credible threats against the security of the school or the safety of their classmates are nevertheless being arrested by law enforcement and detained when these same students might not face discipline at school.”

The school board was supposed to vote on the resolution twice in the last two months, but it canceled both votes. Connor said the board will instead try to speak directly with the authors of the law. A group of parents, many organized by a chapter of the far-right group Moms for Liberty, showed up to speak out against the resolution at a board meeting in September. One school employee and parent begged the board not to ask for a change in the law and asked them to treat all threats the same: “How can you be sure it’s a valid threat?”

Junior was suspended for two days, according to his parents, but the consequences of the arrest have lasted much longer. Junior can barely talk about what happened, even with his parents. He gets scared when he spots a police officer on the street. Little by little, Junior said, it’s gotten easier for him to sit in the classroom of the teacher who reported him to the police and to walk past the officer who handcuffed him and put him in the back of a cop car.

In past years, Junior had struggled with reading and math due to his disability and required extra support in school. And it seemed to be working. Before the arrest, Junior was “rocking this school year,” his mom said. “I’m a proud mama.” He would check his own grades daily, excited to see how well he was doing and track his progress. His parents worry his improvements might be derailed.

“So do you fault the officer? Do you fault the new law? Who takes responsibility of this massive problem?” Boyer said. “We’re traumatizing our children.”

by Phoebe Petrovic, Wisconsin Watch, and Doug Bock Clark, ProPublica

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

Earlier this month, subscribers to the Wisconsin Law Journal received an email with an urgent subject: “Upholding Election Integrity — A Call to Action for Attorneys.”

The letter began by talking about fairness and following the law in elections. But it then suggested that election officials do something that courts have found to be illegal for over a century: treat the certification of election results as an option, not an obligation.

The large logo at the top of the email gave the impression that it was an official correspondence from the respected legal newspaper, though smaller print said it was sent on behalf of a public relations company. The missive was an advertisement from a new group with deep ties to activists who have challenged the legitimacy of recent American elections.

The group, Follow the Law, has placed ads in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin news outlets serving attorneys, judges and election administrators — individuals who could be involved in election disputes. In Georgia, it ran ads supporting the State Election Board as its majority, backed by former President Donald Trump, passed a rule that experts warned could have allowed county board members to exclude enough Democratic votes to impact the presidential election. (A judge later struck down the rule as “illegal, unconstitutional and void.”)

In making its arguments about certification, Follow the Law has mischaracterized election rules and directed readers to a website providing an incomplete and inaccurate description of how certification works and what the laws and rules are in various states, election experts and state officials said.

“Anyone relying on that website is being deceived, and whoever is responsible for its content is being dishonest,” said Mike Hassinger, public information officer for Georgia’s secretary of state.

Certification is the mandatory administrative process that officials undertake after they finish counting and adjudicating ballots. Official results need to be certified by tight deadlines, so they can be aggregated and certified at the state and federal levels. Other procedures like lawsuits and recounts exist to check or challenge election outcomes, but those typically cannot commence until certification occurs. If officials fail to meet those deadlines or exclude a subset of votes, courts could order them to certify, as they have done in the past. But experts have warned that, in a worst-case scenario, the transition of power could be thrown into chaos.

“These ads make it seem as if there's only one way for election officials to show that they're on the ball, and that is to delay or refuse to certify an election. And just simply put, that is not their role,” said Sarah Gonski, an Arizona elections attorney and senior policy adviser for the Institute for Responsive Government, a think tank working on election issues. “What this is, is political propaganda that’s dressed up in a fancy legal costume.”

The activities of Follow the Law, which have not been previously reported, represent a broader push by those aligned with Trump to leverage the mechanics of elections to their advantage. The combination of those strategies, including recruiting poll workers and removing people from voting rolls, could matter in an election that might be determined by a small number of votes.

Since Trump lost the 2020 election, at least 35 election board members in various states, who have been overwhelmingly Republican, have unsuccessfully tried to refuse to certify election results before being compelled to certify by courts or being outvoted by Democratic members. Last week, a county supervisor in Arizona pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for failing to perform election duties when she voted to delay certifying the 2022 election. And last month, the American Civil Liberties Union sued an election board member in Michigan after he said he might not certify the 2024 results. He ultimately signed an affidavit acknowledging his legal obligation to certify, and the ACLU dismissed its case. Experts have warned that more could refuse to certify the 2024 election if Trump loses.

Follow the Law bills itself as a “group of lawyers committed to ensuring elections are free, fair and represent the true votes of all American citizens.” It’s led by Melody Clarke, a longtime conservative activist with stints at Heritage Action, a conservative advocacy organization, and the Election Integrity Network, headed by a lawyer who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

This summer, Clarke left a leadership position at EIN to join the Election Transparency Initiative, a group headed by Ken Cuccinelli, a former Trump administration official. The two groups work together, according to Cuccinelli and EIN’s 2024 handbook.

The banner ads that appeared in Georgia and Wisconsin outlets disclosed they were paid for by the American Principles Project Foundation. ETI is a subsidiary of a related nonprofit, the American Principles Project. Financial reports show that packaging magnate Richard Uihlein has contributed millions of dollars to the American Principles Project this year through a political action committee. Uihlein has funneled his fortune into supporting far-right candidates and election deniers, as ProPublica has reported.

Cuccinelli, Clarke and a spokesperson for Uihlein did not respond to requests for comment or detailed lists of questions. Cuccinelli previously defended to ProPublica the legality of election officials exercising their discretion in certifying results. “The proposed rule will protect the foundational, one person-one vote principle underpinning our democratic elections and guard against certification of inaccurate or erroneous results,” Cuccinelli wrote in a letter to Georgia’s State Election Board.

The most recent ads appear to be an extension of a monthslong effort that started in Georgia to expand the discretion of county election officials ahead of the November contest.

In August and September, Follow the Law bought ads as Georgia’s election board passed controversial rules, including one that empowered county election board members to not certify votes they found suspicious. As ProPublica has reported, the rule was secretly pushed by the EIN, where Clarke worked as deputy director.

Certification “is not a ministerial function,” Cuccinelli said at the election board’s August meeting. The law, he argued, “clearly implies that that board is intended and expected to use its judgment to determine, on very short time frames, what is the most proper outcome of the vote count.”

However, a state judge made clear in an October ruling the dangers of giving county board members the power to conduct investigations and decide which votes are valid. If board members, who are often political appointees, were “free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge” and refuse to certify election results, “Georgia voters would be silenced,” he wrote, finding that this would be unconstitutional. The case is on appeal and will be heard after the election.

Despite that ruling, and another from a different judge also finding both certification rules unconstitutional, Follow the Law’s website section for Georgia still asserts that a State Election Board rule “makes crystal clear” that county board members’ duty is “more than a simple ministerial task” without mentioning either ruling. The state Republican party has appealed the second ruling.

In a Telegram channel created by a Fulton County, Georgia, commissioner, someone shared what they called a “dream checklist” for election officials this week that contains extensive “suggestions” for how they should fulfill their statutory duties. The unsigned 15-page document, which bears the same three icons that appear on Follow the Law’s website, concludes, “Resolve all discrepancies prior to certification.”

On the same day the Georgia judge ruled that county board members can’t refuse to certify votes, Follow the Law began running ads in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin legal publications. The communications argued that certification is a discretionary step officials should take only after performing an investigation to ensure an election’s accuracy, largely continuing the line of argument that Cuccinelli pushed to Georgia’s election board and that the lawyers took before the judge. “Uphold your oath to only certify an accurate election,” said banner ads that ran in WisPolitics, a political news outlet. Another read: “No rubber stamps!” WisPolitics did not respond to requests for comment.

In Pennsylvania, the ad claimed that “simply put, the role of election officials is not ‘ministerial’” and that election officials are by law “required to ensure (and investigate if necessary) that elections are free from ‘fraud, deceit, or abuse’ and that the results are accurate prior to certification.”

Follow the Law has also directly contacted at least one county official in Eureka County, Nevada, pointing him to the group’s website, according to a letter obtained by ProPublica and Wisconsin Watch.

Follow the Law’s ads and website overstate officials’ roles beyond what statutes allow, state officials in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin said.

The group’s Wisconsin page reads: “Canvassers must first ensure that all votes are legally cast and can only certify results after verifying this.” But officials tasked with certifying elections are scorekeepers, not referees, said Edgar Lin, Wisconsin policy strategist and attorney for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works to protect the integrity of American elections. Lin and other experts said officials ensure the accuracy of an election’s basic arithmetic, for example, by checking that the number of ballots matches the number of voters, but they are not empowered to undertake deeper investigations.

Gonski said that in addition to overstating certifiers’ responsibilities, Follow the Law’s messaging underplays the protections that already exist. “Our election system is chock-full of checks and balances,” Gonski said. “Thousands of individuals have roles to play, and all of them seamlessly work together using well-established procedures to ensure a safe, accurate and secure election. No single individual has unchecked power over any piece of the process."

Ads in the Wisconsin Law Journal and the Legal Intelligencer in Pennsylvania also presented the findings of a poll that Follow the Law said was conducted by Rasmussen Reports, a company whose credibility the ad emphasizes. But Rasmussen Reports did not conduct the poll. It was conducted by Scott Rasmussen, who founded the polling company but has not worked there in over a decade.

Both the company and pollster confirmed the misattribution but did not comment further. The Wisconsin Law Journal and ALM, which owns the Legal Intelligencer, declined to comment.

Sam Liebert, a former election clerk and the Wisconsin director for All Voting is Local, said he wants the state’s attorney general to issue an unequivocal directive reminding election officials of their legal duty to certify.

“Certifying elections is a mandatory, democratic duty of our election officials,” he said. “Each refusal to certify threatens to validate the broader election denier movement, while sowing disorder in our election administration processes.”

Do you have any information about Follow the Law or other groups’ efforts to challenge election certification that we should know? Have you seen Follow the Law ads or outreach elsewhere? If so, please make a record of the ad and reach out to us. Phoebe Petrovic can be reached by email at ppetrovic@wisconsinwatch.org and by Signal at 608-571-3748. Doug Bock Clark can be reached at 678-243-0784 and doug.clark@propublica.org.

Correction

Oct. 31, 2024: This story originally misstated the profession of a representative for Richard Uihlein. The representative was a spokesperson, not a lawyer.

by Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana

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Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.

The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.

But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”

For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.

Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.

Barnica is one of at least two Texas women who ProPublica found lost their lives after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, which fall into a gray area under the state’s strict abortion laws that prohibit doctors from ending the heartbeat of a fetus.

Neither had wanted an abortion, but that didn’t matter. Though proponents insist that the laws protect both the life of the fetus and the person carrying it, in practice, doctors have hesitated to provide care under threat of prosecution, prison time and professional ruin.

ProPublica is telling these women’s stories this week, starting with Barnica’s. Her death was “preventable,” according to more than a dozen medical experts who reviewed a summary of her hospital and autopsy records at ProPublica’s request; they called her case “horrific,” “astounding” and “egregious.”

The doctors involved in Barnica’s care at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest did not respond to multiple requests for comment on her case. In a statement, HCA Healthcare said “our responsibility is to be in compliance with applicable state and federal laws and regulations” and said that physicians exercise their independent judgment. The company did not respond to a detailed list of questions about Barnica’s care.

Like all states, Texas has a committee of maternal health experts who review such deaths to recommend ways to prevent them, but the committee’s reports on individual cases are not public and members said they have not finished examining cases from 2021, the year Barnica died.

ProPublica is working to fill gaps in knowledge about the consequences of abortion bans. Reporters scoured death data, flagging Barnica’s case for its concerning cause of death: “sepsis” involving “products of conception.” We tracked down her family, obtained autopsy and hospital records and enlisted a range of experts to review a summary of her care that ProPublica created in consultation with two doctors.

Barnica’s autopsy report lists her cause of death as sepsis with “retained products of conception,” meaning tissue that grew during her pregnancy but remained after her miscarriage. (Highlighted and redacted by ProPublica)

Among those experts were more than a dozen OB-GYNs and maternal-fetal medicine specialists from across the country, including researchers at prestigious institutions, doctors who regularly handle miscarriages and experts who have served on state maternal mortality review committees or held posts at national professional medical organizations.

After reviewing the four-page summary, which included the timeline of care noted in hospital records, all agreed that requiring Barnica to wait to deliver until after there was no detectable fetal heartbeat violated professional medical standards because it could allow time for an aggressive infection to take hold. They said there was a good chance she would have survived if she was offered an intervention earlier.

“If this was Massachusetts or Ohio, she would have had that delivery within a couple hours,” said Dr. Susan Mann, a national patient safety expert in obstetric care who teaches at Harvard University.

Many noted a striking similarity to the case of Savita Halappavanar, a 31-year-old woman who died of septic shock in 2012 after providers in Ireland refused to empty her uterus while she was miscarrying at 17 weeks. When she begged for care, a midwife told her, “This is a Catholic country.” The resulting investigation and public outcry galvanized the country to change its strict ban on abortion.

But in the wake of deaths related to abortion access in the United States, leaders who support restricting the right have not called for any reforms.

Last month, ProPublica told the stories of two Georgia women, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, whose deaths were deemed “preventable” by the state’s maternal mortality review committee after they were unable to access legal abortions and timely medical care amid an abortion ban.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp called the reporting “fear mongering.” Former President Donald Trump has not weighed in — except to joke that his Fox News town hall on women’s issues would get “better ratings” than a press call where Thurman’s family spoke about their pain.

Leaders in Texas, which has the nation’s oldest abortion ban, have witnessed the consequences of such restrictions longer than those in any other state.

In lawsuits, court petitions and news stories, dozens of women have said they faced dangers when they were denied abortions starting in 2021. One suffered sepsis like Barnica, but survived after three days in intensive care. She lost part of her fallopian tube. Lawmakers have made small concessions to clarify two exceptions for medical emergencies, but even in those cases, doctors risk up to 99 years in prison and fines of $100,000; they can argue in court that their actions were not a crime, much like defendants can claim self-defense after being charged with murder.

Amid the deluge of evidence of the harm, including research suggesting Texas’ legislation has increased infant and maternal deaths, some of the ban’s most prominent supporters have muted their public enthusiasm for it. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who once championed the fall of Roe v. Wade and said, “Pregnancy is not a life-threatening illness,” is now avoiding the topic amid a battle to keep his seat. And Gov. Greg Abbott, who said early last year that “we promised we would protect the life of every child with a heartbeat, and we did,” has not made similar statements since.

Both declined to comment to ProPublica, as did state Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose commitment to the ban remains steadfast as he fights for access to the out-of-state medical records of women who travel for abortions. Earlier this month, as the nation grappled with the first reported, preventable deaths related to abortion access, Paxton celebrated a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that allowed Texas to ignore federal guidance requiring doctors to provide abortions that are needed to stabilize emergency patients.

“This is a major victory,” Paxton said.

“They Had to Wait Until There Was No Heartbeat”

To Barnica, an immigrant from Honduras, the American dream seemed within reach in her corner of Houston, a neighborhood filled with restaurants selling El Salvadoran pupusas and bakeries specializing in Mexican conchas. She found work installing drywall, saved money to support her mother back home and met her husband in 2019 at a community soccer game.

A year later, they welcomed a big-eyed baby girl whose every milestone they celebrated. “God bless my family,” Barnica wrote on social media, alongside a photo of the trio in matching red-and-black plaid. “Our first Christmas with our Princess. I love them.”

Barnica and her daughter days after she was born. Barnica loved dressing the family in matching clothing. (Courtesy of the Barnica family)

Barnica longed for a large family and was thrilled when she conceived again in 2021.

Trouble struck in the second trimester.

On Sept. 2, 2021, at 17 weeks and four days pregnant, she went to the hospital with cramps, according to her records. The next day, when the bleeding worsened, she returned. Within two hours of her arrival on Sept. 3, an ultrasound confirmed “bulging membranes in the vagina with the fetal head in the open cervix,” dilated at 8.9 cm, and that she had low amniotic fluid. The miscarriage was “in progress,” the radiologist wrote.

When Barnica’s husband arrived, she told him doctors couldn’t intervene until there was no heartbeat.

The next day, Dr. Shirley Lima, an OB on duty, diagnosed an “inevitable” miscarriage.

In Barnica’s chart, she noted that the fetal heartbeat was detected and wrote that she was providing Barnica with pain medication and “emotional support.”

In a state that hadn’t banned abortion, Barnica could have immediately been offered the options that major medical organizations, including international ones, say is the standard of evidence-based care: speeding up labor with medication or a dilation and evacuation procedure to empty the uterus.

“We know that the sooner you intervene in these situations, the better outcomes are,” said Dr. Steven Porter, an OB-GYN in Cleveland.

But Texas’ new abortion ban had just gone into effect. It required physicians to confirm the absence of a fetal heartbeat before intervening unless there was a “medical emergency,” which the law did not define. It required doctors to make written notes on the patient’s condition and the reason abortion was necessary.

The law did not account for the possibility of a future emergency, one that could develop in hours or days without intervention, doctors told ProPublica.

Barnica was technically still stable. But lying in the hospital with her cervix open wider than a baseball left her uterus exposed to bacteria and placed her at high risk of developing sepsis, experts told ProPublica. Infections can move fast and be hard to control once they take hold.

The scenario felt all too familiar for Dr. Leilah Zahedi-Spung, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist who used to work in Tennessee and reviewed a summary of Barnica’s records at ProPublica’s request.

Abortion bans put doctors in an impossible position, she said, forcing them to decide whether to risk malpractice or a felony charge. After her state enacted one of the strictest bans in the country, she also waited to offer interventions in cases like Barnica’s until the fetal heartbeat stopped or patients showed signs of infection, praying every time that nothing would go wrong. It’s why she ultimately moved to Colorado.

The doctors treating Barnica “absolutely didn’t do the right thing,” she said. But she understood why they would have felt “totally stuck,” especially if they worked at a hospital that hadn’t promised to defend them.

Even three years after Barnica’s death, HCA Healthcare, the hospital chain that treated Barnica, will not disclose whether it has a policy on how to treat miscarriages.

Some HCA shareholders have asked the company to prepare a report on the risks to the company related to the bans in states that restrict abortion, so patients would understand what services they could expect and doctors would know under what circumstances they would be protected. But the board of directors opposed the proposal, partly because it would create an “unnecessary expense and burdens with limited benefits to our stockholders.” The proposal was supported by 8% of shareholders who voted.

The company’s decision to abstain has repercussions far beyond Texas; the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain has said it delivers more babies than any other health care provider in America, and 70% of its hospitals are in states where abortion is restricted.

As the hours passed in the Houston hospital, Barnica couldn’t find relief. On the phone with her aunt Rosa Elda Calix Barnica, she complained that doctors kept performing ultrasounds to check the fetal heartbeat but were not helping her end the miscarriage.

Around 4 a.m. on Sept. 5, 40 hours after Barnica had arrived, doctors could no longer detect any heart activity. Soon after, Lima delivered Barnica’s fetus, giving her medication to help speed up the labor.

Dr. Joel Ross, the OB-GYN who oversaw her care, discharged her after about eight more hours.

The bleeding continued, but when Barnica called the hospital, she was told that was expected. Her aunt grew alarmed two days later when the bleeding grew heavier.

Go back, she told her niece.

On the evening of Sept. 7, Barnica’s husband rushed her to the hospital as soon as he got off from work. But COVID-19 protocols meant only one visitor could be in the room with her, and they didn’t have a babysitter for their 1-year-old daughter.

So he left and tried to get some sleep.

“I fully expected her to come home,” he said.

But she never did. Her family planned two funerals, one in Houston and another in Honduras.

Nine days after her death, Barnica’s husband was processing his shock, learning how to be a single dad and struggling to raise funds to bury his wife and the son he had hoped to raise.

Meanwhile, Lima was pulling up Barnica’s medical chart to make an addition to her records.

The notes she added made one point abundantly clear: “When I was called for delivery,” she wrote, “the fetus no longer had detectable heart tones.”

“They Should Vote With Their Feet”

Texas has been on the forefront of fighting abortion access.

At the time of Barnica’s miscarriage in 2021, the Supreme Court had not yet overturned the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. But Texas lawmakers, intent on being the first to enact a ban with teeth, had already passed a harsh civil law using a novel legal strategy that circumvented Roe v. Wade: It prohibited doctors from performing an abortion after six weeks by giving members of the public incentives to sue doctors for $10,000 judgments. The bounty also applied to anyone who “aided and abetted” an abortion.

A year later, after the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling was handed down, an even stricter criminal law went into effect, threatening doctors with up to 99 years in prison and $100,000 in fines.

Soon after the ruling, the Biden administration issued federal guidance reminding doctors in hospital emergency rooms they have a duty to treat pregnant patients who need to be stabilized, including by providing abortions for miscarriages.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton fought against that, arguing that following the guidance would force doctors to “commit crimes” under state law and make every hospital a “walk-in abortion clinic.” When a Dallas woman asked a court for approval to end her pregnancy because her fetus was not viable and she faced health risks if she carried it to term, Paxton fought to keep her pregnant. He argued her doctor hadn’t proved it was an emergency and threatened to prosecute anyone who helped her. “Nothing can restore the unborn child’s life that will be lost as a result,” he wrote to the court.

No doctor in Texas, or the 20 other states that criminalize abortion, has been prosecuted for violating a state ban. But the possibility looms over their every decision, dozens of doctors in those states told ProPublica, forcing them to consider their own legal risks as they navigate their patient’s health emergencies. The lack of clarity has resulted in many patients being denied care.

In 2023, Texas lawmakers made a small concession to the outcry over the uncertainty the ban was creating in hospitals. They created a new exception for ectopic pregnancies, a potentially fatal condition where the embryo attaches outside the uterine cavity, and for cases where a patient’s membranes rupture prematurely before viability, which introduces a high risk of infection. Doctors can still face prosecution, but are allowed to make the case to a judge or jury that their actions were protected, not unlike self-defense arguments after homicides. Barnica’s condition would not have clearly fit this exception.

This year, after being directed to do so by the state Supreme Court, the Texas Medical Board released new guidance telling doctors that an emergency didn’t need to be “imminent” in order to intervene and advising them to provide extra documentation regarding risks.

But in a recent interview, the board’s president, Dr. Sherif Zaafran, acknowledged that these efforts only go so far and the group has no power over criminal law: “There’s nothing we can do to stop a prosecutor from filing charges against the physicians.”

Asked what he would tell Texas patients who are miscarrying and unable to get treatment, he said they should get a second opinion: “They should vote with their feet and go and seek guidance from somebody else.”

An immigrant from El Salvador who works 12-hour shifts, Barnica’s husband doesn’t follow American politics or the news. He had no inkling of the contentious national debate over how abortion bans are affecting maternal health care when ProPublica contacted him.

Now he is raising a 4-year-old daughter with the help of Barnica’s younger brother; every weekend, they take her to see her grandmother, who knows how to braid her hair in pigtails.

All around their home, he keeps photos of Barnica so that the little girl grows up knowing how much her mother loved her. He sees flashes of his wife when his daughter dances. She radiates the same delight.

When asked about Barnica, he can’t get out many words; his leg is restless, his eyes fixed on the floor. Barnica’s family calls him a model father.

He says he’s just doing his best.

Mariam Elba and Doris Burke contributed research. Lizzie Presser contributed reporting.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The election official was wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Dispute Your Removal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get in Touch

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

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

She intends to cast her ballot for Trump.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are just some of the items that were taken.

Survival Gear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Work Items

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Medical Supplies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His partner said her supply of contacts was also taken.

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

Clothing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repeated Loss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How We Reported This Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vought did not respond to requests for comment.

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

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

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

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

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

A Shadow Government in Waiting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We want to put them in trauma.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nothing Short of a Quiet Revolution”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Alec MacGillis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Eli Hager

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed, things have changed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help ProPublica Reporters Investigate the Immigration System

by Corey G. Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It started with a school shooting.

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

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

The rampage shocked the nation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Initial Participation in the Database Has Been Very Positive”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But internal organization records paint a different picture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Obtained by ProPublica)

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

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

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

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

Contrasting Cabela’s data sharing with its privacy policy

NSSF board documents and privacy policy excerpts

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

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

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

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

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

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

The NSSF was now fully in the election business.

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

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

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

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

“There Will Be No Looking Back”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Design and development by Anna Donlan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least he thought he did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signs in Spanish advertise money transfers in downtown Whitewater.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chastened, Ariel stayed off the road.

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

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

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

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

Maricela died the next day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ariel ties his son’s shoe.

Help ProPublica Reporters Investigate the Immigration System

Mariam Elba, Jeff Ernsthausen and Mica Rosenberg contributed research.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They love to deny things.

—Barbara McAneny, former president of the American Medical Association

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning the Dial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Martin Lustick, a former insurance executive

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other industry experts found the manipulation of denial rates upsetting.

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

Disputed Guidelines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Results

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Too Much Say”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agnel Philip contributed reporting.

by Mark Olalde

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Reorganization Will Functionally Dismantle the BLM”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Less Effective and Less Efficient”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Lisa Song

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expanding a Mirage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the funding would come from fines against companies that don’t comply with the new recycling standard. The bill also requires considerable labor and time from government employees who are tasked with setting up guidelines and requirements to standardize and expand plastic recycling. For instance, regulators must create “data collection procedures” to calculate the annual amount of plastic waste that chemical recyclers could process into new plastic. Another provision points to federal support for using plastic as a construction material, possibly for seawalls that protect communities from sea-level rise and storm surges.

Plastic production was responsible for roughly 5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 — the very thing driving climate change and severe flooding. The industry’s emissions could double or triple by 2050.

A study authorized by the bill sets the stage for even more government spending. The report, which requires input from plastic and chemical recycling industry representatives, will provide recommendations on financial incentives for improved collection and sorting of recyclables — a necessity for chemical recycling — and potentially expanding the EPA’s National Recycling Strategy to incorporate mass balance. Under a Trump administration, the EPA could update the strategy with that change, Rosenberg said.

Prior news investigations have found that plastic bag dropoff programs, like this one in Thorndale, Pennsylvania, have a spotty record, with much of the plastic ending up in landfills. (Hannah Beier/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Up in Smoke

During pyrolysis, materials like plastic are heated in a low-oxygen environment until they break down into other chemicals. The process produces hazardous waste and releases carcinogens like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are toxic at very low concentrations.

The EPA has defined pyrolysis facilities as incinerators for decades, and the Clean Air Act defines anything that combusts any solid waste — including discarded plastic — as an incinerator, said Jim Pew, an attorney at the advocacy group Earthjustice.

This bill would count pyrolysis as manufacturing, not incineration. That bureaucratic shuffle would remove federal air pollution regulations that govern the facilities’ toxic air emissions, Pew said. There are no manufacturing regulations that would automatically apply, so the EPA would need to create brand-new rules, among other changes, he added, which is unlikely to occur because it would take sustained efforts over multiple administrations.

“It is not accurate to suggest that the bill would exempt or remove pyrolysis regulation under the Clean Air Act or other environmental laws,” Albersheim, the ACC spokesperson, said. “Instead, the bill aims to address uncertainty under the current laws and correct a misunderstanding about how the technology works.”

When ProPublica asked which federal air pollution laws would apply if pyrolysis is no longer considered incineration, Albersheim said some facilities would not release enough pollutants to meet certain EPA regulation thresholds.

After lobbying from the ACC and others, about half of all U.S. states have passed laws classifying pyrolysis as manufacturing. But the federal government has ultimate authority to enforce the Clean Air Act.

Under then-President Trump, the EPA began the process of redefining pyrolysis as manufacturing. The Biden administration later reversed that decision but “left the door open” for a future attempt, Rosenberg said. If Trump wins, he said, it would be even easier for a Republican administration to remove pyrolysis from the Clean Air Act.

The bill gives regulators authority to audit companies’ recycling practices, but the results could be kept from the public. Any “proprietary information” uncovered during these investigations would not be subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Journalists and researchers routinely use FOIA to access government records and inform the public about corporate wrongdoing or public health threats.

Trade secrets are already protected under FOIA; Rosenberg fears the wording of the bill could broaden the definition of what’s exempt from public disclosure. The bill’s co-sponsors didn’t respond to questions seeking clarification.

Palmer of Moms Clean Air Force said the bill gives the industry cover as it tries to triple plastic production over the next few decades. All these efforts to increase recycling through whatever means possible are meant to “divert our attention” from the “sinister” effects that plastic has on the environment and our communities, she said.