ProPublica

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They love to deny things.

—Barbara McAneny, former president of the American Medical Association

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning the Dial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Martin Lustick, a former insurance executive

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other industry experts found the manipulation of denial rates upsetting.

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

Disputed Guidelines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Results

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Too Much Say”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agnel Philip contributed reporting.

by Mark Olalde

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get in Touch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Reorganization Will Functionally Dismantle the BLM”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Less Effective and Less Efficient”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Lisa Song

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expanding a Mirage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A study authorized by the bill sets the stage for even more government spending. The report, which requires input from plastic and chemical recycling industry representatives, will provide recommendations on financial incentives for improved collection and sorting of recyclables — a necessity for chemical recycling — and potentially expanding the EPA’s National Recycling Strategy to incorporate mass balance. Under a Trump administration, the EPA could update the strategy with that change, Rosenberg said.

Prior news investigations have found that plastic bag dropoff programs, like this one in Thorndale, Pennsylvania, have a spotty record, with much of the plastic ending up in landfills. (Hannah Beier/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Up in Smoke

During pyrolysis, materials like plastic are heated in a low-oxygen environment until they break down into other chemicals. The process produces hazardous waste and releases carcinogens like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are toxic at very low concentrations.

The EPA has defined pyrolysis facilities as incinerators for decades, and the Clean Air Act defines anything that combusts any solid waste — including discarded plastic — as an incinerator, said Jim Pew, an attorney at the advocacy group Earthjustice.

This bill would count pyrolysis as manufacturing, not incineration. That bureaucratic shuffle would remove federal air pollution regulations that govern the facilities’ toxic air emissions, Pew said. There are no manufacturing regulations that would automatically apply, so the EPA would need to create brand-new rules, among other changes, he added, which is unlikely to occur because it would take sustained efforts over multiple administrations.

“It is not accurate to suggest that the bill would exempt or remove pyrolysis regulation under the Clean Air Act or other environmental laws,” Albersheim, the ACC spokesperson, said. “Instead, the bill aims to address uncertainty under the current laws and correct a misunderstanding about how the technology works.”

When ProPublica asked which federal air pollution laws would apply if pyrolysis is no longer considered incineration, Albersheim said some facilities would not release enough pollutants to meet certain EPA regulation thresholds.

After lobbying from the ACC and others, about half of all U.S. states have passed laws classifying pyrolysis as manufacturing. But the federal government has ultimate authority to enforce the Clean Air Act.

Under then-President Trump, the EPA began the process of redefining pyrolysis as manufacturing. The Biden administration later reversed that decision but “left the door open” for a future attempt, Rosenberg said. If Trump wins, he said, it would be even easier for a Republican administration to remove pyrolysis from the Clean Air Act.

The bill gives regulators authority to audit companies’ recycling practices, but the results could be kept from the public. Any “proprietary information” uncovered during these investigations would not be subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Journalists and researchers routinely use FOIA to access government records and inform the public about corporate wrongdoing or public health threats.

Trade secrets are already protected under FOIA; Rosenberg fears the wording of the bill could broaden the definition of what’s exempt from public disclosure. The bill’s co-sponsors didn’t respond to questions seeking clarification.

Palmer of Moms Clean Air Force said the bill gives the industry cover as it tries to triple plastic production over the next few decades. All these efforts to increase recycling through whatever means possible are meant to “divert our attention” from the “sinister” effects that plastic has on the environment and our communities, she said.

by Nicole Foy

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On the morning of Jan. 22, 2024, Elmer De León Pérez descended deep into the bowels of a ship that he was helping to build in Houma, Louisiana. Pérez was a welder, working to construct one of the U.S. government’s most sophisticated ships, an $89 million vessel for tracking hurricanes and conducting oceanographic research. It was funded by President Joe Biden’s signature climate legislation.

Pérez’s assignment had him working at the bottom of a nearly 12-foot ballast tank, according to a subsequent police report; the walls were just 4 feet apart. That meant standing inside a metal cylinder, roughly twice the size of a household water heater, using an argon-gas torch whose flame can burn as hot as 20,000 degrees.

Something went very wrong that day. In the afternoon, workers noticed that Pérez, 20, had not come up for lunch. Friends and family began calling, with no answer.

His coworkers found him slumped over in the tank. “I couldn’t get to him because the gas was too strong,” one of them told ProPublica. “I started screaming, ‘Help! Help! Help!’”

When emergency workers found his body, Pérez was already showing signs of rigor mortis. A coroner’s report would note that he was wearing a red hoodie, plaid pajama pants and brown steel-toed boots, and that a “copious amount of clear fluid was noted to the mouth and nose,” as well as on the sleeve of his shirt. The coroner concluded that Pérez “died as a result of bilateral severe pulmonary consolidation and edema” — fluid in the lungs — and “copper and nickel intoxication.” (The ship, like many, used copper-nickel alloys as a coating because they resist corrosion from salt water.)

Pérez had worked for roughly the previous two years at the shipyard, which is owned by Thoma-Sea, a large employer with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal defense contracts. If employees are hurt or killed at work, they and their families are eligible for significant financial help. If one dies in an accident, for example, federal law requires companies such as Thoma-Sea to pay any surviving children. For an employee who perished the way Pérez did, that would have meant payments until his toddler son was at least 18, which could approach a total of $500,000.

But Pérez wasn’t working directly for Thoma-Sea; he was employed by a contractor. So when he died, Thoma-Sea paid nothing. Not to his family, including the partner that survived him. Not to his toddler son. Not even to help send Pérez’s body home to Guatemala. Instead, his family borrowed money and desperately tried to raise the rest online. Family members said they haven’t heard anything from Thoma-Sea since Pérez died.

When Pérez’s partner sought death benefits from G-4 Services, the local staffing contractor that had hired him to work for Thoma-Sea, G-4 rebuffed her. “Pérez was a self-employed independent contractor and thus a claim for death benefits is not compensable,” a lawyer for the company wrote in May. G-4 contends that Pérez “wasn’t working at the time of his death” even though his corpse was found in the ship with his welding equipment.

Investigators from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration concluded in a September report that Thoma-Sea committed multiple safety violations. “An employee was allowed to weld in a confined space that was not monitored for atmospheric changes while hot work was being done,” OSHA’s report stated. The site supervisor, the findings continued, “did not verify that the ventilation ductwork … was set up properly to maintain a safe atmosphere.”

The agency imposed a fine of $41,480 and then, after Thoma-Sea appealed, reduced it to $31,340. As with potential death benefits, none of that money went to Pérez’s family.

For decades, U.S. politicians have blamed immigrants for all manner of national woes, particularly taking American jobs. These days, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump agree on the need for a border clampdown.

But the truth about jobs is more complicated. There is a dire shortage of blue-collar workers in the United States. Skilled tradespeople have been aging out of the workforce for years now, with fewer people to replace them, as students have prioritized four-year college degrees. The Biden administration has pumped millions into development programs to lure young people into trades, but it’ll take years to see any effects.

Today the lack of welders is acute. The U.S. needs at least 300,000 more of them in the next few years. Shipyards have been hit particularly hard by the gap, which has contributed to a shortfall in warship production.

As in many other industries, immigrants are filling that gap.

Pérez embodied many aspects of the immigration debate. He had exactly the skills that American companies are desperate for. He was an expert welder, willing to work in the cramped, dangerous spaces inside ships. And Pérez was able to earn $23 an hour at a shipyard in Houma, many times more than he could in his home country. Slightly built with jet-black hair, Pérez was funny, diligent and eager to succeed. He had begun building a life in the U.S.

But, like millions of others, Perez had not been able to do that legally. This spring, the secretary of Navy, Carlos del Toro, called for creating exactly such a pathway, to help construct the ships the Navy needs. “What we’ve got to do is open up the spigot a bit,” he said. “Allow blue-collar workers to come here.”

Without a work permit, Pérez was vulnerable. He worked at the shipyard but not for it, a contractor for a subcontractor.

Pérez’s story is emblematic of a system that relies ever more on immigrants, even as employers and politicians vilify the very people doing work that generates profits and serves the nation. Employers use subcontractors and independent contractors to pass the risks and costs on to the workers, said Laura Padin, director of work structures at the National Employment Law Project. “These companies, particularly in occupations and industries with high rates of health and safety violations, use this to shield themselves from responsibility,” she said. “We also see that they do this with workers who are immigrants if they think they’re undocumented so that they can avoid responsibility for hiring someone who’s undocumented.” The point, Padin said, is to “protect the entity at the top.”

Elmer De León Pérez was welding in a ship’s tank, which he entered through this hole, before his body was found slumped over inside. (Occupational Safety and Health Administration)

Houma, about an hour southwest of New Orleans, lies at the heart of bayous and wetlands that draw tourists for swamp tours, crawfish boils and Cajun music festivals. Hollywood film crews occasionally visit for the historic plantation houses that dot the surrounding towns and the wooden structures where enslaved people first lived and labored, and where Black sharecroppers later crowded in.

It’s a region in decline. Damage from 2021’s Hurricane Ida is still visible, and decades of oil and gas extraction, combined with the rapidly worsening effects of climate change, have caused an entire island to disappear into the Gulf of Mexico. Last month, another hurricane, Francine, slammed into the parish, and longtime residents are fleeing soaring insurance costs as much as the next storm.

Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes (Houma is located near the line between the two) are sparsely populated and majority white, but with sizable Black and tribal nations communities whose ancestral homelands have been ravaged by climate change. Roughly three-quarters of the region’s voters supported Trump in 2020, and there’s a strain of anti-immigrant sentiment. In the small town of Golden Meadow, one family still has the sign they erected more than 15 years ago, after their son died in a workplace accident. “An illegal alien working at Port Fourchon killed Nicholas. 5-11-06.” (That sentiment is hardly limited to these two parishes: In June, Louisiana enacted a law that threatens prison terms for any “alien” found to have entered the state unlawfully.)

A bridge, open to allow a ship to pass, on the Intracoastal Waterway in Houma. Bottom: A family in Golden Meadow, Louisiana, holds an immigrant responsible for their son’s death in a workplace accident. (Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica)

Like much of coastal Louisiana, the region has long drawn migratory labor, such as workers who come for the jobs linked to the giant oil-services installation at Port Fourchon or Filipino visa workers who commonly labor in seafood processing plants.

Latino immigration to southern Louisiana began increasing nearly 20 years ago, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. A pattern has developed: After a storm wreaks devastation, Louisianans move north while immigrants come to do disaster cleanup and other jobs deemed too dangerous or difficult even for members of a community built around grueling labor on oil rigs and the like. Hispanic residents barely register on the Census counts outside the New Orleans suburbs. But Latino immigrants are steadily becoming a stronger presence where their labor is needed. About a third of all Latino immigrants in Louisiana arrived within the last several years, according to the Pew Research Center.

The Thomassie family, owners of Thoma-Sea, have run businesses in the region’s trademark industries, first with family shrimping operations, and then with shipbuilding in 1990. The company initially built tugboats to tow offshore oil rigs and barges through the criss-cross of bayous and canals.

Walter Thomassie took over in the early 2000s and expanded the business and its ambitions. “My father set a good example for us, as owners of the company,” Thomassie told The Houma Times in 2014. “We live comfortably, but not lavishly. We re-invest heavily into the company as it is the mechanism that feeds us and it is our job to do all within our power to maintain its stability.”

Thomassie lives in Raceland, minutes from a billboard advertising workers’ compensation claims for maritime injuries. A half-mile drive leads from the blend of bayou towns and sugarcane fields to his home, partially hidden from view by a garage that blocks the path.

Thomassie didn’t respond to multiple email and phone requests for an interview for this article, and he declined again when ProPublica approached him outside his home in June. He had emerged with a smile, wiping his hand with a rag, from the shop where he was working. But his face dropped at the mention of ProPublica. Thomassie said he had looked up the website and didn’t want to talk about his company or Pérez’s death. “You really shouldn’t come to people’s homes,” he said. (The company also didn’t respond to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica.)

The Thomassie family’s political involvement has grown steadily in recent years. Walter Thomassie is a significant supporter of congressional Republicans, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who have been harshly critical of immigrants. “You’re seeing countries emptying out prisons to send people here,” Scalise claimed this year, citing brutal crimes he said had been committed by “someone here illegally” in his own district, which includes part of Houma. How many immigrants or terrorists, he asked, “are here in America planning to do us harm because Joe Biden opened the southern border?” Thomassie made roughly $35,000 in political contributions over the past year. He and his brother, who is also a member of Thoma-Sea’s board, have also donated to local Louisiana Republican candidates.

Several Louisiana Republican politicians have made appearances at the shipyards. In October 2022, Thoma-Sea executives gathered with local Republican representatives and federal officials to etch one of the ships the company was building for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Discoverer, with the signature of its ceremonial sponsor, second gentleman Doug Emhoff (who didn’t attend). Its sister ship, Oceanographer, where Pérez worked and eventually died, had received its ceremony and fanfare a few months earlier.

Over the past several years, Thoma-Sea has secured hundreds of millions of dollars to construct and repair everything from Coast Guard cutters and Army Corps of Engineers barges to parts for Navy submarines. In 2022, Thomassie said that building the NOAA ship and a second similar one, both designed to collect climate change data that would encourage coastal resilience, would bring more than 600 jobs to the Houma shipyard.

By all appearances, Thomassie’s company is thriving. Thoma-Sea has another, much larger contract to build two more ships for NOAA. (Asked about Pérez’s death, a NOAA spokesperson expressed “our condolences to the employee’s family and our appreciation for everyone working on these vessels” and followed up to note that it was the U.S. Navy that selected Thoma-Sea to build the ship that Pérez worked on.) Thoma-Sea was awarded millions in new federal contracts in the months after Pérez died.

A rough divide in Thoma-Sea’s shipyard is visible, according to workers who spoke to ProPublica. Non-Latino — mostly white — employees tend to be on staff, with many in supervisory positions. Some Latino immigrant workers are employed directly for the company and in supervisory positions, but they are more likely to work as independent contractors with no benefits.

The phenomenon is not limited to Thoma-Sea. Around Houma, Spanish advertisements for contratistas litter the windows and bulletin boards of Hispanic businesses on the long commercial and industrial strips leading to the shipyards and the Port of Terrebonne, offering positions for pipe fitters, riggers, deckhands, painters and tug welders. Some Houma-based agencies recruit for jobs in other Southern port towns in Mississippi, Alabama or South Carolina. Employers with federal contracts are supposed to ascertain workers’ eligibility — and ensure subcontractors do the same — using the government’s online E-Verify system, which checks identity information like Social Security numbers against federal databases. But experts say E-Verify makes it easy for workers to provide false information, and government agencies rarely monitor compliance with these rules.

Top: Ships lined up across the Thoma-Sea repair yard in Houma. Bottom: Flyers advertising contracting jobs have been hung in Latino businesses in the area. (Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica)

Other shipyards working on federal contracts have also hired undocumented workers. At Detyens Shipyards in Charleston, South Carolina, three Mexican immigrants died between 2019 and 2023 in gruesome accidents while repairing the same Navy cargo ship. An investigation by Charleston’s Post and Courier discovered that two of the men were working under assumed names and both had been recruited by a contractor agency based in Houma.

A federal investigation found an abysmal safety record at the shipyard. But the Navy awarded Detyens several more contracts to repair ships soon after those deaths. A company representative declined to comment other than to say that it confirms every employee’s eligibility to work.

The same day OSHA fined Detyens for its safety record, a House Armed Services Committee hearing discussed the struggle to properly staff shipyards. Rep. Adam Smith, a Democrat from Washington, gingerly broached the idea of relying more on immigrants. “This is not a great place to bring up an immigration debate, but you know immigration is potentially one place where we could find some of those workers,” Smith said. “And as we are all painfully aware, there are a lot of people who want to come here. Seems to me that we ought to be able to match up those two problems a little bit better than we are.”

Smith’s suggestion, which was echoed by del Toro, the Navy secretary, never gained momentum. It withered away nearly as soon as it was mentioned. Smith’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

Pérez and his father, Erick De León, left their hometown of San Miguel Ixtahuacán, Guatemala, at the tail end of 2019, but they crossed into the U.S. separately. According to an account provided by his father, the 15-year-old Pérez gave himself up to U.S. authorities, leading to a brief detention, while his father crossed the border in the desert. Father and son reunited, then settled with family in Houston, where Peréz picked up jobs in restaurants and contracting jobs with his father. But by 2021, they had relocated to Houma, where several of Pérez’s aunts lived with their extended families.

Pérez’s father eventually returned to Guatemala when his wife got sick. But Pérez stayed, finding that the welding skills he’d learned on a job in Houston were coveted in Houma.

Pérez’s partner, another Guatemalan immigrant, moved with him to Houma. Their son was born on Christmas Day in 2022 at the hospital in Houma, making him a U.S. citizen. They relied on his aunt and uncle, who viewed Pérez like a son, to get established in Louisiana, and his aunt remembered how his son’s birth had shifted his priorities. He focused even more on building a life for his family and spent his limited free time with his son. (ProPublica interviewed several members of Pérez’s family in Houma, but agreed not to name them due to the legal and employment threats that immigrants face right now.)

Elmer De León Pérez, right, with his father, Erick De León, in Houma (Photo courtesy of Erick De León)

By the time Pérez signed an independent contractor agreement with G-4 Services to work at Thoma-Sea just a few weeks later, photos of the proud father and son were filling Facebook feeds from Houma to Guatemala. “Tenerte como hijo siempre será el mejor regalo del mundo,” Pérez wrote beneath a photo with his son on Nov. 19, 2023, just two months before his death. “To have you as a son will always be the best gift in the world.”

In the days before Pérez’s death, he was pulled into extra work shifts on Saturday and Sunday. It meant he missed the service at the small Spanish-speaking church near the shipyard, but he arrived home in time to join family dinner with his aunt, uncle and cousins. Eating a huge Sunday meal they had cooked together was one of the most treasured traditions for their busy extended family in Houma, his aunt told ProPublica. Pérez had requested carne asada, one of his favorites. He wanted to bring the leftovers to work that week.

The next day, Monday, marked the beginning of a harrowing ordeal for Pérez’s family. It started around 3 p.m., when relatives who also worked at the shipyard received a worrisome message via Facebook: Something had happened to Pérez.

Family started messaging friends and calling each other frantically, trying to figure out what was going on. When they couldn’t get answers, a handful went to the shipyard itself. As they arrived at the Thoma-Sea parking lot and rushed to the security gate, one of Pérez’s aunts remembers seeing a small caravan of emergency vehicles, including a coroner’s van, driving in the opposite direction.

The company didn’t tell them anything at first, leaving them to wait in increasing despair outside the security gate. It wasn’t until later, after someone emerged to break the news, that Pérez’s aunt realized that it was his body that had passed them. “It was like the world came crashing down on me,” she told ProPublica.

Standing in the shadow of the ship where he had died hours earlier, Pérez’s family clutched each other and cried. Distraught, confused and angry, they returned home to break the news to Pérez’s partner.

Word of Pérez’s death spread quickly across Facebook, mostly thanks to the tight-knit evangelical Christian community of his hometown in Guatemala. His U.S. family hosted bake sales and started a GoFundMe page, which raised just $470 toward the $8,689 undertaker’s bill and other funeral costs. Pérez’s hometown church in Guatemala, as well as a local evangelical Facebook page, raised much more through posted calls for financial assistance across their network.

Neither Pérez’s partner nor the rest of his family in the U.S. could attend the funeral in Guatemala. But they watched a Facebook livestream from the Guatemalan radio station. It showed his coffin arriving in San Miguel Ixtahuacán, a caravan of cars following the hearse down the winding mountain road as the sun set. They watched his younger siblings and cousins weep over his open casket, then weep again as his family and neighbors buried him in San Miguel’s cemetery.

Watch video ➜

Pérez’s family members in Houma are still reeling from his death. None of his relatives who worked at Thoma-Sea could stomach staying there any longer. They eventually quit and moved to different jobs in the region.

His partner still keeps his phone exactly how he left it, the recent call list full of missed calls from family and coworkers who were looking for him that day. His son still wakes up crying for him in the middle of the night. A cousin made a TikTok of Pérez dancing with his son, the overlaid text promising that they’ll find him justice.

There’s a chance Pérez’s family could obtain financial compensation, but it’s a long shot. Federal law does create a path for a workers’ compensation lawsuit, even for a shipyard contractor or an undocumented immigrant. Steve Wanko, a Houma workers’ compensation lawyer, said he won such a case in 2015.

Another lawyer filed a claim on behalf of Peréz’s partner against the contractor, G-4 Services. G-4 is disputing the benefits claim, citing Peréz’s ineligibility as an independent contractor, saying his partner was ineligible because they were not legally married, and claiming the sudden death of a healthy 20-year-old was not caused by his job. His death, a medical review conducted at the request of G-4 argued, “occurred while he was working but was not caused by workplace related factors or activities.”

Reached in May outside his home, Ricky Guidroz, one of the owners of G-4 Services, declined to discuss Pérez’s death, citing the advice of his lawyers. Guidroz said he had tried to reach out to Pérez’s family. Guidroz’s wife came by the house crying at one point, Pérez’s aunt said, but they didn’t really know what to say to her. “It’s so unfortunate,” he told ProPublica. “Just know that my heart hurts, really.” (ProPublica also sent a detailed list of questions to G-4 Services, which didn’t respond.)

This October, ProPublica visited Thoma-Sea again, one month after the OSHA report excoriated the company for not protecting Pérez. At the end of the day’s shift, the workers, mostly Latino, passed an Army Corps of Engineers barge, under repair just behind the shipyard’s security guard shack, in groups and pairs to reach cars in the muddy parking lot.

The workers filtered out to the handful of Hispanic businesses near the Port of Terrebonne to buy tortillas for the weekend and to wire money home. Some drove upwards of an hour to reach homes scattered from the New Orleans suburbs to small towns hugging Bayou Lafourche and the Atchafalaya River. Most of them would be back the next morning, to resume building America’s ships.

Two National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration vessels are under construction at Thoma-Sea’s shipyard. Pérez died while working on one of them. (Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica)

Help ProPublica Reporters Investigate the Immigration System

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Mica Rosenberg and Jeff Ernsthausen

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

The chief of police in Whitewater, Wisconsin, didn’t ask for the moon in late 2023 when he wrote to President Joe Biden about the hundreds of new Nicaraguan migrants who’d arrived in his city over a whirlwind span of two years. All of a sudden, he wrote, his 23 sworn officers were dealing with three times the number of drivers without licenses on local roads.

Biden administration officials didn’t get back to the chief for almost two months. And when former President Donald Trump learned about Whitewater’s predicament, he seized on it as further evidence that the United States was being overrun by “migrant crime” and promised voters he would conduct the “largest deportation in American history,” though that’s not at all what the chief was asking for, much less how he saw his city.

The small Wisconsin town is one of a number of American communities that have experienced the strains of a new phase of immigration whose origins and meaning have been obscured during this year’s presidential election by Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and the reluctance of his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, to clearly address the Biden administration’s track record on the issue.

In the coming days, ProPublica will publish a series of stories that we hope will be of use to voters, especially those focused on immigration as a key issue. We aim to provide a more complete picture of what’s happening on the border and in cities and towns across the United States. Amid the misleading bombast of the campaigns, our reporting on the ground and analysis of government data will explain the real challenges — as opposed to the ones being made up to scare you — posed by immigration trends at the Southwest border over the past decade.

We’ve found that what’s changed most about the border isn’t just the number of migrants coming across. It’s who’s coming and how. Many of today’s migrants are coming from new places and in new ways that make their arrivals more visible and, at times, more costly to the communities where they settle. And those changes are coinciding with, if not helping drive, a hardening in public opinion.

Our analysis of immigration court and census data found that while the number of times U.S. officials encountered migrants at the border spiked in the past three years, only a small share of Americans live in neighborhoods that saw a significant number of new arrivals when compared with their populations. We found that migrants were concentrated in relatively few places around the country.

In places like Whitewater that were ill-prepared for those increases, the new arrivals created small pockets of upheaval that, thanks to television and the internet, spilled into the public consciousness. Meanwhile in large Democratically controlled urban centers like New York and Chicago, where migrants have settled for generations, the new arrivals _— including some bused north by Republican governors seeking to make political points — strained resources in ways that set off flashes of resentment.

In Denver last year, taxpayers watched their city government provide months of free housing to Venezuelan migrants, while many in its long-standing homeless population languished on the streets. In Belle Glade, Florida, a farmer who’d long depended on immigrant labor had a change of heart after he became a state lawmaker, helping pass restrictions against hiring undocumented workers.

And at the border, in Del Rio, Texas, residents who had long been accustomed to the rhythms of crossings between the U.S. and Mexico were shaken by the swift and sudden arrival of nearly 20,000 predominantly Haitian migrants — a number that amounts to more than half the local population. Three years later, residents fear that such a destabilizing event could happen again. One Democratic candidate for sheriff there has taken positions so openly critical of his own party that local Republicans invited him to join their side.

The Biggest Change at the Border Isn’t Just How Many People Are Crossing — It’s Who’s Crossing and How

More migrants crossed the border without getting caught in the early 2000s. But today’s migrants are more likely to turn themselves in to authorities, often seeking asylum.

Note: 2022 and 2023 unapprehended crossings are based on unpublished government estimates.

Public opinion polls show that concern and confusion about immigration persist among Americans beyond Del Rio. To understand why, consider the chart Trump shared with his supporters during a rally in July in Butler, Pennsylvania. It showed the numbers of migrants encountered at the Southwest border over the past decade. Trump turned to it in the split second a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his ear. He says he loves the chart, even gushing about sleeping with it, because it probably saved his life. But the reason he’s continued to display it at subsequent rallies is that it shows the record jump in encounters that occurred under Biden and Harris, which he says is evidence of the administration’s failure.

What Trump doesn’t say is that the increase actually began while he was still in office. Meanwhile, Harris has touted the tough asylum restrictions the Biden administration has imposed this election year that have led to dramatic decreases in the number of illegal crossings. But she doesn’t talk about why it took so long to do so. And she says even less about how some of her own allies accuse her of adopting immigration proposals they say are similar to Trump’s.

Voters could be forgiven for not knowing whom to believe, for feeling there is an unprecedented crisis at the border. But in past years, according to government estimates, there were many more migrants who crossed into the U.S. illegally and didn’t get caught. It might not come through in Republican talking points, but those of us over 20 have probably lived through periods of higher rates of border crossings before.

Shifting Demographics

The migrants arriving in the past few years came from a broader array of countries, including some that either can’t or won’t take them back. In some cases they’ve landed here without established networks of relatives who could support them. Those let in to pursue asylum claims are allowed to stay until their cases are resolved by the woefully backlogged immigration courts, a process that can take years. Many won’t ultimately qualify, but in the meantime they can apply for work permits and for some public benefits. There are now around 3.5 million pending cases in the immigration court system, up from some 400,000 a decade ago.

Former President Barack Obama oversaw the beginning of these major shifts when he took office in 2009. It was the end of a decade when over 90% of the millions arrested trying to illegally cross the border were from Mexico, and most were single adults. His administration actively pursued border crossers at a rate that outraged immigration advocates, who derisively dubbed him the “deporter-in-chief.”

In his second term, an increasing number of Central American children and families began coming mostly from a region known as the Northern Triangle: El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. This was the first sign of the trend in which more people started crossing the border and didn’t attempt to avoid Border Patrol, but instead turned themselves in to ask for asylum. Under U.S. and international laws, they couldn’t be sent back to a place where they could face persecution.

Obama couldn’t easily deport them, but detaining children and families became a losing logistical, humanitarian and political proposition. The numbers of people arriving were at the lowest levels since the 1970s, partly because of the administration’s crackdown on many border crossers and because the country was recovering from a recession, when fewer jobs were available.

Enter Donald Trump, gliding down an escalator to announce his first presidential bid in 2015. The years of low numbers of border crossings didn’t stop him from casting the situation as a crisis and making the construction of a border wall one of the pillars of his campaign platform.

After taking office in 2017, Trump didn’t make much progress on building a wall, but he made strides overhauling the country’s asylum system. He argued that because so many migrants are ultimately found to be ineligible for asylum in court, they were using the process as a loophole to gain entry to the U.S. His administration moved swiftly to enact new restrictions, including forcing tens of thousands of asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for court hearings and separating parents from their children at the border.

Crossings still rose sharply in 2019, going so high that Trump officials said the system was at a “breaking point” and, in turn, released hundreds of thousands of migrants into the U.S. After the pandemic began in March 2020, the Trump administration used a public health policy known as Title 42 to allow border agents to expel migrants to Mexico without giving them a chance to seek asylum.

Trump’s policy helped usher in another shift in new migration patterns. Mexico initially only agreed to accept expulsions of its own nationals and those from some Central American countries under Title 42. Almost everyone else couldn’t be expelled, and many who hoped to claim asylum were released into the United States. Thanks in part to social media, word got out among migrants in nations that were being convulsed by conflict, political turmoil and natural disasters, and people from other countries began coming to the border in larger numbers.

When Biden took office promising a more humane approach to immigration, that trend exploded. He initially kept his word and quickly overturned many of Trump’s policies. But he left Title 42 in place even after the pandemic began subsiding.

Media reports showed thousands of men, women and children making perilous journeys through the inhospitable jungle region between Colombia and Panama known as the Darien Gap. People from China, India and West Africa were paying smugglers tens of thousands of dollars in some cases to fly them to Nicaragua and deliver them to the Southwest border. News stories then showed them illegally crossing the U.S. border by clamoring under razor wire and wading across the Rio Grande but then immediately turning themselves in to officials.

By 2023, when encounters at the Southwest border reached an unprecedented 2.5 million, just 29% were from Mexico, 20% were from northern Central America and the rest came from dozens of nations around the world.

As more Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Cubans arrived, those countries’ poor diplomatic relations with the United States made it difficult to quickly remove them. Haitians also came in large numbers, including many who had already left their country and were living in South America.

Much like what happened in 2019 under Trump, the soaring numbers of families and migrants coming in large groups overwhelmed the border’s infrastructure. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents didn’t have the capacity to either detain or deport the migrants they were apprehending, so they began releasing more of them into the United States.

Legal, but in Limbo

Removals and Releases by U.S. Customs and Border Protection

With no clear place to go, migrants gathered on the streets of U.S. border cities. The Republican governor of Texas paid to bus people north to Democratically controlled cities like Chicago, where families ended up sleeping on the floors of police stations.

New York’s laws, which guarantee shelter to everyone, made the city a particularly attractive destination. As the numbers of migrants arriving there swelled beyond the capacity of the shelter system, Mayor Eric Adams sided with Republicans in criticizing his own party’s management of the border.

Recent data shows that more than 200,000 asylum-seekers have accessed the city’s shelter system since 2022. As of August, tens of thousands were Venezuelans, who had a relatively thin network of relatives and friends to help integrate them into the city. Their arrival stands in stark contrast to Chinese immigrants who came to New York in similar numbers as Venezuelans. But, due in part to the city’s large Chinese population, they did not depend anywhere near as much on the city shelter system.

Facing criticism from both parties, the Biden administration tried to deter migrants from risking their lives to cross the border illegally and turn themselves in. Instead, it wanted them to go to a legal port of entry. In May 2023, when Title 42 was lifted, officials implemented a new rule that barred most migrants from requesting asylum unless they made an appointment to approach the border using a government app called CBP One. The app allows only 1,450 slots per day, causing thousands of people to wait in Mexico, where they routinely fall prey to criminal groups.

Beyond those migrants released into the country at the border through CBP One, around 828,000 have been allowed to enter through new temporary humanitarian parole programs. Most of those people applied from abroad and have a U.S. sponsor.

In June, the Biden administration took the restrictions further. It barred most people from requesting asylum at the border when crossings reached a certain threshold, but it set that limit so low it essentially made the ban permanent. In addition, Mexico agreed to work with the Biden administration to keep migrants from reaching the border by stepping up its own enforcement. The administration says the efforts have allowed the government to vastly speed up screenings and deportations and have reduced releases, while allowing exceptions for unaccompanied children and trafficking victims. Advocates for immigrants slammed the rule as mirroring measures put in place by Trump and said it is putting people with legitimate claims at risk. But the measures have had an impact. The number of people crossing illegally in July and August, after the rule went into effect, dropped to the lowest levels in four years.

Demand for Workers

Whether they cross the border undetected, turn themselves in and ask for asylum or are granted parole, migrants are drawn to our southern border by the opportunity to work. When businesses across the country were shuttered in early 2020 by the pandemic, border encounters briefly plummeted. In the recovery, American companies created more jobs than there were unemployed people to fill them.

“There’s the elephant in the room: There’s just a lot of jobs, and people want to come,” said Dany Bahar, an economist at the Washington-based Center for Global Development who has researched border crossings and labor market tightness. He said that as the U.S. population ages, the need for workers from elsewhere is only going to grow. “I haven’t seen any politician talk about this, neither Democrats or Republicans.”

Only a limited number of temporary visas and green cards are made available each year for those wanting to migrate to the U.S. legally for work, while refugee admissions — which can lead to U.S. citizenship — are also capped. “Those numbers are ridiculous when considered alongside the size of our economy and U.S. workforce,” said Leon Rodriguez, who directed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Obama administration.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, said the unemployment rate — which has remained low despite the increase in recent immigrant arrivals — did not account for the millions of disaffected and disabled American workers who had dropped out of the labor force because they couldn’t compete with migrants who were willing to accept “below-the-table wages.”

But what Vance didn’t say was that Republicans and conservative groups have opposed efforts to significantly raise the federal minimum wage. Meanwhile both campaigns offer many more proposals for expanding border security than they do realistic ones to address our country’s dependence on migrant labor. Nor do they talk about plans for cracking down on employers who exploit immigrant workers.

In Houma, Louisiana, a shipbuilding company with millions in federal contracts embodies the debate. Campaign finance records indicate that the company’s chief was giving tens of thousands of dollars in contributions to politicians who call for shutting down illegal immigration even as the shipbuilder struggled to deal with a nationwide shortage of welders. Through a contractor, it employed a young, undocumented man from Guatemala, according to his family, to do the dangerous work of helping to build one of the country’s most sophisticated ships. After he died on the job, the worker’s family said, the company gave them nothing, nor is it required by law.

The company did not respond to requests for comment.

Hardening Attitudes

Americans’ Views on Whether Immigration Should Decrease, Increase or Stay the Same

Going into this election, recent Gallup polls have shown that across party lines, a growing number of Democrats, Republicans and independents believe immigration levels should be decreased. Another recent poll found a majority of Americans support some form of mass deportation.

Mike Madrid, a Republican pollster, said immigration is an emotional issue for voters rather than a rational one. He said it “literally defines who we are as a people,” adding, “It’s how we perceive the world through our racial and national identity and, at the same time, plays to our worst fears as human beings when people who are not like us end up in our neighborhoods and communities.”

It’s no surprise that the findings of those polls are reflected in the presidential campaigns. Just like he did when he ran against Hillary Clinton, Trump makes every effort to keep the issue high on voters’ minds, resorting to nativist rhetoric when talking about immigrants and their impact on the country. The Biden administration has imposed restrictions on asylum much like Trump’s, and Harris makes clear that she will embrace them. At every opportunity that she has to speak about the issue, Harris promises that if she’s elected president she will push for the passage of a bipartisan border deal that includes enforcement provisions demanded by Republicans.

It’s unclear whether she’d be successful. Congress hasn’t passed a comprehensive immigration reform package in decades, and Republicans aren’t likely to give Harris such an important political victory.

Trump’s sweeping campaign promises revolve largely around using executive authority to “seal the border” and forcibly remove masses of undocumented immigrants from the country. It’s highly likely that those actions would be challenged in court, much like many measures were in his first term.

What isn’t being talked about on the campaign trail is how all the changes in the past decade are affecting communities like Whitewater today. While we won’t have a complete picture of the impact of the post-pandemic spike in border crossings until next year, census data shows that — even with all the people who crossed the border in the first years of the Biden administration — the foreign-born share of the U.S. population only increased from 13.7% in 2019 to 14.3% in 2023.

The chief of police in Whitewater wasn’t asking for the border to shut down, or for all the Nicaraguans who worked in local factories to be deported. But with so many new Nicaraguan drivers on the roads without licenses, he just hoped the federal government might kick in some money so he could hire more staff to help manage the added workload. His concerns are more typical of how people are experiencing the new effects of immigration today. And if you’re looking to make sense of the issue before you cast your ballot, then you need to hear from them.

About the Data

Total Southwest Border Encounters Chart

Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security data. Encounters include both U.S. Border Patrol arrests and Office of Field Operations apprehensions, which can result in release, detention or removal. Only includes full fiscal years.

Unapprehended Crossings Chart

Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimates of unapprehended crossing rates at the Southwest border. For 2022 and 2023, we used an unpublished government estimate.

Southwest Border Encounters by Nationality Chart

Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security data. Includes encounters by U.S. Border Patrol and Office of Field Operations. Only includes full fiscal year data.

Individual nationality charts are only U.S. Border Patrol arrests. Monthly data updated through June 2024.

Removals and Releases Chart

Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Only includes full fiscal year data, which was updated through June 2024.

Note: Removals include total deportations, expulsions and returns by U.S. Customs and Border Protection as counted by: Title 8 repatriations, Title 42 expulsions and Migrant Protection Protocols. Releases include: U.S. Border Patrol releases, Office of Field Operations paroles and transfers to Health and Human Services. Data does not include transfers to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention, which can result in deportation or release.

Data does not include other uncategorized outcomes, which are usually less than 1% of total encounters.

Data also does not include humanitarian parole programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, Afghans and Ukrainians, which are not counted in this CBP dataset.

Americans’ Views on Immigration Chart

Source: Gallup

Job Openings Over Time Chart

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Immigration Court Data and U.S. Census Data Analysis

For this story, ProPublica used immigration court records from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review and population figures from the U.S. Census Bureau to analyze how many Americans live in neighborhoods that saw a significant number of new arrivals when compared with their populations. We relied on address information listed on about 4 million immigration court cases initiated since the start of 2021 for nondetained migrants. We did not screen cases out based on their charge or the result of the case, if they reached one (though we examined those in checking our work). Note that migrants entering under humanitarian parole programs and those who successfully evaded border officials likely do not appear in the court data unless they later encountered law enforcement or were placed in immigration proceedings for other reasons. Migrants could also have moved without updating their addresses. For overall population figures, we relied on the 2020 decennial census, while for foreign-born population figures, we relied on the 2019 5-year American Communities Survey. We compared the court data to the population at several geographies: census ZIP code tabulation areas, counties and — in the case of New York — cities.

Graphics, design and development by Lucas Waldron, Zisiga Mukulu and Lena Groeger. Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel contributed reporting.

by Jennifer Smith Richards and Megan O’Matz

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

One by one, Catholic dioceses in key presidential swing states are putting out unusual statements: Newspapers whose titles include the word Catholic that are showing up in people’s mailboxes aren’t what they seem and aren’t connected to the church.

With a classic typeface and traditional newspaper design, the mass-mailed Catholic Tribune newspapers carry signposts of legitimacy. But most of the articles in the papers are inflammatory and overtly partisan, focusing on culture-war issues that resonate with conservative voters.

A headline in the Wisconsin Catholic Tribune, and repurposed in other states’ versions, provocatively asks, “How many ‘sex change’ mutilation surgeries occurred on Wisconsin kids?” Another: “Haitian illegal aliens in America: What are Harris supporters saying?”

At the same time, they undermine Vice President Kamala Harris and prop up former President Donald Trump by, for instance, reminding readers on the front page that anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — whose father and uncle were among the most prominent Catholics in the country — has endorsed Trump.

Dioceses and parishes in Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin have issued warnings about the publications. “It gives the impression that the Diocese of Grand Rapids or the Catholic Church is behind this newspaper,” diocese spokesperson Annalise Laumeyer said of the Michigan Catholic Tribune.

She reached out to local media to flag parishioners so they won’t be misled. And because of the clearly partisan content, non-Catholics might be left with an impression of the Catholic Church that is “worrisome,” she said.

The papers, which have also appeared in Arizona and Pennsylvania, are what academics call “pink slime.” The name comes from a filler in processed meat — or a product that is not entirely what it seems.

Using tax documents and business filings, ProPublica traced the papers to a Chicago-based publishing network led by former TV reporter Brian Timpone. His enterprises, including Metric Media, are known among researchers for peddling misinformation and slanted coverage. The network has received money from right-wing super PACs funded by conservative billionaire Richard Uihlein, founder of the mammoth shipping supply company Uline.

The Catholic Church does not endorse candidates or call for their defeat but does speak out on moral issues and participates in debates over public policies. Many dioceses publish newspapers, but they are not partisan.

In distancing itself from the Michigan Catholic Tribune, the Archdiocese of Detroit noted that tax-exempt churches are not permitted under the Internal Revenue Code to be involved in partisan politics. The Archdiocese of Milwaukee directed Catholics to a Wisconsin Catholic Conference document setting out guidelines for church involvement in electoral politics.

Jason Bourget, a Catholic in the Diocese of La Crosse, Wisconsin, received a copy of the Wisconsin Catholic Tribune in the mail and immediately thought it was suspicious. He had never asked to receive the paper or paid to subscribe.

“I put it with all the other political ads, right in the garbage,” he said.

A portion of the front page of the Wisconsin Catholic Tribune’s October 2024 issue. The return address in Chicago matches the business mailing address of companies within the Metric Media network.

Similar papers were mailed to swing-state residents ahead of the 2020 and 2022 election cycles. They’ve been spotted in past elections in Arizona and Iowa, too. There are Catholic Tribune websites registered for all 50 states, plus one national version, but most don’t appear to have published anything for months, if ever. It’s unclear how many papers have been mailed this year.

Timpone did not respond to requests for comment or to questions from ProPublica.

In an era of prolific “pink slime” sites, sophisticated, AI-concocted fakes and outlandish conspiracy theories engulfing social media, the papers are a throwback to a low-tech disinformation tactic.

But they are not unusual in the Metric Media universe. ProPublica, in collaboration with the nonprofit news organization Floodlight and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, recently reported on a misinformation campaign against solar energy in Ohio aided by Metric Media that included distribution of a similar unfamiliar newspaper, the Ohio Energy Reporter. It has the same mailing address as the Catholic Tribune papers.

Metric Media and its sister companies operate more than 1,100 local news websites across the country. The return address for the Michigan and Wisconsin Catholic Tribunes matches the business mailing address of companies within the Metric Media network, ProPublica found.

Timpone, who lives in Illinois and has contributed to conservative campaigns and causes, leads Metric Media. His brother, Michael Timpone, also leads a media company at the address listed on the Catholic Tribune papers, and he led the Metric Media affiliate that published similar papers in previous election cycles. Michael Timpone also did not respond to a request for comment.

An analysis by ProPublica shows the stories in the Catholic newspapers also were published on websites operated by Metric Media. Nearly every story lacks a reporter byline, so it’s impossible to tell who authored them.

Metric Media’s sister companies were paid nearly $6.4 million in 2021 and 2022 by the nonprofit Restoration of America and its Restoration PAC, campaign finance and tax records show. Uihlein has donated about $125 million to Restoration PAC since 2020. Uihlein did not respond to questions from ProPublica or a request for comment.

Restoration also has funded CatholicVote, another nonprofit with a super PAC that operates on behalf of laity and not the church. It supports conservative political causes. Tax records show that CatholicVote in turn has paid companies in the Metric network about $827,000 since 2020.

In August, Restoration PAC sent $2.5 million to another right-wing PAC called Turnout for America, according to recent campaign finance filings. And then in September, Turnout for America paid CatholicVote $200,000 and one of Brian Timpone’s companies $250,000 for “media services.”

Officials at CatholicVote did not respond to questions for this story. The organization makes prominent appearances in Catholic Tribune stories. The paper circulating in Michigan includes three stories quoting Jacky Eubanks, cited as CatholicVote’s regional field director for the state. Eubanks ran unsuccessfully for the Michigan House in 2022 in a campaign calling for a ban on contraception and gay marriage. Trump endorsed her.

Eubanks told ProPublica she was not familiar with the Catholic Tribune newspapers and never spoke to a reporter for them. She said the quotes were ones that she gave to her employer, CatholicVote, including one in which she said “nothing good” could come from Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz being elected vice president. “My employer probably put it in some kind of press release, or email or text message,” she said.

A devout Catholic, Eubanks said her politics derive straight from her faith. “If the Catholic Church teaches it,” she said, “that’s my belief.”

The paper left some Catholic parishioners confused until church leadership issued statements.

“Thank you, I thought it was rather strange. Will be shredding it,” said one Facebook commenter in Reno, Nevada, responding to her parish’s confirmation that the Nevada Catholic Tribune wasn’t affiliated.

In other households, including non-Catholic ones, the papers provoked annoyance and ire.

Ingrid Fournier, a Lutheran, was perplexed when it arrived at her home.

“We live in no-man’s-land Michigan,” she said of their home in Branch, some 90 minutes northwest of Grand Rapids.

She reached out on Facebook to find out if anyone else in her circle had gotten a copy.

“It’s a pro-DJT Propaganda nightmare of pages,” she wrote. “I was offended on Every. Single. Page. Actually, every single article was wild.”

Some who received the papers have questioned why the Catholic Church has not been more forceful in denouncing lies and hateful rhetoric in the publication, which includes assertions that Democrats are responsible for the Trump assassination attempts. A full page seems intended to stoke hostility by purportedly quoting Harris supporters praising Haitians while referring to Midwesterners as “white trash” and “whiny lazy fentanyl addicts.”

A spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Detroit told ProPublica: “We don’t want to bring undue attention to the publication by discussing specific content, other than to reiterate that we do not endorse it.”

The fact that the Catholic Tribune mimics the appearance of a traditional newspaper means it may catch more attention than online “pink slime” outlets, said Ben Lyons, an assistant professor at the University of Utah who studies partisan misinformation. It is, in a way, “hacking credibility” by appearing to be a local news source tied to the Catholic Church, he said.

Online “pink slime” sites tend to reach few readers, Lyons said. Mailing the papers to homes makes it more likely they’ll be noticed, particularly by older voters. The tactic “could be potentially more influential than a lot of the random stuff we see floating around,” he said.

While most evangelical Christians are firmly in Trump’s corner, the Catholic vote is less bankable. In the 2020 presidential election, Catholic voters were about evenly divided: 49% backed Trump and 50% voted for Joe Biden, according to the Pew Research Center. It notes that 1 out of every 5 U.S. adults identifies as Catholic. Biden is the second Catholic president in U.S. history. The Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, converted to Catholicism five years ago.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s role as a Trump supporter is emphasized in the Catholic Tribunes. The end of a story in the Michigan edition notes: “His Catholic background and policy positions might motivate Catholic voters who are undecided or seeking candidates that reflect a”

The sentence ends abruptly, with no period, and the story never continues to another page.

by Justin Elliott, Robert Faturechi and Alex Mierjeski

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

An internal whistleblower complaint at Trump Media calls for CEO Devin Nunes to be fired, alleging he has “severely” mismanaged the company and opened it to “substantial risk of legal action” from regulators, according to a copy reviewed by ProPublica.

The letter also says that former President Donald Trump’s company is hiring “America Last” — alleging that Nunes imposed a directive to hire only foreign contractors at the expense of “American workers who are deeply committed to our mission.”

“This approach not only contradicts the America First principles we stand for but also raises concerns about the quality, dedication, and alignment of our workforce with our core values,” the letter says.

Trump’s promise to “stop outsourcing” and “punish” companies that send jobs abroad has been a centerpiece of his political career, including his current campaign for president.

The letter also accuses Nunes, a former Republican congressman, of hiring unqualified members of his inner circle and being dishonest with employees at the company, which runs the social media platform Truth Social.

ProPublica reported this month that several executives and staffers had been forced out of the company, and people involved with Trump Media believed the ousters were retaliation in the wake of a whistleblower complaint. The complaint has been the subject of intense interest among former employees, according to interviews and records of communications among former employees. Several people with knowledge of the company had told ProPublica the concerns revolve around alleged mismanagement by Nunes.

Get in Touch

Do you have any information about Trump Media that we should know? Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240. Robert Faturechi can be reached by email at robert.faturechi@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 213-271-7217.

No specific employee signed the letter that was reviewed by ProPublica. It claims to represent “over half” of the company’s staff, including “multiple department heads and C-level officers.” The copy reviewed by ProPublica has been circulating among people connected to the company, and it’s unclear whether there are any differences between it and the version recently submitted to Trump Media’s board.

The copy reviewed by ProPublica is addressed to the audit committee of the board and says it was submitted through the company’s anonymous whistleblower channel.

Trump Media declined to answer detailed questions about the whistleblower complaint or provide comment from the board. But the company’s lawyer in a letter accused ProPublica of writing another in a “series of hit pieces” and “once again basing it upon unreliable sources, attempting to paint a picture of internal turmoil.”

In a previous statement, the company’s lawyer said in a letter that Trump Media “strictly adheres to all laws and applicable regulations.”

Nunes and the Trump campaign did not respond to questions.

The whistleblower complaint paints a picture of turmoil and profound problems in the company at a time when Trump Media’s stock has soared nearly 150% in less than a month, pushing the company’s market value to roughly $6 billion. Even though Truth Social generates virtually no revenue, the company’s stock has attracted enormous interest from Trump fans and speculators.

The stock’s rally has generated a windfall, at least on paper, for Trump, whose majority ownership stake in the company is now worth more than $3 billion. (He recently said he has no plans to sell.)

Among the company’s board members are Trump’s son Don Jr. and two of his former cabinet members: Robert Lighthizer, the former U.S. trade representative, and Linda McMahon, who headed the Small Business Administration and is a major donor and current co-chair of Trump’s transition planning committee.

After the ProPublica story was published this month, an attorney representing Trump Media, Jason Greaves of Binnall Law Group, sent ProPublica a letter demanding an “immediate retraction.” The letter described the article as “false and defamatory” but provided no evidence showing anything in the story was inaccurate.

Following the whistleblower complaint to the board, the company enlisted an outside lawyer to investigate and interview staffers, a person with knowledge of the company had told ProPublica. It’s not clear what the result of that review was or whether it’s ongoing. Governance experts told ProPublica that company boards have a duty to address red flags that suggest corporate wrongdoing.

In perhaps the most serious charge, the letter alleges that Nunes’ “missteps have put us at substantial risk of legal action with our regulators, vendors, shareholders, and employees, and have already resulted in litigation.”

The letter does not give examples of what Nunes has done that could risk action by regulators.

The letter says that not only is Trump Media understaffed — with just “20 technical employees” — but that Nunes has blocked the hiring of Americans. LinkedIn profiles and an invoice obtained by ProPublica show about half a dozen people listed as based in the Balkans doing work for Trump Media, in tasks including software engineering and customer support.

The front page of Truth Social contains the tagline: “Proudly made in the United States of America. 🇺🇸”

The whistleblower letter portrays Nunes, who left a two-decade career as a California congressman in 2022 to become CEO of Trump Media, as ill-equipped to run a tech company.

“Mr. Nunes has consistently lied, targeted employees, and mishandled company resources by placing critical functions in the hands of unqualified members of his inner circle,” it says.

The letter doesn’t give examples of Nunes’ alleged lies or identify the members of his inner circle.

The tone of the letter is more in sorrow than in anger.

“We have approached this with patience, kindness, and grace, hoping for improvement, but the situation has only deteriorated,” the letter states, adding, “We remain fully committed to the mission of restoring and defending free speech on social media.”

Another concern in the letter is about money. Employees were pressured to sell their shares of the company at $20 before it went public, leaving them without a stake in the enterprise and costing them financially, according to the letter. The company’s stock was briefly trading at more than three times that price after it went public in March. After dipping as low as $12 in September, it closed this week above $29.

The letter includes a warning: If the board does not act, the problems could spill into public view and Trump Media could be gravely damaged.

“The more these internal failures — ranging from leadership mismanagement and broken promises to legal vulnerabilities — remain unaddressed, the more likely they are to leak out, likely triggering a PR crisis,” the letter says. “If these issues become public, they will severely tarnish Truth Social’s reputation, erode public trust, and draw negative media attention.”

Do you have any information about Trump Media that we should know? Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240. Robert Faturechi can be reached by email at robert.faturechi@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 213-271-7217.

by Abrahm Lustgarten

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Patrick Crusius worried that Texas — hot and dry and facing climate calamity — was being overrun by immigrants. For his entire life he’d watched as Allen, Texas, the upper-middle-class Dallas suburb where he grew up, more than doubled in size, with quick-built mansions and car-choked freeways. Crusius, 21 years old, with wavy dark brown hair, sparse stubble collecting on his round chin, was awkward and introverted. He spent eight hours a day on his computer. He learned to hate the influence of megacorporations and the culture of consuming cheap goods that he thought they fostered, and he detested the waste and pollution that came with it. He brooded over the dwindling supplies of clean water and that too many people were competing for too little of it. But more than anything he had come to hate Hispanic migrants, who had turned his overwhelmingly white town into a nearly-half ethnic one. He wanted to keep them out. “#BuildTheWall is the best way that @POTUS has worked to secure our country so far!” he tweeted in 2017. In a world of constraints and an environment under stress, why should he have to share with them?

Crusius bought a semiautomatic rifle online and 1,000 rounds of hollow-point 7.62 x 39 mm ammunition. On Aug. 3, 2019, he got into his gray Honda Civic and drove nearly 10 hours toward El Paso, Texas. Entering the city, he turned into the Cielo Vista Walmart Supercenter parking lot. By some accounts, he wanted a snack, but after briefly going into the store filled with Hispanic shoppers, he returned to his car, posted a vitriolic 2,400-word manifesto to the extremist social media site 8chan and got the gun. He shot 45 people, ultimately killing 23, eight of them Mexican citizens. “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” Crusius wrote. “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”

In his manifesto, which he titled “The Inconvenient Truth” — a seeming nod to Al Gore’s documentary about the climate crisis — he wrote that “water sheds around the country, especially in agricultural areas, are being depleted.” Americans would never change their habits of consumption, he asserted, but new immigrants would only consume more, rising to this country’s standard of living and expanding the net environmental burden on the world. “Urban sprawl creates inefficient cities which unnecessarily destroys millions of acres of land,” he continued. “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”

I arrived at the Cielo Vista Walmart three weeks later to find flowers and pictures and memorials adorning a quarter-mile chain-link fence erected around the store’s perimeter and a city still in shock. I had been investigating climate change as a new driver of both large-scale migration around the world and of potential conflict. Traveling through the mountains of Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico, I heard accounts of migrants suffering shortages of food and climate-driven despair that had forced them to move. Worldwide, the number of displaced people has been climbing alongside what appears to be the rising severity of disasters, and research suggests that by later this century as much as one-third of civilization — billions of people — could be facing the kind of heat and drought that had prohibited most human settlement for thousands of years. If humankind’s uncharted venture into the hottest and most unpredictably chaotic environment in history was to be marked by a new era of global migration, how would never-ending pressure on the U.S. border weigh on the politics and divisions of this country?

Crusius’ manifesto was striking because he considered the crushing squeeze of environmental degradation — the very changes that would be amplified by climate change — on communities, but from the opposite perspective. His fear that white Americans were being replaced by an army of invaders who must be repelled seemed to me symptoms of a reactive white supremacy, exacerbated by worries over scarcity brought on by the radically changing environment.

But there was something even more significant: For a generation, conservatives — not just the far right, which Crusius appeared to identify with — had propelled the notion that climate change was a hoax fabricated so the government could impose new restrictions on the economy and society. Yet Crusius hadn’t denied climate change at all. Instead, he seemed to claim its impacts were themselves arguments justifying his violence. I wanted to understand why and, by extension, what it said about the rise and threat of American extremism as the world warms.

After El Paso I began investigating how a border crisis, rising temperatures, disasters and the swirling political reactions to them were affecting the agendas and vigilante campaigns of the far right. I spoke with dozens of actors, militia leaders, secessionists, gun-rights advocates, immigration control activists and self-identified white nationalists. I reviewed more than 14,000 pages of letters and internal documents from the anti-immigration movement.

What I found suggested that Crusius’ grievances were neither isolated nor unique. Across the country, fear and tension about environmental threats were boiling beneath the surface. The people I spoke with largely said that climate change was real and urgent. In their hands it became a weapon to justify their agendas — or at least a useful tool to expand their movements. Some were struggling under the concussions of wildfires and drought. They believe that water and land are becoming scarcer, forcing them to hoard and defend those resources. And they hold onto a nostalgic view for the way American life was in the 1950s, when there were half as many people, and nearly 90% of them were white.

One thing stood out: The roots of their sentiments lay in concerns that the United States has become overpopulated. Almost everyone I spoke with placed the blame on immigrants, holding the view, as Crusius did, that dark-skinned people from the global south are surging northward to overwhelm white Christians, what’s become known as the “great replacement theory.” For many, this argument over population and immigration had become a battle over whether Americans want to live in a diverse society.

This fall, the great replacement theory and the immigration crisis at the border have vaulted to the top of many voters’ concerns. While violence and persecution and economic opportunity remain the primary drivers pushing migrants into the U.S., the evidence increasingly also points to climate change as a growing factor. Yet immigration is still largely seen as separate from the environmental stresses contributing to it, and scrutiny of the far right has largely missed its intertwining with the climate crisis.

The gaps hint that a critical flash point of America’s political impasse may be misunderstood. The intensifying economic and environmental pressures of the warming climate are now beginning to drive new wedges into old divisions. That flash point foretells an America becoming more polarized the hotter things get, more sharply divided between its rural and urban communities and more hateful and more dangerous. It suggests we’re entering an era of climate nationalism, where the right could be poised to reclaim climate change as an issue of its own. As Jared Taylor, the white supremacist and founder of the New Century Foundation, put it when we met this year, a new wave of “eco-supremacists” is emerging.

Crusius’ manifesto, though, wasn’t just evidence of that shift. His declarations were also eerily familiar. I realized I’d read them in the archives of one man — a man who died less than three weeks before Crusius’ crime but who, decades before, foresaw this collision of climate change and nativist fears coming and used it to set the country on its precarious course, creating the most powerful anti-immigrant organizations in the country today. It was through this history — and the story of this man, a Sierra Club environmentalist, a doctor, a father — that I suspected the clues to future strife in a hotter world might be found, because the conflicts unfolding now seemed to be the fruition of his work. The more I studied Crusius’ manifesto, the more I realized that I was also reading the imprints of a ghost, the ghost of John Tanton.

John Tanton grew up as an all-American farm boy in an almost mythologically quaint version of America. He was tall and brawny, with leafy brown hair. In a picture probably from the late 1940s he wears a flannel shirt tucked into trousers. He played football and baseball and was a top scorer on his district-champion basketball team and took his life lessons about the natural limits of the world from the challenges of managing crop rotations in the family fields near Saginaw Bay. Tanton gravitated to science — not to the fundamentalist Evangelical United Brethren Church of his mother — and eventually studied medicine. He met his wife, Mary Lou, in 1956, brunette and pretty, wearing bobby socks at a fraternity mixer at Michigan State.

John Tanton as a young man. His family moved to a farm in Michigan near Saginaw Bay in the 1940s, where he lived a classically quaint American life and said he learned his first lessons about ecological limits. (Via johntanton.org)

As Tanton aged, his face would square, his dark hair turning white. He often wore wire-rimmed glasses, and his jaw jutted forward, as if clenched. It was a hint of the sternness of the ideas that became his hallmark, if not his personality, which his friends described as gentle. In one interview a videographer follows him outside the home he moved to with his wife in the tiny northern Michigan town of Petoskey, where he had begun to practice as an eye surgeon. Tanton kindles a small fire of twigs inside a metal pitcher, while expounding for the camera about ecology and overpopulation. Then he gently squeezes a bellow, pouring smoke into the hives of honeybees in his garden. He took a similarly methodical approach to dismantling the notion that the United States should continue to be a beacon for immigrants.

Tanton wasn’t just a malignant force against immigration. Virtually unknown is that Tanton also had an early and lucid understanding that climate change would exacerbate the country’s immigration conundrum, and it ultimately framed his life’s work. In 1989, when climate politics was still fledgling, he warned that the effects of warming were going to prove explosive along America’s borders — and that, left unresolved, communities could disintegrate into violence. Global warming would “put strictures on the economic growth that has been the great social salve that has kept some groups, in some measure, from each other’s throats,” he told his close friend Otis Graham, the University of California, Santa Barbara, historian. “We’re entering a time when the pie is not going to enlarge as rapidly … a time when there is going to be heightened group conflict.”

Tanton received his medical degree from the University of Michigan and practiced as an ophthalmologist in Petoskey, Michigan. (Alan R. Kamuda/Detroit Free Press/Zuma)

Later, he declared outright that climate change, among other reasons, would require the United States to rethink its immigration policy. Deforestation and flooding in Bangladesh, the collapse of Black Sea fisheries, the desertification of sub-Saharan Africa and “a nearly endless list” of other issues, he said, would drive human migration. He imagined a future in which “resources and livable conditions are scarce. Scarcity is the rule, and requires a degree of self-interest. Population problems are beyond solution by migration. No habitable unclaimed lands remain.”

Tanton cultivated these views as patiently as he cultivated his garden. From the time he moved to remote Michigan, he brought the world to him, amassing thousands of books and corresponding with the savants who resonated the most — Garrett Hardin, the ecologist from University of California, Santa Barbara, and Richard Lamm, the environmentalist and three-term governor of Colorado, among them. They found him intellectually engaging, admired his provocative curiosity and became his friends. Some would visit Tanton, joining him on long walks in the wooded hills above the Lake Michigan shoreline and talking for hours. He organized salons. In many ways, nature became Tanton’s religion, and the mission to protect it consumed him. He co-founded one of the state’s first conservation organizations, the Little Traverse Conservancy. His friends describe him as a charismatic orator, who spoke softly and possessed wells of energy for the issues he cared about most.

Early on, the cause was reining in the world’s population — the United States’ population, in particular. Tanton began working with the group Zero Population Growth, which posited that stabilizing the number of people on the planet was the best way to save the environment, and became its national president. (With his wife, Tanton also started a local chapter of Planned Parenthood.) In 1968, Hardin wrote his essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which warned that population growth will outpace the gains of conservation as people overuse the planet’s resources. The same year, the Sierra Club helped publish the bestseller “The Population Bomb” by Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, a Stanford scientific researcher, which argued that saving the planet was a numbers game.

Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, a Stanford scientific researcher, published “The Population Bomb” in 1970, arguing that saving the planet was a numbers game.

Much of the American environmental movement shared this sense of urgency. The Union of Concerned Scientists, the National Wildlife Federation, Earth First and The Wilderness Society, among others, all published articles or ran campaigns against runaway population growth well into the late 1990s. But it was the Sierra Club, influenced by its first executive director, David Brower, that emerged as a leading proponent of the notion that the earth had a carrying capacity — that there was an optimum number for the planet’s population to be held at. Tanton, a long-standing member of the Sierra Club’s Michigan chapter, became the head of the organization’s national population committee.

Here’s where Tanton’s personal history becomes essential to understanding America’s recent resurgence of immigrant hate. Even as he built an environmental legacy, Tanton was privately thinking more and more not just about the size of the population but about how to preserve what he described as the distinctiveness of European people. In 1975, he wrote a paper titled “The Case for Passive Eugenics” and would later, in a letter to eugenicist Robert Graham, a millionaire businessman known for starting a sperm bank for geniuses, clarify his goals. “Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids?” he asked. “More troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less?”

Around this time, a fundamental demographic shift occurred: New births no longer exceeded deaths in the United States. The population should have begun to stabilize, except there was a new form of growth: immigration. The population, then at around 211 million, continued to expand, and many who at first worried for the carrying capacity of the planet became preoccupied with walling off the country and keeping the global population at bay. For Tanton, “population” became a euphemism for “immigration.” With time, “immigrant” would become a euphemism for “nonwhite.” Long before the great replacement theory became a dominant strain among mainstream conservatives — nearly 7 out of 10 Republicans have said the theory had merit — Tanton, while not using those words, began to define the term. We’ve been thinking so much about “how many” come to this country, he would write, it’s time to think about “who.”

When Tanton blended ecology with eugenics and immigration, he was digging up the two-century-old principles of Thomas Malthus, who first theorized that human population growth would lead to poverty and suffering. Tanton drew on the views of some of America’s most influential environmentalists. Sierra Club founder John Muir rhapsodized about the purity of wilderness, supporting the push to protect Yosemite’s lands from the “dirty” influence of the native tribes who inhabited it. In the early 1900s, the conservationist and anthropologist Madison Grant, who helped establish Glacier National Park and the Bronx Zoo, wrote pseudoscientific tomes about the coming extinction of white people. The Nazis used some of the same references, braiding environmental purity and racial purity. Hitler himself is said to have called Grant’s book, “The Passing of the Great Race,” about European racial superiority, “my bible.”

Tanton resurrected these sentiments and dressed them in liberal arguments about sustainability. It was an environmental appeal he crafted not just in earnest — which he certainly was — but also because he thought it was one of the strongest rationales that the United States should remain predominantly white.

All of this might have remained in the realm of intellectual exploit had Tanton not begun to formalize and evangelize his beliefs. Between 1979 and 1997, Tanton launched or helped create more than eight organizations aimed at curtailing immigration or preserving English-speaking culture, building an unparalleled modern force for shaping the debate about who should and should not be allowed into the United States. Among the most prominent is the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, which has since become one of the nation’s largest and most influential immigration control advocacy groups. In 1982, Tanton started U.S. Inc., an umbrella nonprofit created to fundraise for his initiatives. Three years later the Center for Immigration Studies was spun off from FAIR in the hope of creating a nonpartisan immigration think tank. Tanton also published and, for many years, edited The Social Contract, a magazine that served as a clearinghouse for his ideas.

Tanton co-founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform in 1979, launching what has become one of the nation’s largest and most influential groups that advocates for curtailing immigration. (Michigan Daily Digital Archives)

He diligently befriended Cordelia Scaife May, an heiress to Andrew Mellon’s fortunes who funded forest preservation across Pennsylvania and believed in curtailing population growth, endearing himself to her with gauzy appeals. “Dear Cordy,” he wrote to her. “We should foster diversity between nations, not within them.” She gave him hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then, after her death, her Colcom Foundation, named after the bleak and satirical novel “Cold Comfort Farm,” continued to donate to Tanton’s organizations — more than $150 million.

Tanton’s belief that mass immigration would supplant white America had one particular focus: He saw it as a threat to the country’s ecology and ultimately to the consensus among environmentalists about preserving the purity of that ecology. That’s why, he thought, the immigration fight had to be taken up inside the conservation movement itself, by what is viewed as America’s most prominent environmental organization, an organization that would have the moral authority to bring difficult messages to the public. “The Sierra Club may not want to touch the immigration issue,” he wrote in a 1986 memo. “But the immigration issue is going to touch the Sierra Club!”

On a spring morning in 2002, the Sierra Club’s leaders gathered at the historic Ralston White Retreat, tucked between towering redwood trees on the side of Mount Tamalpais, high above the San Francisco Bay. Carl Pope, the club’s longtime executive director, was present, as was Robert Cox, the club’s former president, who still served on the board. The board had just sworn in its newest members, including an astronomy professor from the University of California, Los Angeles, named Ben Zuckerman. With curly hair receding above his broad forehead and an energetic grin, Zuckerman was effectively Tanton’s Trojan horse.

Six years earlier, the club’s board had declared the club neutral on issues of immigration. To a sizable portion of members, the decision was an abomination, and it provoked a mutiny. A faction formed a splinter group called Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization, or SUSPS, and assembled a roster of notable supporters including the Harvard evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson. Tanton offered thousands of dollars to fund the group’s efforts, but it was Zuckerman who led the charge. In 1998, he and the SUSPS members pushed an initiative that would be put to a membership vote: Should the Sierra Club formally stand against immigration, because it was a stand against population growth and environmental decline? “They wanted to be able to say, ‘This is not just a conservative cause, this is a liberal cause as well,’” Pope told me.

The Sierra Club fractured under the weight of the debate. Sixty percent of the club’s members rejected the initiative, but tens of thousands of members voted for it, demonstrating the reach of Tanton’s worldview. Brower himself soon resigned from the Sierra Club board in protest over what he saw as its refusal to consider immigration’s effect on population growth.

One afternoon shortly after the vote, members of the splinter group gathered outside of San Francisco, hiking through the chaparrals of the San Bruno hills, and plotted what to do next. They recognized that the club’s direct democratic process — and its annual elections of three members of its 15-person board — was a vulnerability, and they assembled the first stages of a plan: a hostile takeover. It would take several years of quiet, painstaking work, and it would begin with Zuckerman’s ascent.

Zuckerman maintains that Tanton was not the mastermind behind the Sierra Club effort. But he worked closely with Tanton’s protégé Roy Beck and attended national gatherings of Tanton-affiliated groups. He even visited Tanton at his Michigan home. Through these years, Zuckerman was also the vice president of a separate Tanton-aligned organization called Californians for Population Stabilization, which had received funding from the Pioneer Fund, a far-right political group known for its support of eugenics.

That morning in Mill Valley in 2002 was the moment of Zuckerman’s success. Throughout his campaign, Cox told me, Zuckerman had downplayed his anti-immigration views, and he had succeeded in quieting his opponents. But once Zuckerman was sworn in, Cox said, he began pressing the immigration question again. “He hid his agenda,” Cox told me. Just weeks later — despite a new board policy forbidding him from advocating on immigration issues — Zuckerman railed against the club’s co-directors in an interview with the Los Angeles Times Magazine, saying they can’t “save species and wetlands and so on when there are a billion Americans.” Later that summer he led a discussion about population and the border at a board retreat in Michigan, and at the next board meeting, according to the minutes, he continued to press the issue, saying that “immigration drives us to higher fertility.”

Zuckerman, like others involved with the early argument that population growth was a threat to the environment, vehemently denied prejudice against immigrants and did not advocate violence. He maintains that his work always arose from a genuine concern that more people will place an unsustainable burden on the planet. “You should not stop doing the right thing for the right reasons because somebody else is doing the right thing for the wrong reasons,” he told me. Nonetheless, he found common cause with people who prioritized race and eugenics.

The following year more board members were elected who were sympathetic to the anti-immigration cause, and the SUSPS members found themselves within reach of the votes to command the organization. The plan was for Lamm, who was chair of FAIR’s advisory board, and Frank Morris, who was on the Center for Immigration Studies board, to run for seats in 2004, along with a Cornell University environmental scientist named David Pimentel, who had written extensively for The Social Contract.

The 2002-04 fight over the Sierra Club’s stance on immigration generated intense media coverage. (Mother Jones, Marin Independent Journal, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report and The Denver Post)

This was a period in which Tanton himself was veering in an increasingly extremist and overtly racist direction. He published an English translation of “The Camp of the Saints,” a French novel written by Jean Raspail. The plot centers on thousands of impoverished Indian farmers who commandeer a fleet and sail, dirty, uncivilized and desperate, to France, where a small resistance is all that stands in the way from their overrunning the country. It would become a treatise for the far right and help solidify the great replacement theory into popular discourse.

U.S. Inc. provided financial support for Peter Brimelow, a former Forbes journalist, to write “Alien Nation” — a book Tanton helped edit and that would go on to shape the white supremacy movement. Brimelow, who refers to himself as a civic nationalist, then launched a website devoted to discussions of racial identity, which he called VDare, after Virginia Dare, supposedly the first English baby to be born on American soil. Brimelow received a list of questions for this article but declined to comment.

Tanton was also drawing closer to Jared Taylor, whose writings about the superiority of white people had earned him a zealous following. Taylor had become a regular at Tanton’s salons, which were growing into an annual conference with dozens of prominent anti-immigration activists meeting at a Marriott hotel outside of Washington, D.C. Tanton admired Taylor’s 1992 book about the failure of affirmative action to fix race relations. When Taylor would later publish “White Identity,” warning that white people will be marginalized by other races if they do not defend themselves, Tanton would write to him: “You are saying a lot of things that need to be said.”

As the campaign for the votes of the Sierra Club’s 750,000 members grew more rancorous, Zuckerman sent board members an article from Brimelow’s VDare, about how Latinos were spreading disease and crime and that “Hispandering” politicians were encouraging it, Cox recalled. (Zuckerman acknowledged the article was from “a right-wing” site but told me he did not recall it being racist.) Cox, who had never heard of VDare, dove into the site, finding a trove of pseudoscientific articles on such subjects as measuring skull sizes and comparing Northern European and African head shapes to determine intelligence. He began recognizing connections: FAIR and the Center for Immigration Studies had links to Brimelow; Lamm chaired the advisory board of FAIR, and Morris sat on the board of the center. A letter the Sierra Club received from the Southern Poverty Law Center alerted him that they all had ties to Tanton. For the first time, Cox and Pope both saw that the internecine battle appeared coordinated. “It was like, ‘Oh my fucking God.’” Pope told me. “I mean it moved from a five-alarm fire to nuclear war.”

Old guard members of the board began to campaign against Tanton’s proxies. While the Southern Poverty Law Center publicly branded the takeover attempt as racist, news broke that a wealthy California investor, David Gelbaum, had pledged $100 million on the condition that the club never stand against immigration. The internal election spilled into public view, with an op-ed appearing in The New York Times, and 13 of the club’s past presidents wrote an open letter decrying the anti-immigrant candidates as bigots. Lamm and Pimentel are no longer alive. Morris, who is Black, called claims of racism preposterous and said it was a campaign of guilt by association. “They were trying to paint us with the Tanton stain,” he told me.

In a last-ditch effort, Tanton’s network began its own efforts to whip votes. In the fall of 2003, The Social Contract ran an ad encouraging its readers to join the Sierra Club so that they could help elect “leaders who will redirect this vital organization toward genuine environmental stewardship.” FAIR’s newsletter published the same ad. VDare encouraged its readers to “join the Sierra Club NOW and have your vote influence this debate. … The prize is enormous.”

It wasn’t enough. All three candidates lost — Lamm received just 13,000 votes — bringing an end to what Pope described as the first modern battle to bring white supremacy into mainstream America under the guise of environmentalism. It might have seemed an obscure, even parochial, battle, but America’s right wing was watching. For them, it was an epic loss, one that Ann Coulter, Tucker Carlson and others would still be mourning a decade later.

Having lost the backing of the Sierra Club, America’s anti-immigration movement turned more explicitly to climate change — and to one of Zuckerman’s Sierra Club colleagues, Leon Kolankiewicz, an environmental planner versed in sprawl and impact studies and a longtime proponent of the idea that the planet had a limited carrying capacity. Kolankiewicz took a job with Roy Beck, the Tanton protégé and former Washington editor of The Social Contract, who went on to found a slightly less strident “immigration reform” organization called NumbersUSA.

Kolankiewicz, for one, was fascinated by studies of the carbon legacy of families — the emerging notion that a person’s carbon footprint would multiply through generations and that the best way to reduce emissions was to have one less child. It got him thinking about the inverse: Could he quantify how much carbon increased with that extra child? If so, what was the difference between a new child born in the United States and someone arriving from abroad?

His answer helped the Tanton organizations reframe immigration squarely in global warming terms: Newcomers to the United States were making climate change worse, because as they increased their consumption here, their carbon emissions would increase, too.

It was a logical notion but shaky science. Other researchers cautioned that just because the country’s total emissions can be divided by the number of people inside its borders does not mean that each person contributes the same amount. In fact, America’s rich are responsible for an enormous proportion of the global emissions causing climate change, even as per capita emissions are rising in many other countries.

But the Tanton network pressed on anyway. In August 2008, the Center for Immigration Studies promoted Kolankiewicz’s research, publishing a joint study arguing that “immigration to the United States significantly increases world-wide CO2 emissions.” In a subsequent paper it argued that climate change was “the most important environmental challenge facing the world.” The reports began introducing the rhetoric of climate change straight into the heart of the far right’s vocabulary. Kolankiewicz told me he and Beck hoped to resurface issues of overpopulation and distinguish the fight against mass immigration from prejudice against immigrants. Both disavowed racism and violence.

But the movement seemed to be experimenting: What would happen if you took Tanton’s warnings about population and the climate and merged them with people’s fears of outsiders and paranoia about the limits of resources? What would happen if you truly turned the immigration debate into an environmental debate?

In February 2010, as Republicans gathered for the prestigious annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., the Center for Immigration Studies’ longtime executive director, Mark Krikorian, sat on a panel about immigration reform in front of a packed audience, along with Robert Rector from the Heritage Foundation and Steve King, the lightning-rod congressman from Iowa. Near the end of the session someone in the audience asked why the center was publishing reports about climate change if it was a hoax?

Krikorian, who declined to be interviewed for this story, offered the group a simple yet telling answer: The climate issue was a potent opportunity. He saw it as a wedge that could scare — and divide — the American left on immigration. The suggestion was that by doing so the Center for Immigration Studies would give liberals reason to support hard-line immigration controls and perhaps also offer conservatives an avenue to fold global warming into their narratives of a country under assault.

By then, the groups that Tanton had helped found had become larger than Tanton, who was in his mid-70s and diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and they had achieved mainstream power. FAIR created a political action committee and channeled money to up-and-coming Republicans. It hired Kellyanne Conway’s Washington firm, The Polling Company, to gauge nationwide sentiment about immigrants. NumbersUSA ran a grassroots robo-fax campaign that helped kill George W. Bush’s bipartisan immigration overhaul. FAIR’s affiliate legal organization worked to draft a bill in Arizona that gave law enforcement the right to stop people for proof of citizenship. In 2010, the Center for Immigration Studies helped torpedo the DREAM Act, forestalling the possibility that Congress might protect young people brought to the United States as children. And the groups gained a certain legitimacy — they were cited hundreds of times by six of the largest U.S. news outlets, including The New York Times.

All these efforts helped launch Tanton’s words and arguments into the flea market of American ideas. Now, politicians, newscasters, podcast hosts and white nationalists were picking up his ideas about pollution and scarcity, immigration and global warming, that fit their agendas, swirling them together with historical tropes about ecology and racist thought and conspiracy theories, not sure, necessarily, where the ideas had come from but eager to trade on their currency.

Some of those ideas could be found in the right-wing website Breitbart News, where Stephen Miller, the principal architect of President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, flooded editors with research from the Center for Immigration Studies. The site posted dozens of articles about climate-driven disasters each year, and while it often denied warming, it was full of stories about resource scarcity and food shortages and migrants, too, all published near numerous stories about the great replacement theory.

Tanton’s ideas could also be found in the proclamations of the prominent “alt-right” white nationalist leader Richard Spencer. In 2014, three years before he led the torchlight march at the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Spencer tweeted, “Is not population control and reduction the obvious solution to the ravages of climate change?” In his Charlottesville manifesto, he wrote, “We have the potential to become nature’s steward or its destroyer.” When I spoke with Spencer recently, his views had only firmed. “If we bring everyone on the planet into an American lifestyle,” he said, “there first off might not be much planet left, and at the very least, the kind of degradation that might entail would be tremendous and horrifying.”

And Tanton’s ideas could be heard on Fox News. “The left used to care about the environment, the land, the water, the animals,” Tucker Carlson said on his show on Dec. 17, 2018. “They understood that America is beautiful because it is open and uncrowded. Not so long ago, environmentalists opposed mass immigration. They knew what the costs were. They still know. But they don’t care.” He also talked about the great replacement theory on at least 400 shows, often citing FAIR reports and hosting Center for Immigration Studies staff as guests. Ann Coulter, lamenting the Sierra Club’s rejection of immigration issues, wrote an article headlined “Your Choice — A Green America Or A Brown America” for VDare in advance of Earth Day in 2017 and then tweeted that “I’m fine with pretending to believe in global warming if we can save our language, culture & borders.” She later told Fox’s Jeanine Pirro that “you can shoot invaders.”

Half a world away, Brenton Tarrant had been absorbing similar ideas and decided to act on them. On March 15, 2019, inspired in part by a 2011 shooting in Norway and frustrated by what he described as the overtaking of white people by immigrants in New Zealand, Tarrant entered two mosques in the city of Christchurch and shot 91 people, killing 51 of them. There is no evidence that Tarrant has read or even heard of Tanton, but in his 74-page manifesto, which he titled “The Great Replacement,” he was drawing on nearly identical notions.

He pointed to “White Genocide.” He described climate change and immigration as parts of the same problem and decried “rampant urbanization and industrialization, ever expanding cities and shrinking forests, a complete removal of man from nature.” To Tarrant, conserving the purity of lands was indistinguishable from conserving white European ideals and beliefs. And he was well aware of the particular pressures at the United States border. “When the white population of the USA realizes the truth of the situation, war will erupt,” he wrote. “Soon the replacement of the whites within Texas will hit its apogee.”

Patrick Crusius read Tarrant’s words and felt similarly. His attack in El Paso unfolded four and a half months later. In his manifesto he pointed to many of those same reasons, and they were familiar. John Tanton had said them, and the reasoning had been echoed by Leon Kolankiewicz and Roy Beck and NumbersUSA and Tanton’s other organizations. They were endorsed again the week after the massacre, as if they were not shocking but the logical evolution of four decades of messaging that, until that terrible August day, had failed to land. In an interview with The Washington Post, Mark Krikorian, the Center for Immigration Studies’ executive director, denounced Crusius’ killings, but he described his manifesto as “remarkably well-written for a 21-year-old loner.”

“If you have a guy who is going to be angry about immigration, have a killer offering reasons for shooting up immigrants,” he asked, “how could he not use reasons that have already been articulated by legitimate sources?”

Roy Beck, a longtime friend and protégé of Tanton’s, founded the prominent immigration control group NumbersUSA. (Matt Eich, special to ProPublica)

In January, I drove through an affluent community of country roads, hobby farms and sprawling hilly yards outside of Fairfax, Virginia, to the home of Jared Taylor. For three decades Taylor had worked to advance eugenicist ideas. He was both an old associate of Tanton’s and a leading proponent of the great replacement theory. Several years ago, when climate change was beginning to emerge in the vernacular of the extreme right, Taylor’s publications began to reflect his own thoughts on the implications of the warming world.

He wrote the foreword to a dystopian French climate-focused analysis called “Convergence of Catastrophes,” which predicts an era of unprecedented migration and political destabilization. In 2017, his magazine, American Renaissance, under an anonymous byline, ran an article titled “What Does it Mean for Whites if Climate Change is Real?” which asked, “Are we preparing for agricultural disruption in some areas and new opportunities in others? Do we have the legal framework to deal with ‘climate refugees’?” And the magazine had conducted a survey of 578 white Americans, finding that 38% of those who identified as “racial conservatives” said there was ample scientific evidence of climate change — a leap beyond the roughly 23% of Republicans who say they believe it is a threat.

If Tanton’s efforts had shaped the present — turning concerns about overpopulation and climate change into a proxy battle for defending a white majority on an imperiled continent — I hoped that Taylor might help me understand where this battle was headed.

Taylor is 73 years old and a graduate of Yale. He is fluent in French and Japanese. He has a monkish buzz cut, a mustache and a healthy stubble. He greeted me wearing gray felt slippers, green pants and a rust-colored down vest at the door of the large brick home that he had lived in for the past 22 years. Taylor had agreed to be interviewed, but he had some conditions: I could not describe the interior of his home, the books on his shelves, the pictures on his walls. He appeared relaxed, wrapping a white scarf around his neck and reclining with legs crossed and a hot mug of coffee.

“The climate is certainly changing,” he had told me when we’d first arranged to meet, and “it will certainly drive immigration.” Now, in person, he picked up where he had left off. He framed his highest priority — the preservation of the white race — in environmental, even ecological, terms. Immigration is a battle for habitat and species. White people are an endangered breed, fighting to delay their extinction. The great replacement theory is a statistical fact, being cemented into reality. Just look at the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Climate change, he added, “is just going to add to whatever pressures we already have.”

Then he offered a warning: What happened with Crusius was going to happen again and again. “I’m surprised they’re not more of these guys,” he said. Like Krikorian, Taylor described Crusius’ actions as “fantastically stupid.” But he can explain them. Crusius was like all the great preservationists “maintaining what is and what is beautiful for the benefit of future generations.” In this way, he was also like Tanton, Taylor said in a subsequent conversation, who found his own “quasi-racial consciousness” through his environmental enlightenment.

“This kind of completely unhinged, brutal and horrible reaction is inevitable in the conditions under which we live,” he said. The status quo has failed to protect Crusius’ community, and the logical response was vigilantism. That’s how Crusius must have felt. And the terrorists that came after him — like Payton Gendron, the self-declared “eco-fascist” who killed 10 Black shoppers in a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York, in 2022 and described his crime as a pursuit of “green nationalism.” And the terrorists who Taylor believes are still to come. They’re “a particularly virulent, violent form of white preservationists,” he said.

Jared Taylor, founder of the New Century Foundation and publisher of the magazine American Renaissance, argues for the preservation and separation of white Americans. (Matt Eich, special to ProPublica)

As we spoke, I thought about the surging activity I’d been seeing online. “The planet can be saved if non-Whites return to their countries, and if we can reduce their populations,” wrote Stephenm85 in 2020, on Stormfront, one of the largest and most influential global social media and publishing sites for Nazi sympathizers. “Let the savage non-Europeans die out without food and allow the intelligent non-Europeans [to] be close to each other away from us.” A 2022 study examining eco-fascist sentiments on Stormfront identified more than 10,000 similar comments across hundreds of threads, some of which had been viewed more than 4 million times. The research, published in the journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, found that in 70% of the posts deemed to be the most substantive, the writers “accepted or exploited climate change.”

Actual antagonistic and intimidating shows of force were increasing, too, if subtly. In July 2020, an alt-right group called the New Jersey European Heritage Association began tacking up posters in Pennsylvania warning that immigration would turn the first world into “the third”; the former was pictured as bucolic green hills, the latter as a smog-choked traffic jam. In 2023, White Lives Matter Network marched in Manlius, New York, holding pickets that read “Save the Swans, End Immigration.” This past February, the Wyoming Active Club, a white supremacist organization, plastered stickers around Campbell County in the northeast part of the state that pictured mountain forests and said, “Preserve Nature, End Immigration.” They were all part of what the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center described as a marked uptick in white supremacist activity, a small but growing portion of which is environmentally focused.

But however menacing, these were still just protests, and if Taylor was right about an approaching era of violence — something more widespread and systemic than the lone-wolf terrorism of a wayward man like Crusius — it was still unclear what the actual danger looked like. None of the academic and security experts I spoke with knew how to answer this. The rising threat is theoretical, until it isn’t.

I’d come across a guy named Mike Mahoney, a 20-something rising star in white nationalist circles who worked for Breitbart News and accompanied Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart’s firebrand tech editor, on his speaking tours. In 2019, going by his byline of “Mike Ma,” he self-published a novel called “Harassment Architecture,” which glorifies those lone-wolf acts of terror, picking up on strains of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who expressed fears about the future “greenhouse effect” and disavowed modernity and its consumerist culture.

The book drew a following, and Mahoney launched the “Pine Tree Party,” using the same symbol of a pine tree derived from the Christian Nationalist banner “An Appeal to Heaven” that could be seen during the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol and would later be flown outside the vacation home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. The Pine Tree Party’s mission is environmental, broad and violent. “We will teach ourselves to respect and rely on nature,” someone who identified himself as Mahoney wrote on Telegram. “We will beat up anime kids. … We will bring the American family back to the woods, back to self-sufficiency. … We will oust illegal immigrants with zero mercy.”

The national security journal Homeland Security Today warned that the Pine Tree Party “is quickly accelerating, recruiting, and pushing the ideological bounds to promote infrastructure damage and violence now directly.” Attempts to reach Mahoney by phone and through social media were not successful. As recently as May, a Telegram account ostensibly linked to the party posted a video calling for the violent toppling of electrical towers and the destruction of power grids.

The ideas represented an evolution. They were virulent and undeniably scary. Graham Macklin, a researcher at the Center for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo, has written that what connects these far-right groups is the view that liberals are disconnected from “wild nature” — a Kaczynski term. This is part of an emerging eco-fascist belief, he said, that the right must now take stewardship of the environment.

This is where Macklin and other counterterrorism experts warn the United States could be headed: The harsher and more challenging the environment gets and the more destructive and expensive the impacts become, the more climate change may be seized as the dominion of the right. Denialism is slowly being replaced by something more pragmatic — and a lot closer to what Taylor had described as eco-supremacy.

Put another way, Taylor explained to me, today’s acceptance of climate change on the far right — and, inevitably, he said, among conservatives writ large — is ushering in a more clear-eyed view of what lies ahead for America, one that accepts the possibility, even the necessity, of sacrifice. Consider those sacrifices a compromise in the name of self-preservation, he said. But the people most strident about protecting this version of America — the showered-with-abundance and historically white version — they will not accept sacrifices only to give away what is gained to outsiders, he told me.

In that way, the determination to keep outsiders from entering the country is, in fact, a truer and, Taylor offers, renewed form of environmentalism. That was, after all, Crusius’ original gambit. “Many people think that the fight for America is already lost,” Crusius wrote. “They couldn’t be more wrong. This is just the beginning.”

Clarification, Oct. 21, 2024: This article has been updated to clarify that Patrick Crusius used 7.62 x 39 mm ammunition.

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

Correction

Oct. 21, 2024: This story originally misstated the length of Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto. It was 74 pages, not 239.

by Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico

This article was produced in partnership with Source New Mexico, which was a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2023. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Victims of New Mexico’s biggest wildfire could receive hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government for the hardship they endured when the blaze roared across their land in 2022 after the U.S. Forest Service accidentally ignited it.

U.S. District Judge James Browning said at the end of a hearing in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Tuesday that he was “leaning” toward ruling for fire victims who sued the Federal Emergency Management Agency last year for limiting the types of damages it would pay for. Browning said he would issue a ruling as soon as possible, but likely not until next month.

The lawsuit centers on FEMA’s determination that a federal law allows it to pay victims for economic losses but not emotional harm, which Source New Mexico and ProPublica reported on in January. Lawyers for fire victims said some people who owned little of value would not get enough money to rebuild unless FEMA paid for emotional harm.

If Browning does side with victims, FEMA could be required to compensate them for the stress of fleeing the fire, the distress they felt as it burned their trees and the toll of losing their home and possessions — what victims’ lawyers describe in legal filings as “annoyance, discomfort and inconvenience.”

A few could get sizable payments for pain and suffering resulting from injuries, in addition to payments for the injuries themselves. So far, the only recourse for people who were injured or for the families of those who died in the fire or ensuing floods has been to sue the federal government — a long, uncertain process. One suit filed on behalf of three people who died in post-fire flooding is pending.

Gerald Singleton, whose San Diego-based firm is representing about 1,000 victims of the fire, said in an interview after the hearing that emotional harm losses could amount to about $400 million. Such payments could result in a more equitable distribution of funds than the current system, he said, because renters and people with little to their name would receive money beyond the dollar value of their possessions.

If victims win, it’s not clear how quickly they could be paid. Lawyers representing FEMA said the agency would have to go through the formal rulemaking process to allow for payments for emotional damages. That could take months.

The money would come out of a nearly $4 billion fund Congress established in September 2022 to, as President Joe Biden put it, “fully compensate” victims of the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire. It was triggered by two controlled burns that escaped to scorch a 534-square-mile area and destroy several hundred homes.

As of Friday, FEMA’s Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Claims Office has paid $1.5 billion to households, nonprofits, businesses and local and tribal governments.

Jay Mitchell, director of the claims office, watched the hearing Tuesday. In a brief interview afterward, Mitchell suggested it could be challenging and costly to dole out payments for emotional distress.

He said the ruling could open the door to a flood of claims seeking damages for “nuisance” or “trespass” from people whose properties were touched by wildfire smoke. “Smoke goes where it goes,” he said as he walked into a meeting with lawyers representing FEMA.

FEMA declined to comment further, citing the pending lawsuit, and encouraged anyone affected by the fire to file a claim by Dec. 20.

The crux of the legal fight is FEMA’s interpretation of the Hermits Peak-Calf Calf Canyon Fire Assistance Act, written and sponsored by U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez and U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján, Democrats from New Mexico. Plaintiffs argue that the agency improperly denied what are called “noneconomic damages” when it finalized the rules for how the $4 billion fund would be paid out. Those rules limited compensation to economic damages, those that come with a price tag: things like cars, homes, business expenses and cattle.

For months, lawyers for FEMA and four firms representing victims have exchanged briefs over what federal lawmakers intended when they wrote the bill. In Tuesday’s hearing, Browning questioned lawyers for both sides about that language.

For example, the law says payments “shall be limited to actual compensatory damages.” Victims’ lawyers argued, with numerous citations in New Mexico law and elsewhere, that “actual compensatory damages” historically means both economic and noneconomic damages. Lawyers representing FEMA interpreted the clause to mean that Congress was imposing a limitation: Only economic damages were allowed. Browning said he agreed with lawyers for the victims. “Plaintiffs have a better reading,” he said.

The dispute over intangible losses from the wildfire centers on the wording of a federal law. Officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency have pointed to language saying payments must be “limited to actual compensatory damages” (yellow highlighting). Victims’ lawyers and New Mexico officials point to language saying New Mexico law should apply and note that the law doesn’t exclude intangible losses (red highlighting). (Obtained by Source New Mexico and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

At the beginning of Tuesday’s hearing, Browning said he’d already made up his mind on one issue: He agreed that New Mexico law does allow noneconomic damages to be paid to victims in a scenario like the fire. That’s important because the federal law requires damages to be calculated in accordance with state law.

He cited an opinion issued this year from the New Mexico attorney general that concluded emotional hardship payments are allowed for victims of “nuisance and trespass.” Two state lawmakers requested that opinion shortly after Source and ProPublica reported on the issue.

Browning said he would try to rule quickly, citing previous delays in getting money to victims. “I don’t live under a rock,” he said. “I know that there has been a lot of criticism of how slow the process was.”

by Andy Kroll, ProPublica; Phoebe Petrovic, Wisconsin Watch; and Nick Surgey, Documented

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

Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance’s appearance at a far-right Christian revival tour last month may have broken tax and election laws, experts say.

On Sept. 28, Vance held an official campaign event in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, in partnership with the Courage Tour, a series of swing-state rallies hosted by a pro-Trump Christian influencer that combine prayer, public speakers, tutorials on how to become a poll worker and get-out-the-vote programming.

Ziklag, a secretive organization of wealthy Christians, funds the Courage Tour, according to previously unreported documents obtained by ProPublica and Documented. A private donor video produced by Ziklag said the group intended to spend $700,000 in 2024 to mobilize Christian voters by funding “targeted rallies in swing states” led by Lance Wallnau, the pro-Trump influencer.

Even before the Vance event, ProPublica previously reported that tax experts believed Ziklag’s 2024 election-related efforts could be in violation of tax law. The Vance event, they said, raised even more red flags about whether a tax-exempt charity had improperly benefited the Trump-Vance campaign.

According to Texas corporation records, the Courage Tour is a project of Lance Wallnau Ministries Inc., a 501(c)(3) charity led by Wallnau. There have been five Courage Tour events this year, and Vance is the only top-of-the-ticket candidate to appear at any of them.

Wallnau has said that Vice President Kamala Harris is possessed by “the spirit of Jezebel” and practices “witchcraft.” As ProPublica reported, Wallnau is also an adviser to Ziklag, whose long-term goal is to help conservative Christians “take dominion” over the most important areas of American society, such as education, government and entertainment.

The Vance campaign portion was tucked in between Courage Tour events, and organizers took pains to say that Wallnau’s podcast hosted the hourlong segment, not the Courage Tour. Two signs near the stage said Wallnau’s podcast was hosting Vance. And during Vance’s conversation with a local pastor, the Courage Tour’s logo was replaced by the Trump-Vance logo on the screen.

An email sent by the Courage Tour to prospective attendees promoted the rally and Vance’s appearance as distinct events but advertised them side by side:

An email promoted the Courage Tour and the town hall with Vance side by side. (Obtained and redacted by ProPublica)

But the lines between those events blurred in a way that tax-law experts said could create legal problems for Wallnau, the Courage Tour and Ziklag. The appearance took place at the same venue, on the same stage and with the same audience as the rest of the Courage Tour. That email to people who might attend assured them that they could remain in their same seats to watch Vance and that afterward, “We will seamlessly return to the Courage Tour programming.”

The Trump-Vance campaign promoted the event as “part of the Courage Tour” and said Vance’s remarks would take place “during the Courage Tour.” And although the appearance included a discussion of addiction and homelessness, Vance criticized President Joe Biden in his remarks and urged audience members to vote and get others to vote as well in November.

Later in the day, Wallnau took the stage and asked for donations from the crowd. As he did, he spoke of Vance’s appearance as if it were part of the Courage Tour. “People have been coming up to us, my staff, and saying we want to help you out, what can we do, how do we do this? I want you to know when we do a Courage Tour, which will be back in the area, when we’re in different parts of the country,” he said. Asking for a show of hands, Wallnau added: “How many of you would like to at least be knowing when we’re there? Who’s with us on the team? If we have another JD Vance or Donald Trump or somebody?”

An employee of Wallnau’s, Mercedes Sparks, peeked out from behind a curtain. “I just wanted to clarify: You said they came to the Courage Tour,” Sparks said. “They didn’t. For legal reasons, the podcast hosted that. It was very separate. I don’t need the IRS coming my way.”

Despite the disclaimers, Vance’s campaign appearance at the Courage Tour raises legal red flags for several reasons, according to experts in tax and election law.

Both Lance Wallnau Ministries and Ziklag are 501(c)(3) charities, the same legal designation as the Boys & Girls Club or the United Way. People who donate to charities like these can deduct their gift on their annual taxes. But under the law, such charities are “absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office,” according to the IRS.

Internal Ziklag records lay out how the Courage Tour could influence the 2024 election. “Our plan,” one private video states, “is to mobilize grassroots support in seven key swing states through large-scale rallies, each anticipated to attract between 5,000 and 15,000 participants. These ‘Fire and Glory’ rallies will primarily target counties critical to the 2024 election outcome.” Wallnau said he later changed the name of his swing-state tour from Fire and Glory to the Courage Tour, saying the original name “sounds like a Pentecostal rally.”

Four nonpartisan tax experts told ProPublica and Documented that a political campaign event hosted by one charitable group, which is in turn funded by another charitable group, could run afoul of the ban on direct or indirect campaign intervention by a charitable organization. They added that Wallnau’s attempt to carve out Vance’s appearance may not, in the eyes of the IRS, be sufficient to avoid creating tax-law problems.

“Here, the [Trump] campaign is getting the people in their seats, who have come to the c-3’s event,” Ellen Aprill, an expert on political activities by charitable groups and a retired law professor at Loyola Law School, wrote in an email. “I would say this is over the line into campaign intervention but that it is a close call — and that exempt organization lawyers generally advise clients NOT to get too close to the line!”

Roger Colinvaux, a professor at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law, said that regulators consider whether a consumer would be able to distinguish the charitable event from the political activity. Does the public know these are clearly separate entities, or is it difficult to distinguish whether it’s a charity or a for-profit company that’s hosting a political event?

“If it looks like the (c)(3) is creating the audience, then that again is potentially an issue,” he said.

Ziklag, Wallnau and the Vance campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

First image: Vance talks with Howard. Second image: Lance Wallnau gives a presentation. The Vance discussion was tucked in between Courage Tour events, and organizers took pains to say that Wallnau’s podcast, which is owned by his for-profit company, hosted the hourlong segment, not the Courage Tour. (Stephanie Strasburg for ProPublica)

Marcus Owens, a tax lawyer at Loeb and Loeb and a former director of the IRS’ exempt organizations division, said there were past examples of the agency cracking down on religious associations for political activity similar in nature to Vance’s Courage Tour appearance.

In the 1980s, the Pentecostal televangelist Jimmy Swaggart used his personal column in his ministry’s magazine to endorse evangelist Pat Robertson’s campaign for president. Even though the regular column, titled “From Me to You,” was billed as Swaggart’s personal opinion, the IRS said that it still crossed the line into illegal political campaign intervention. Swaggart had also endorsed Robertson’s campaign for president during a religious service.

In that case, the IRS audited Swaggart’s organization and, as a result, the organization publicly admitted that it had violated tax law.

Phil Hackney, a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh who spent five years in the IRS’ Office of Chief Counsel, said the fundamental question with Vance’s Courage Tour event is whether the 501(c)(3) charity that hosted the event covered the cost of Vance’s appearance.

“If the (c)(3) bore the cost, they’re in trouble,” Hackney said. “If they didn’t, they should be fine.” The whole arrangement, he added, has “got its problems. It’s really dicey.”

And even though Ziklag did not directly host the Vance event, tax experts say that its funding of the Courage Tour — as described in the group’s internal documents — could be seen as indirect campaign intervention, which federal tax law prohibits.

“The regulations make it clear that 501(c)(3) organizations cannot intervene in campaigns directly or indirectly,” Samuel Brunson, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago, said. “So the fact that it’s not Ziklag putting on the event doesn’t insulate Ziklag.”

Potential tax-law violations aren’t the only legal issue raised by Vance’s appearance.

Federal election law prohibits corporations from donating directly to political campaigns. For example, General Motors, as a company, cannot give money to a presidential campaign. That ban also applies to nonprofits that are legally organized as corporations.

Election experts said that if the funding for the Vance appearance did come from a corporation, whether for-profit or nonprofit, that could be viewed as an in-kind contribution to the Trump-Vance campaign.

Do you have any information about Ziklag or the Christian right’s plans for 2024 that we should know? Andy Kroll can be reached by email at andy.kroll@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 202-215-6203.

by Jeremy Kohler

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

The billboards have popped up along both Interstates 55 and 170 around St. Louis. They’re along I-70 between Columbia and St. Charles, in central Missouri. And there’s one across from a shopping center in Cape Girardeau, along the Mississippi River in the state’s southeast corner.

In fact, as the Nov. 5 election approaches, motorists can see the billboards all over Missouri.

Each one spreads claims designed to undermine support for an abortion rights amendment that was placed on next month’s ballot through the state’s initiative petition process. Some billboards warn voters to “STOP Child Gender Surgery,” even though the amendment doesn’t mention gender-affirming care. Other billboards say it would permit abortions in the ninth month of pregnancy, though a state appeals court ruling in a case challenging the wording of the amendment’s summary on the ballot said that was not true.

Missouri’s abortion law, which bans nearly all abortions except in cases of medical emergencies, with no exceptions for rape or incest, was put into effect in June 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Amendment 3 would enshrine reproductive freedom in the state constitution, nullifying any law that restricts abortion before fetal viability, typically around the 24th week of pregnancy. The amendment would also safeguard other reproductive rights, such as access to in vitro fertilization and birth control. Polls show the measure is likely to pass — a recent survey showed 52% in favor and 34% opposed.

But abortion opponents, saddled with poll numbers that show their argument is losing even with the state’s largely conservative voters, are taking steps to undermine support for the amendment.

“Abortion rights are broadly popular all across the country, even in red states,” said Matthew Harris, an associate professor of political science at Park University, just outside Kansas City. “If you’re going to lose on the substance of that issue, you sort of have to try to make it about something else.”

The opponents have poured about $1 million into a late-hour misinformation campaign that has paid for radio ads and at least some of the billboards. The goal appears to be to sink the effort, or at least to try to redefine what it means to support it. Among the biggest contributors are John Sauer, the Missouri solicitor general from 2017 to 2023 who has served as a lawyer for former President Donald Trump.

Sauer, who has a long history of anti-abortion activism and represented Trump before the U.S. Supreme Court in his immunity case, has put $100,000 into a new political action committee — Vote “No” on 3 — that is funding many of the billboards, according to campaign finance reports. Sauer did not respond to voice and text messages to his cellphone. The PAC’s treasurer, Jim Cole, a longtime official with Missouri Right to Life, declined to comment.

Opponents are trying to capitalize on polls showing that Missourians oppose gender-affirming medical care for minors, which is already illegal for transgender children in the state, and allowing athletes to compete outside their birth gender. By combining the issues, political observers say, opponents are banking on confusing voters and building a broader base against the amendment.

The anti-transgender messaging in Missouri is part of a national trend, where Republicans are leveraging cultural issues like transgender rights to rally conservative voters in the 2024 campaigns.

Opponents are also strategizing about next steps if they lose at the ballot box. They are ready to shift their efforts to a more receptive audience: a state legislature dominated by deeply conservative politicians who have frequently acted against public opinion.

The Missouri General Assembly has a history of using “ballot candy,” where lawmakers add politically charged language they support to amendments to undo voter-approved measures that they don’t like. Some legislators have vowed to keep on fighting the abortion-rights amendment if it passes.

In 2018, for instance, voters overwhelmingly approved the Clean Missouri initiative, which aimed to reform some of the worst abuses of legislative redistricting. Two years later, Republican lawmakers introduced new ballot language that reframed the issue, focusing on minor ethics reforms while quietly seeking to reverse many of the changes in the Clean Missouri initiative. That repeal effort narrowly passed.

A similar tactic is evident in Missouri’s Amendment 7, which the legislature placed on this year’s ballot. While it is dressed up as a measure to ensure that only U.S. citizens can vote, something already required by law, its real impact would be to ban ranked-choice voting in the state, a move strongly supported by Republicans in the General Assembly.

Benjamin Singer, the former communications director for the Clean Missouri campaign, called the legislature’s action to undo Clean Missouri “brazen” and said the effort on Amendment 7 is part of a pattern. Singer, now chief executive officer of Show Me Integrity, a group focused on promoting democracy reforms in Missouri, said voters shouldn’t underestimate the lengths legislators will go to reverse popular measures.

“Think of the dirtiest trick in Missouri political history,” Singer said, “and plan for worse.”

State Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Branson, said abortion-rights proponents were the ones playing tricks by trying to protect transgender men playing women’s sports and sex changes for minors. “What is Amendment 3 actually talking about? I say it’s a multisubject amendment that should not even be on the ballot. So might we look at those individual subjects? Of course, we will.”

Seitz said that if conservative lawmakers weren’t adequately representing the will of the people, “Why are we continuously elected?”

But while Missouri voters tend to elect conservative leaders into a legislative majority, many of the issues that resonate with voters tell a different story. Voters have rejected a law that would have allowed employees to opt out of paying union dues, legalized recreational marijuana and expanded Medicaid — policies at odds with the priorities those lawmakers have championed.

Those leaders this year tried to limit the ability of citizens to file amendments to directly change the constitution. Republicans wanted to include ballot candy in the measure that would have added unrelated issues about immigrants voting and foreign fundraising. But that measure went down to defeat after an all-night Democratic filibuster.

“Missouri voters don’t love the idea of government interference generally, but at the same time, they support conservative principles,” said Beth Vonnahme, associate dean in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City. “So when you have a candidate who’s advocating conservative principles, they win. But when you have amendments that are progressive but focus on government interference, they also tend to do pretty well.”

Before the abortion amendment made it on the ballot, it survived a number of legal challenges. In September, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to keep Amendment 3 on the ballot, rejecting claims that the initiative failed to list all laws it might affect.

Still, state Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, a Republican from Jefferson County and an architect of the Missouri abortion ban — and one of the plaintiffs in the state Supreme Court case — said amendment proponents are lying “by saying it won’t do some things that it very obviously will do.” She said that if Amendment 3 passes, the only way for lawmakers to undo the damage would be to put a new amendment on the ballot to overturn it.

Marcia McCormick, a Saint Louis University law professor who specializes in sexuality and the law, called the billboard claims highly misleading “straw man” arguments. She emphasized that while Amendment 3 ensures reproductive freedom, it is narrowly focused on fertility and childbirth.

Michael Wolff, a retired chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court, said he was confident anti-abortion lobbyists are already working with legislators on a new amendment. Wolff, who helped advise the Amendment 3 proponents on ballot language, said he anticipated that the effort would lead with the transgender medical care issue, as the billboards have done.

He said lawmakers might lead a new amendment “the same way they started out with Clean Missouri — they started out with something that people would agree with,” adding, “Everybody with any resources that puts together ballot propositions is going to poll on what the voters will find attractive.”

by Jennifer Berry Hawes

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On a brilliant mid-October morning, Harold Singletary stood before a teal shroud hanging from a building along one of the most famed architectural stretches in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. A Black businessman, he never imagined he would be standing here, for this purpose, along a street he had walked countless times, not knowing.

He prepared to address a group gathered to unveil a historical marker that announced to anyone walking by that the finely restored antebellum structure behind him once housed an auction firm that in 1835 “conducted the largest known domestic slave sale in United States history.”

In all, 600 enslaved people were put up for sale.

The new marker is notable because these streets, once bustling with businesses critical to the slave trade, yield little of that story to the average passerby. Singletary grew up in this coastal city — once the nation’s busiest slave port — where racial atrocities went largely ignored by white locals until recently.

He held prepared remarks in one hand. But before speaking, he walked over to hug Lauren Davila, a stranger who in 2022 discovered an ad for the sale of 600 people when she was a College of Charleston graduate student. Last year, a ProPublica reporter traced the sale to a wealthy plantation operator named John Ball Jr., which enabled Singletary to connect his own family members to those sold — and opened the door to additional research into the fates of the 600 people advertised for sale.

Until Davila’s discovery, the largest known slave auction in the U.S. was one that was held over two days in 1859 just outside Savannah, Georgia, roughly 100 miles down the Atlantic coast from Charleston. At that auction, 436 people were sold.

A small group then spearheaded creation of the marker Singletary was prepared to unveil.

“This is a big moment in representing ancestors,” Singletary began. Among those sold by the auction firm housed here were the mother and grandparents of an ancestor Singletary so reveres that he named his business, BrightMa Farms, after her. Its corporate office sits a four-minute walk away.

Harold Singletary, whose ancestors were among the 600 people put up for sale, speaks at the unveiling of the marker. Behind him stands Bernard Powers, a historian and key advocate for the marker. (Catie Cleveland/College of Charleston)

“America has to face some hard facts,” Singletary said. “And those facts change stories that change narratives.” He thanked the people “who helped change the narrative.” Among them is the man who owns the salmon-colored building at 24 Broad Street and agreed to hang the marker on it.

Attorney Stephen Schmutz bought the two-story building in 1989 and has operated his law firm there since. He had no idea it once housed a notorious slave auction firm.

“I just started thinking of the irony of it all,” Schmutz said. He grew up in segregated schools. Until he attended law school, all of his classmates were white. But when he was a young man during the Civil Rights movement, men like Martin Luther King Jr. “opened my eyes to the injustice of segregation.”

Among others, Schmutz has represented families of those killed in the 2015 Emanuel AME Church massacre, in which a white supremacist murdered nine Black worshippers. Standing before the marker, he applauded work to compile a more honest accounting of the city’s history.

The marker, about 2 feet tall, reads: “SLAVE AUCTIONS OF THE DOMESTIC SLAVE TRADE.” The auction firm Jervey, Waring & White, which operated in the building from 1828 to 1840, was “part of a network of similar enterprises” around it that included banks and insurance companies, the marker explains.

The marker’s story began in March 2022 when Davila, now a doctoral student at Tulane University, was scouring newspaper archives from her home in Charleston. As part of an internship, she was logging ads for slave auctions.

On that day, she clicked on Feb. 24, 1835. From a sea of classified ads, she read:

“This day, the 24th instant, and the day following, at the North Side of the Custom-House, at 11 o’clock, will be sold, A very valuable GANG OF NEGROES, Accustomed to the culture of rice; consisting of SIX HUNDRED.” She was stunned.

Graduate student Lauren Davila discovered this ad announcing the sale in the classifieds of the Charleston Courier on Feb. 24, 1835. (NewsBank/Readex. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

But the ad she found was brief. It yielded almost no details beyond the size of the sale and where it would be held.

A ProPublica reporter then found the original ad for the sale, which ran more than two weeks earlier. Published on Feb. 6, 1835, it revealed that the sale of 600 people was part of the estate auction for John Ball Jr., scion of a slave-owning planter regime. Ball had died the previous year, and five of his plantations were listed for sale — along with the people enslaved on them.

A descendant of Ball’s named Edward Ball wrote a bestselling book in 1998, “Slaves in the Family,” which detailed his family’s skeletons and the horrors long minimized by a Lost Cause narrative of benevolent slave owners. Ball had located descendents of people his ancestors had enslaved — including Harold Singletary.

Davila’s research was supported by the College of Charleston’s Center for the Study of Slavery and a white Charlestonian named Margaret Seidler. At 65, Seidler had discovered notorious slave traders in her own family tree, and then she began identifying others — including Jervey, Waring & White.

Seidler wrote a book about her findings and has been reaching out to other white Charlestonians urging them to help provide an honest account of the city’s slave history. She and historian Bernard Powers, the Center for the Study of Slavery’s founding director, pushed for the marker.

“Truth can be a tonic,” she said.

by Byard Duncan and Ryan Gabrielson

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In the spring of 2020, attorneys general from nearly three dozen states announced a landmark legal settlement with the nation’s largest auto lender for risky borrowers.

Santander Consumer USA had for years made high-interest loans to people it knew couldn’t afford them, the officials alleged. When those borrowers got into financial trouble, it allowed them to delay making payments — without disclosing the steep costs of doing so. Because of those extensions, customers ended up owing thousands of dollars in surprise interest charges, and in many cases, they lost their cars.

“Predatory lending practices like this led to the 2008 financial crisis and harmed millions,” Josh Shapiro, then Pennsylvania’s attorney general and now its governor, said in a press release announcing the settlement, which imposed new consumer protections and required clearer disclosure about how loan extensions work.

The multistate effort, he added, “will put a stop to some of Santander’s most outrageous tactics.” The bank did not admit any wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which it said resolved a “legacy underwriting issue.”

But by the time the attorneys general were heralding their crackdown, they were receiving strikingly similar complaints from customers with loans from another lender, Exeter Finance.

The parallels were more than coincidence. The company was being run by former Santander executives who had left that bank amid the investigation. By 2020, most of Exeter’s corporate leadership — including its CEO and its operations chief — was composed of people who had overseen Santander during the period that the state attorneys general said it was “misleading, failing to disclose material information, or otherwise confusing consumers.”

Those elected officials, however, have taken a decidedly different approach with Exeter. In fact, in 12 states that participated in the Santander agreement, officials have taken little or no action in dozens of cases alleging nearly identical behavior, according to a ProPublica investigation.

The news organization reviewed nearly 200 consumer complaints filed with state regulators over the past five years and found they rarely pressed Exeter about its practices. In Washington, they asked Exeter to participate in a voluntary mediation process, then closed the case when the company didn’t respond. In New Jersey, they just forwarded complaints to their counterparts in Texas, where the company is based, and did nothing more. In Kentucky, an office sat on a complaint for months while the borrower’s car was repossessed.

Some attorneys general declined to answer questions for this story, while others — such as those in Pennsylvania, Georgia and California — did not release documents in response to our public records requests. But Prentiss Cox, a University of Minnesota law professor who spent years in charge of consumer protection at the Minnesota attorney general’s office, said attorneys general often have limited staff and money to bring cases against companies, “and you bet players like subprime auto lenders know that.”

At least two states now appear to be scrutinizing Exeter. Georgia has acknowledged investigating the company, and Louisiana recently signaled potential action after ProPublica published the first part of its series last month. In response to questions about Exeter, the state attorney general’s office said it “cannot comment on ongoing investigations.”

Enforcement from attorneys general is particularly significant for auto borrowers, given how little recourse they have for legal action, said Chris Peterson, a law professor at the University of Utah and a former senior official at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Many car loan contracts explicitly limit borrrowers’ right to bring cases in civil courts by forcing them into arbitration. Consumer rights lawyers “often give indirect auto finance companies and car dealers a free pass because it’s so difficult to get them into court anymore,” he said.

That makes state attorneys general one of the few official checks on the country’s trillion-dollar auto lending industry.

Over the past decade, Exeter has grown to become one of the largest players in the business, with more than 500,000 active loans worth $10 billion. As ProPublica reported last month, extensions are fundamental to its business model. The company routinely grants borrowers several extensions, which typically add thousands of dollars in new interest charges to the loan. Dozens of customers told ProPublica that Exeter didn’t clearly disclose the charges, even as the extensions drove them deeper into debt.

The news organization reached out to Exeter’s executives for this story and they either declined to comment or did not return calls. In response to written questions, the company issued a statement defending its extension practice, which it said “has been heavily reviewed by its regulators and is fully compliant with all applicable laws.” It did not answer questions about which regulators had reviewed its practices.

“Extensions are granted to customers who request them so that they can remain in their vehicles and provide for their families,” the company said.

ProPublica’s investigation found these payment deferments can do the opposite though, with borrowers losing their cars even after paying the equivalent of the original loan or more.

New Address, Same Faces, Same Playbook

At the start of 2016, Exeter was headed toward failure. Financial disclosures show it had lost about $50 million over the previous two years. Its turnaround coincided with the arrival of a new leadership team that had a long history in subprime auto loans — and in aggressively granting financially shaky borrowers multiple extensions.

The new CEO, Jason Grubb, had just spent more than a decade at Santander, ultimately becoming its president. Exeter’s operations chief, Brad Martin, had been working for Santander in a similar capacity. The two joined Exeter while their former employer was embroiled in state and federal investigations into allegedly deceptive and unfair lending practices. A slew of other Santander staffers — from the company’s human resources, compliance and executive arms — followed them. Jason Kulas, who was Santander’s CEO until 2017, joined Exeter’s board of directors in 2019 and today is also its chief financial officer.

“We went ahead and kind of got the gang back together again,” said a former executive at Exeter and Santander who asked to not be named for fear of professional repercussions.

There was little stopping them. Neither a federal settlement with Santander in 2018 nor the subsequent one from state attorneys general named the bank’s individual executives. While regulators have the power to do so when they bring legal actions against companies, they rarely use it with major lenders like Santander, said Dalié Jiménez, a professor of consumer law at the University of California, Irvine.

In such cases, the government’s chief aim is getting a settlement that results in fines and reforms for consumers, she said, and the people running those financial institutions “are going to fight really hard” against cases that target them directly.

Exeter’s Texas headquarters are in a suburb just 15 minutes from Santander Tower. Under its new management, Exeter loosened its lending criteria: It began approving borrowers with a debt-to-income ratio of up to 70%, meaning they would spend as much as $7 of every $10 of their paychecks on the car loan and other debts each month. (Consumer advocates and lenders recommend borrowers keep their debt ratio around 35%.)

Exeter also accepted customers with lower credit scores than it had previously, lent them more money than before — as much as $50,000 per loan — and gave them more time to repay it. Some agreed to repayment schedules stretching longer than six years, meaning more costly loans over the course of the term.

Many borrowers had trouble fulfilling the terms. Financial disclosures show the number of Exeter loans with five or more payment extensions soared in the first three years after Grubb and Martin took over. As did the company’s revenue. Exeter went into the black in 2016 and stayed there, claiming $94 million in pretax profit in 2018, according to rating agency reports.

Exeter said in a statement that “extensions are not a profit strategy.” However, ProPublica found the company sometimes made more money on loans that defaulted than on ones in which borrowers paid on time.

Each time the company grants an extension, it resets the clock and reclassifies the delinquent loan as being on schedule. Exeter has done this in some cases as many as 12 times over the course of a 72-month loan, with borrowers continuing to make payments in hopes of catching up.

Some of them turned to their attorneys general for help even before the regulators had finalized their settlement with Santander. The consumers alleged that Exeter had added huge interest charges without clear explanation.

In early 2020, Deborahlyn Wells, a disabled Kentucky woman, sent such a complaint to state Attorney General Daniel Cameron. Wells was trying to prevent Exeter from seizing her 2008 GMC Acadia. She wrote that she’d taken multiple extensions with the understanding that Exeter had moved the payments “to the end of the loan to keep me current.” At the time, Wells had paid the company almost $13,000, but she was nevertheless on the verge of repossession. Nearly all of her payments had gone to interest.

Cameron’s office took months to contact Exeter about Wells’ complaint, records show. Even then, it simply forwarded her letter to the company, which confirmed it had given her five extensions. By that point, Exeter had already repossessed Wells’ car and auctioned it off.

Records obtained by the attorney general’s office show Exeter’s extension notices did not explain that Wells’ payments would first be applied to the interest from extensions, which would delay repayment of the original loan balance. The notices only hinted at the financial consequences, saying “any payments you can make before they are due will help you minimize interest.”

The company has said that it updated its written disclosures in late 2021 — roughly 18 months after the Santander settlement — but declined to provide copies or details about the changes.

Notices from earlier this year, provided to ProPublica by borrowers, clarified how interest charges increase and payments are applied after extensions. However, they did not include the actual dollar amount of what the deferments would cost. If borrowers wanted to know more, the letter directed them to call a toll-free number.

Cameron, who left the attorney general’s office this year after an unsuccessful bid for governor, did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did his successor, Russell Coleman.

Weak Enforcement in the States

The Santander settlement, announced just three months after Wells’ complaint, took aim at the type of disclosure failures that were at the core of her case. It required Santander to explain to customers that an extension will add new interest charges and increase the amount they’ll owe at the end of their loan. (Notably, the deal did not require Santander to tell customers how much additional interest they’ll pay due to extensions. That’s why ProPublica built a tool to provide estimates.)

And while on paper it technically applied to just one company, consumer advocates and legal experts say it should have telegraphed new standards for all lenders, including Exeter.

With such public announcements, regulators “are putting every other company on notice that we will come after you,” said Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates. “If you engage in those practices, we will hold you to account.”

Indeed, some attorneys general pledged to do exactly that. “Lenders and servicers have an obligation to deal fairly with Washington borrowers,” said the state’s attorney general, Bob Ferguson, who had helped craft the Santander settlement. “And when they fail to do so, my office will be there to protect Washingtonians.”

Matthew Hutchinson hoped for that kind of protection when he contacted Ferguson’s office in early 2022. He’d been rear-ended while driving on a highway near Vancouver, Washington, flipping his Nissan Frontier over the center median and into oncoming traffic. His truck was wrecked, but he was sure the insurance payout would easily cover whatever he still owed on his Exeter loan.

Instead, the payout was thousands of dollars short.

Hutchinson had taken five extensions during months when money was tight. He said Exeter told him he would owe some extra interest, but he was given nothing in writing and had assumed the cost would be “reasonable.”

The deferments had actually added about $4,000 in interest to his debt, according to ProPublica’s analysis of Hutchinson’s loan records.

Hutchinson filed a complaint accusing Exeter of charging excessive interest, and Ferguson's office sent a letter to Exeter. In its response, the lender acknowledged it had granted Hutchinson the extensions.

But the attorney general’s staff did not press for more information about whether Exeter had explained how extensions add additional interest charges, one of the requirements of the states’ Santander settlement. Instead, it sent the matter to its voluntary mediation program, designed to help consumers and businesses reach an agreement.

Exeter ignored the request to mediate, regulatory records show, and Ferguson’s office closed the case a month later.

“I was confused and frustrated,” Hutchinson recalled of the swift dismissal. “Because I thought the only thing I could do, legally, was contact the attorney general’s office and see if there was any way they could help me.”

His loan defaulted. He said he’s still being pursued for the charges the extensions created.

Exeter declined to comment on specific cases for this story, but it defended its practices in a statement. “Customers always receive an Extension Agreement,” the company said. “Any assertion that a customer wasn’t provided an Agreement is false.”

Ferguson’s office also declined to discuss Hutchinson’s case but confirmed that it closes complaints if a business does not respond.

Nevertheless, Brionna Aho, the office’s communications director, said that closed complaints “can and do sometimes lead to open investigations and civil enforcement.” She would not comment on whether that had happened in Hutchinson’s case.

In other states, attorneys general didn’t even contact Exeter when they received complaints.

That was the outcome in New Jersey after Sophia Nelson and her husband wrote to state Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal. The couple had struggled to make their monthly car payment to Exeter while caring for their daughter, who has a rare swallowing disorder. They’d taken extensions to avoid default, and they filed a complaint in 2020 saying that, unbeknownst to them, the extensions added $9,000 in interest to their debt.

Grewal declined to investigate and sent the complaint to Attorney General Ken Paxton in Exeter’s home state of Texas.

Paxton’s office told Nelson it could not take direct action on every complaint and would contact her “if we need additional information.”

Nelson said she and her husband never heard anything more. She said they didn’t expect the complaint would help them personally, but they “hoped there would have been some legal action taken or at the minimum an investigation of Exeter’s practices.”

The spokesperson for New Jersey’s attorney general said the office’s action was a “customary” response to consumer complaints. Paxton’s office in Texas did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Cox, the University of Minnesota law professor, said the public pronouncements of attorneys general are often constrained by the fiscal realities of their offices — something that companies are well aware of.

Lenders “should be afraid of the AGs,” he said, “but at the same time they know that there are limits.”

In February of 2023, nearly two years after Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul declared that his settlement “holds Santander accountable and sets an important precedent,” a consumer wrote to him stating that Exeter stood to collect “300% of the original amount financed” thanks in part to extensions. After seeking information about how interest was charged on these deferments, the borrower reported that “Exeter refused to provide me with any relief.”

Raoul’s office had led the multistate coalition against Santander. But when the consumer told Exeter they’d be telling the attorney general about their problems, they said the company “showed no concern.”

April McLaren, a spokesperson for Raoul’s office, told ProPublica the complaint was closed after “an attempted, but unsuccessful mediation.” She wouldn’t provide further details.

Help ProPublica Investigate the World of Subprime Car Loans

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

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

Alaska officials have announced plans to help Anchorage city prosecutors take criminal cases to trial days after the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica reported the municipality has dropped hundreds of cases due to low staffing.

Normally, the city prosecutes misdemeanor crimes that occur within city limits while the state prosecutes felonies. Over the next six months, the two governments plan to work together to stem the wave of dismissals. Deputy Attorney General John Skidmore said Tuesday that his department would provide seven to 10 state attorneys to aid the city government.

Those prosecutors would supplement the 13 the city said it had on staff as of last week.

“Public safety is one of the primary goals of any government,” Skidmore said in a written statement. “The Department of Law is not staffed to take on all misdemeanor prosecutions in Anchorage, but we are working to lend a hand to protect the public as best we can while the municipal prosecutor’s office gets back on its feet.”

“Many of our prosecutors live in Anchorage, so for many of us this is our community too,” he said.

The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica reported that from May 1 through Oct. 2, the Anchorage municipal prosecutor’s office dismissed more than 930 misdemeanor criminal cases because the state’s 120-day deadline to bring defendants to trial had expired or was about to expire. That number has now exceeded 1,000 cases.

The cases included defendants charged with domestic violence, child abuse and driving under the influence.

City officials said employee turnover and resignations had left the municipality without enough attorneys. In an effort to clear out a backlog of cases this year, judges forced prosecutors to regularly examine which cases would be ready for trial within the 120 days, and the prosecutor’s office routinely lacked the staff to move forward in time.

Anchorage Municipal Attorney Eva Gardner previously said the city asked the state for help back in April, during the administration of then-Mayor Dave Bronson, but was rebuffed. Skidmore has said city officials did not explicitly ask for assistance at the April meeting.

Gardner, who began working for the city in July under new Mayor Suzanne LaFrance, said that when she learned of the apparent miscommunication, she called Skidmore, and city and state lawyers met Oct. 8 to discuss potential solutions.

“The state has a willingness to help, and it’s just a matter of figuring out the best way to do it,” she said.

Including dismissals through Oct. 9, the municipality has dropped at least 279 cases of domestic violence assault and 313 drunken driving cases since May 1 because it was not able to meet speedy-trial deadlines, according to the news organizations’ review of court recordings.

Skidmore said the state plans to loan attorneys from the Office of Special Prosecutions and the Anchorage district attorney’s office, along with some former prosecutors working within the Department of Law’s civil division.

The city had already been working to recruit new prosecutors by offering additional pay this year, and city officials have said those efforts are beginning to pay off.

Gardner said that after the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica revealed the mass dismissals on Oct. 13, she also heard from retired prosecutors who expressed an interest in helping the new municipal attorneys take cases to trial. The city is exploring that option as well, she said.

by Doug Bock Clark

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A Georgia judge ruled this week that county election board members cannot block the certification of votes based on suspicions of fraud or error.

The ruling, if it stands, puts to rest the question of whether local election officials would be allowed to throw out individual precincts from county vote totals if they suspect fraud or error. A new rule adopted by the State Election Board appeared to allow such exclusions.

If county election board members were “free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so — because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud — refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in the ruling. “Our Constitution and our Election Code do not allow for that to happen.”

The ruling stems from a lawsuit brought by Julie Adams, a Republican member of Fulton County’s election board who is also part of a right-wing group that has raised doubts about the integrity of U.S. elections. Adams’ lawyer argued in court that the new election rule empowered county board members to refuse to certify votes they suspected of being tainted by fraud or error. This power, the lawyer argued, extended all the way to excluding entire precincts’ votes if they found something they considered suspicious in the returns.

A ProPublica examination found that if Adams’ interpretation of the rule had stood, election officials in just a handful of rural counties could have excluded enough votes to impact the outcome of the presidential race. After former President Donald Trump lost his reelection bid in 2020, Republican legislators in Georgia launched efforts to overhaul county election boards one at a time, sometimes unseating Democrats and stacking the boards with Trump backers. Election boards in Spalding, Troup and Ware counties, for instance, are now led by election skeptics, including one man who called President Joe Biden a “pedophile” and made sexually degrading comments about Vice President Kamala Harris. If the judge had accepted Adams’ argument, these county boards would have had the power to exclude the ballots of Democratic precincts that had provided roughly 8,000 more votes for Biden than Trump in 2020.

The chairman of Spalding County’s election board declined comment to ProPublica this month. The chair of Ware County’s board did not respond to requests for comment. William Stump, chair of Troup County’s board, said he doesn’t think anyone on the board is overtly partisan. “Everybody’s concern is to get the numbers right and get them out on time,” Stump said.

McBurney’s ruling made clear that excluding Democratic precincts’ votes would not be allowed. “If in the course of her canvassing, counting, and investigating,” a board member “should discover what appears to her to be fraud or systemic error, she still must count all votes,” McBurney wrote. The correct way forward is for the board member to “report her concerns about fraud or error ‘to the appropriate district attorney,’” as stated in Georgia law, not do the work of professional investigators herself.

If interested parties want to dispute the result, the long-standing pathway is by contesting the election in court. “Importantly, election contests occur in open court, under the watchful eye of a judge and the public,” McBurney wrote. “The claims of fraud from one side are tested by the opposing side in that open court — rather than being silently ‘adjudicated’ by” county board members “outside the public space, resulting in votes being excluded from the final count without due process being afforded those electors.”

The ruling is the latest development in a legal battle about whether county election board members have the power to delay or block the certification of election results — a power experts warned could affect the outcome of the presidential election in November. Many of those experts emphasize, however, that certification has long been interpreted as a nondiscretionary duty for election board members.

Much of that legal battle was driven by Adams, the Fulton County board member and the regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network, a right-wing organization led by a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. Going against over a century of legal precedent, Adams voted against certifying the March presidential primary election, saying she needed more information to investigate the results, but was outvoted by the Democratic majority. She then sued the board and the county’s election director, asking for the court to find that her certification duties, among others responsibilities, “are, in fact, discretionary, not ministerial.”

Then, behind the scenes, Adams began working to change the rules for certifying elections in Georgia, pushing activists to bring forward a rule for the State Election Board to adopt that would vastly expand the power of county board members to not certify votes they deemed suspicious, as ProPublica reported. When that rule was first brought before the State Election Board, members voted it down as illegal. However, in August, after one moderate Republican member was forced off the board and replaced, the new majority, each of whom Trump praised by name at a rally, passed a version of the rule almost identical to the one that the previous majority had found to be illegal.

In back-to-back bench trials at the beginning of October, McBurney heard Adams’ case, along with a similar one that pitted the Democratic and Republican national committees against each other over whether the certification of election results was mandatory. McBurney’s ruling only directly addressed Adams’ lawsuit.

Adams had also asked in her lawsuit for the court to grant her greater access to election-related documents and information before certifying the vote. McBurney ruled that this information should be granted to her, but that tardiness in receiving it did not allow her to refuse to certify election results.

“This suit was brought to ensure Ms. Adams had access to all the election material she needs in order to ensure Fulton County elections are free from irregularities, and to have the ability to challenge irregularities in election results,” said Richard Lawson, a lawyer for Adams and the Center for Litigation at the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-allied think tank. “This order preserves her rights in both regards.”

The ruling makes clear that the avenues that county board members can use to challenge election results they deem suspicious are the same ones as before the lawsuit and do not include delaying certification.

“It is my belief that having access to the entire election process will allow every board member to know and have confidence in the true and accurate results before the time for certification,” Adams said in a statement provided by Lawson.

Kristin Nabers, the Georgia state director for All Voting is Local, a voting rights advocacy organization, said in a statement, “Georgia voters won today against a shameless attempt from a prominent election denier who tried to turn the long-standing, routine duty of certification into a discretionary decision for election officials when they don’t like the election results.”

Experts expect the ruling to be appealed, which means a final determination could come much closer to the election.

Neither Adams nor Lawson answered questions via email about whether they planned to appeal.

McBurney did not issue a ruling in the second case he heard alongside Adams’ about another new rule that experts have warned could be used to disrupt the election by dragging an ill-defined “reasonable inquiry” past tight certification deadlines. However, McBurney wrote that a county board member “‘shall’ certify her jurisdiction’s election returns” by the state deadline.

The legal battles around the State Election Board rules are continuing. On Tuesday, McBurney heard arguments in a different case from Cobb County’s election board asserting that multiple other new rules exceed the state board’s authority. That night, he issued an order blocking the implementation of a rule requiring election workers to hand-count ballots, warning it could lead to “administrative chaos.” On Wednesday, another judge heard a similar Republican-led lawsuit against the State Election Board over the new rules. The board has faced at least seven lawsuits over its recent changes to rules and related actions.

McBurney in his ruling signaled an impatience with the efforts to change election rules, writing that “key participants in the State’s election management system have increasingly sought to impose their own rules and approaches that are either inconsistent with or flatly contrary to the letter of these laws.”

Heather Vogell contributed reporting.

by Phoebe Petrovic, Wisconsin Watch

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.

Right-wing strategists still talk about what happened in Detroit in 2020, when poll watchers stood outside the absentee ballot counting center, banging on windows and shouting “Stop the count!” Conspiracy theories swirled that those volunteers had been kept out while something corrupt was unfolding inside. In fact, at one point the facility held almost double the number of permitted poll watchers of both parties.

But the theories continue spreading four years later. “They kick people out that are observers, and they put cardboard over the window, and you’re supposed to trust what’s going on behind the cardboard?” Lance Wallnau, a leading Christian right influencer, said at an Arizona tent revival in April.

Ahead of the 2024 election, activists have taken steps to get closer to the action. A coalition of activists on the political right, many of whom have promoted false claims about election fraud, is recruiting poll workers to administer the process themselves rather than watching from the outside. The groups are urging people to work at their local polling stations and to report perceived irregularities to those groups’ external hotlines — something that could risk violating the law.

“Poll watcher is the person where you get kicked out if chicanery happens,” Mercedes Sparks, who works for Wallnau, said at the same tent revival, explaining the recruitment initiative. “If you’re a poll worker, you’re the one doing the chicanery, so you can lock the door. You can kick everybody out.”

Sparks said by email that her remarks were a “lighthearted joke,” and that she and Wallnau “make it clear that everyone must follow election laws.” Wallnau did not respond to multiple calls, emails or a list of detailed questions.

The politicized effort to recruit poll workers is concentrated in at least six swing states. ProPublica and Wisconsin Watch reviewed dozens of hours of trainings and presentations, some closed to the press, in which activists discussed their plans.

Activists, including Wallnau, have told recruits they can be a “spy in the camp” or “Trojan horse” on Election Day. But while elections officials in more than a dozen swing-state counties said safeguards are in place to prevent interference, they and elections experts warned of a bigger threat: delegitimizing the process. If poll workers report their experiences to groups with a history of spreading false claims about election fraud, they may help further distrust in the system and results.

“I would be concerned about a repository of alleged fraud like that being used as fodder for misinformation,” said Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy and partnerships at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “If it’s used to perpetuate conspiracy theories and false narratives about our election system, I think you could end up doing a lot of harm.”

Poll watcher is the person where you get kicked out if chicanery happens. If you’re a poll worker, you’re the one doing the chicanery, so you can lock the door. You can kick everybody out.

—Mercedes Sparks

The Republican and Democratic parties have historically recruited poll workers, and almost every state legally requires some amount of partisan balance. Ahead of 2024, Republicans have accused officials in five Michigan and Wisconsin cities of unfairly overlooking their nominees and overstaffing polling places with Democrats. The challenges in Flint, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin, were dismissed (one by a court, the other by the Wisconsin Elections Commission), and Republican applicants in some places have since filed the required paperwork and signed up; other challenges are ongoing.

What’s newer is groups outside the parties making concerted efforts to recruit poll workers themselves. The Election Integrity Network, founded by Cleta Mitchell, a former lawyer for ex-President Donald Trump, began enlisting poll workers during the 2022 midterms. Now, more groups have joined it. These include True the Vote, whose claims formed the basis of the widely debunked and eventually retracted film “2000 Mules,” which claimed to show election fraud, and The Lion of Judah, a group aspiring to be the “Christian version of the NRA” that is traveling to swing states with Wallnau to recruit conservative Christian poll workers.

Late last month, Trump’s vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, lent Wallnau’s efforts credibility by appearing at a tour stop in Pennsylvania.

It is unknown how many poll workers these groups have recruited, in part because they aren’t saying and in part because election offices don’t ask people about their motivation.

“You have a clear admission publicly of what the game is, that they fundamentally assume that our election systems are corrupt, and so they believe that it is their job to corrupt them in their own direction,” Matthew Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, said of Sparks’ remarks.

Taylor, whose new book documents the role of Christian right leaders like Wallnau in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, said the “propaganda value” of having someone inside the voting system, who “presents quote unquote evidence of election fraud that does not stand up in court, that is completely debunked later on,” is still enormous and bad for democracy.

Wallnau talks to attendees at the Pittsburgh-area stop of his Courage Tour in September. (Stephanie Strasburg for ProPublica) First image: At the Courage Tour event in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, Wallnau’s podcast hosted vice presidential candidate JD Vance, left, for a discussion on addiction and homelessness with Pastor Jason Howard. Second image: Attendees worship during the Courage Tour. Manny and Mary Ann King, front, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, drove hours to be there. (Stephanie Strasburg for ProPublica) “Stand Up. We’re Going to Induct You.”

Historically, campaigns, parties and advocacy groups have enlisted volunteer poll watchers to observe the process and flag concerns. In 2020, hundreds swarmed ballot-counting centers in states where the vote was close. On social media and in unsuccessful lawsuits, Trump claimed Republican poll watchers had witnessed fraud or were denied the chance to observe, fueling conspiracy theories that the contest had been stolen from him.

But poll watchers can only look and, in some states, raise challenges. Poll workers, on the other hand, are paid to help to physically administer the election. As temporary government employees, they may register voters, check identification, issue ballots and assist with equipment. In Arizona this year, they’ll also hand-count the envelopes for absentee ballots returned on Election Day. Until this week, they were going to hand-count ballots in Georgia too, but a state court judge blocked the rule.

That direct access to the voting is exactly what the activists are promising. In May, Wallnau brought his Courage Tour to a massive white tent an hour outside Detroit. He moved among the crowd, clasping his arms around believers as they swayed together to worship music. Later that day, he summoned them to their feet as he issued a holy assignment: to serve as poll workers.

“Who here is bothered about the election integrity issue?” Wallnau asked. “Who is interested in obeying God, election integrity and getting paid to do it? All right, stand up. We’re going to induct you.”

Dozens in the crowd stood, heads bowed and arms raised.

“I pray for an anointing. Angels will go with them, and they’ll expose the hidden works of darkness,” Wallnau said. “They’ll be led to discover whatever nefarious things are being done by the darkness.”

Wallnau did similar recruiting in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, directing attendees to Lion of Judah. The organization, which features Trump prominently on its website, offers a free course titled “Fight the Fraud,” with modules detailing poll workers’ basic duties and helping people find their local elections offices so they can apply as well as email templates to streamline the process. It tells students that “election workers matter now more than ever” because the “threat of election fraud is a serious concern” and “what happened in 2020 can never happen again!”

At a Wallnau event outside Pittsburgh last month, Greg Pontinen of Murrysville, Pennsylvania, said he decided to register as a poll worker after speaking with an activist soliciting support for administering elections by hand-counting paper ballots.

“It just seems like there’s a lot of controversy, and there’s a lot of people that have been in a lot of anguish over the last election, of improprieties and rigged elections,” he said. “I think if you have oversight on that, you have less chance of that, and I think that’s a firsthand chance for me to actually watch for that.”

Greg Pontinen, a Pittsburgh-area Courage Tour volunteer, decided to register as a poll worker after talking to an activist soliciting support for administering elections by hand-counting ballots. (Stephanie Strasburg for ProPublica)

Although Lion of Judah’s course notes that poll workers “must be impartial and follow strict guidelines to maintain the integrity of the electoral process,” it also instructs workers who “encounter any type of voter fraud” to email their hotline with “any proof if available.” Joshua Standifer, founder of Lion of Judah, has referred to his strategy as a “Trojan Horse.” On stage in Michigan, he agreed as Wallnau told the crowd: “When they kick everyone else out, you’re the spy in the camp.”

Standifer said in an interview that by “Trojan Horse,” he means his program is a way to place principled Christians where they might not otherwise be. And he described the hotline as a tool to reassure whistleblowers that they’re “safe” and supported, as well as to ensure problems get “dealt with either officially or in the court of public opinion.”

But state laws often detail a strict chain of command poll workers must follow on Election Day, including when they encounter possible issues, and prohibit the sharing of private voter information. By reporting information outside the polling place, elections workers risk violating their oaths of office or even state law, said Lauren Miller Karalunas, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice who has reviewed poll worker statutes in 11 swing states.

“Our objective is to encourage Christians to engage peacefully, ethically, and legally within the system,” Standifer said by email. “Any suggestion that we are encouraging inappropriate behavior is simply false and part of an ongoing effort to discourage Christians from participating in civic processes.”

Like Lion of Judah, True the Vote has established a repository to receive complaints and concerns from poll workers on Election Day: an app called VoteAlert. The platform asks users to submit information and to specify if they are poll workers, because “it helps us to better anticipate a way in which to potentially support or find resources for you, if you’re serving,” founder Catherine Engelbrecht said during a virtual training in September. The app includes a disclaimer that users agree to follow federal and state laws limiting the ability to record in polling places.

She said her team vets every report before posting it on its platform. However, the public feed included a report that a polling place in Delaware held a bake sale enticing people to vote for certain candidates, which would be illegal. The post contained a photograph that a reverse image search revealed was at least seven years old.

Engelbrecht said she would review details about the bake sale report but otherwise declined to comment. The organization said by email the post “was part of our beta testing period” before its app launched. After the ProPublica-Wisconsin Watch inquiry, the group removed the post.

Many of those recruiting poll workers have connections to Trump or his allies. Lion of Judah’s most recent Tennessee annual corporation filing, obtained through a public records request, was submitted by Miles Terry, an attorney whose law firm partner represented Trump in his first impeachment proceeding. Terry did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.

First image: Joshua Standifer, left, founder of The Lion of Judah, on stage with Wallnau at the Pittsburgh-area stop of the Courage Tour. Standifer took the stage to call for Christians to work in positions of influence in government, especially as election workers for the coming presidential election. Second image: A banner for Lion of Judah’s push for Christians to work as poll workers. (Stephanie Strasburg for ProPublica)

Mitchell, who leads Election Integrity Network, served on Trump’s legal team during his attempts to overturn the 2020 election result. Since 2022, EIN has promoted becoming a poll worker, directing people to “become part of the election apparatus” in their communities. EIN affiliates in Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin have made efforts to recruit and train poll workers in 2024. Mitchell and another EIN leader did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.

During a June livestream on the video-sharing platform Rumble, former Trump Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli directed an audience of about 10,000 to EIN’s website to sign up as poll workers. What “can make the most difference without changing the laws,” Cuccinelli said, “is getting more of our folks inside the polling places, not as poll watchers, but as election officials, the ones who actually sign people in in the poll books, the ones who actually count the ballots.” Reached by phone, Cuccinelli said he takes every opportunity to encourage people to become poll workers and often refers them to EIN for training.

His remarks came during regular “election security” livestreams hosted on Rumble by Florida businessman and local Republican Party leader Steve Stern. Stern declined an interview.

In April, Christina Norton, director of election integrity for the Republican National Committee, told the livestream audience that its poll watchers and workers were the “heart of this mission.” When they encounter problems on Election Day, Norton said, they should “immediately report that issue back to the Republican headquarters, back to our war rooms, and then we are able to answer, mitigate or escalate these problems to resolve them in real time.” An RNC spokesperson said Norton meant that only observers should contact the war room but did not respond to requests for clarification and whether the request asked workers to break the law.

An attendee signs in upon entering the Republican National Committee’s Protect the Vote Tour in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, in September. (Joe Timmerman/Wisconsin Watch) The Worry Is Not Disruption but Distrust

Poll worker recruits could try to disrupt the process by challenging voters’ eligibility to cast ballots. There have been isolated instances of more extreme interference. In June, an Arizona election worker was charged with stealing a magnetic security key to a vote-tabulating machine, and, in 2022, a Michigan worker was charged with copying voter information onto a personal flash drive. The Arizona worker is awaiting trial, while the Michigan worker’s case was dismissed, though the dismissal is being appealed.

But elections officials across the country said there are a number of provisions to prevent poll workers from interfering with voting and ballot counting.

Zach Manifold, elections supervisor in Gwinnett County, Georgia, outside Atlanta, explained that poll workers must receive official training and swear an oath of office — procedures statutorily required in most states — and can be dismissed for impropriety at any time.

“I always tell people, if you’re skeptical of the process, you should be a poll official, because — spoiler alert for them — it’s a really tough job, a really long day, and they work really hard, and there’s a lot of safeguards in place,” Manifold said.

Temporary workers, for instance, are often assigned to work on teams of at least two. And there are detailed processes for documenting who touched vote-related material and when. Administrators also try to pair new workers with experienced ones and strive to staff members of both parties at the polls.

“During our training, that is a pretty big point that we hit home is that when you are an election worker, you are nonpartisan,” said George Guthrie of the Washoe County Registrar of Voters in Nevada. “You’re there to essentially do a job, and that job is to make sure people have the opportunity to vote.”

I always tell people, if you’re skeptical of the process, you should be a poll official, because — spoiler alert for them — it’s a really tough job, a really long day, and they work really hard, and there’s a lot of safeguards in place.

—Zach Manifold, elections supervisor in Gwinnett County, Georgia

Some administrators also noted that they and their staff will be vigilant for workers with ulterior motives. “If you’re going there to disrupt, it’s going to be obvious very quickly, and you’re going to be removed, and if it’s something that’s criminal, you’re going to be prosecuted,” said Jerry Holland, supervisor of elections in Duval County, Florida, home to Jacksonville.

Despite Election Day safeguards, some groups also suggest that they could use poll worker testimony in lawsuits challenging the electoral process. United Sovereign Americans, a group that claims to have identified widespread voter fraud, has shared such a plan on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast.

“We’re not saying, like, hey, maybe we’ll file a lawsuit down the road,” founder Marly Hornik said on the show. “We’re saying we already have attorneys writing these lawsuits. What we need is your reports to fill in as those are going to constitute the exhibits.”

In an interview, Hornik said her group is nonpartisan and insisted it is not seeking to disrupt the election. But it is planning to request injunctions stopping the certification of election results in some states.

“We’re not disrupting the election,” she said. “The officials who are supposed to run a legitimate process are refusing to do so.”

Attorneys at the Institute for Responsive Government and the Brennan Center said these efforts will likely fail. The Brennan Center has filed an amicus brief in opposition to a United Sovereign Americans’ lawsuit in Maryland; that suit has been dismissed and the group is appealing.

Beyond the courts, elections administrators and experts point to the broader risks of introducing misconceptions or falsehoods in the court of public opinion.

David Levine, an elections administration consultant, has studied how Trump and others have taken advantage of human errors in service of election fraud narratives, leading to threats and harassment. That warning was borne out both by Special Counsel Jack Smith and a congressional investigation, which have laid the blame for the Capitol violence with the falsehoods spread by Trump and his team.

“Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of this is that when you tell people that there could be fraud around every corner, you certainly can trigger them,” Levine said. “If people who are recruited and receptive to these claims become election workers, and their preferred candidate, or candidates, do not win, they can become very angry, and, as we saw in 2020, take matters into their own hands.”

Update, Oct. 17, 2024: This story has been updated to reflect new court rulings on Georgia’s election rules.

Anna Clark, Mary Hudetz, Andy Kroll, Megan O’Matz and Doug Bock Clark of ProPublica and Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio contributed reporting. Mollie Simon of ProPublica and Ava Menkes of Wisconsin Watch contributed research.

by Brett Murphy

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

In one of its most direct and sweeping warnings to date, the Biden administration told Israeli government officials on Sunday that if they did not improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza in the next 30 days, the U.S. could reevaluate its military support, which has flowed largely without pause for more than a year.

In a letter to Israel’s ministers of defense and strategic affairs, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said they were writing to “underscore the U.S. government’s deep concern over the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza, and seek urgent and sustained actions by your government this month to reverse this trajectory.” The letter was first reported by Israeli media and confirmed Tuesday by the State Department’s top spokesperson.

Last month, ProPublica detailed how the U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance — the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department’s refugees bureau — concluded this past spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza. Those experts determined that weapons sales should be halted under a U.S. law, known as the Foreign Assistance Act, that requires the government to cut off military aid to a country that is blocking humanitarian efforts.

Blinken rejected their findings and, weeks later, told Congress that the State Department had concluded that Israel was not arbitrarily blocking aid. After the U.S. government raised concerns, the Israelis promised to allow more aid to flow.

Those pledges do not appear to have been met. According to Blinken and Austin’s letter, September was the worst month for relief efforts in the past year. The amount of aid has dropped by more than 50% since the spring. Israelis halted imports to Palestinian civilians, denied or impeded 90% of humanitarian movements between northern and southern Gaza last month, and imposed onerous new requirements for trucks carrying critical supplies, the letter says.

Children sift through waste at a landfill in the southern Gaza Strip on Oct. 15, 2024. (Bashar Taleb/AFP/Getty Images)

When asked about ProPublica’s previous reporting in September, Blinken told morning news programs he had evaluated input from several sources and made a decision that the Israelis weren’t deliberately blocking the aid. “We found that Israel needed to do a better job on the humanitarian assistance,” he allowed. “We’ve seen improvements since then. It’s still not sufficient.”

The State Department did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment Tuesday, but in a press conference, agency spokesperson Matthew Miller said that the letter was the latest effort to pressure the Israelis to address the crisis and that their improvements in the spring did not last. “The levels have not been sustained,” Miller said. “We are going to respond to events as they happen.”

“We know that it’s possible to get humanitarian assistance into Gaza,” he added.

Annelle Sheline, a former State Department official who resigned in protest earlier this year, said Sunday’s letter is a “clear acknowledgement that the administration knows” the Foreign Assistance Act is being violated. “This,” she added, “renders Israel ineligible to receive American weapons or security assistance.”

Responding to a similar criticism, Miller said, “We believe it’s appropriate to give them another 30 days to cure the problem.”

The humanitarian crisis has reached a critical stage, experts warn. The United Nations and other aid groups have become increasingly vocal about the deteriorating situation ahead of the winter. And an Al Jazeera documentary released in late September showed how Palestinian children had died of malnutrition.

On Monday, an Israeli military unit said it had allowed 30 trucks through a crossing in northern Gaza. “Israel is not preventing the entry of humanitarian aid, with an emphasis on food, into Gaza,” the unit wrote. “Israel will continue to allow the entry of humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza, while simultaneously destroying Hamas’ military and governance infrastructures.” A spokesperson for the Israeli government did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In the letter, Blinken and Austin make several specific demands of the Israelis, including allowing a minimum of 350 trucks per day through the four border crossings and opening up a fifth. They also warned the Israelis to not force civilians to evacuate from northern Gaza to the south.

“Failure to demonstrate a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining these measures,” they wrote, “may have implications for U.S. policy.”

In addition, they called for a new channel to discuss civilian deaths. “Our engagements to date have not produced the necessary outcomes,” they wrote. At least 42,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli operations since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack last year, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, an agency in the Hamas-controlled government.

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

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

In late August, with a hotly contested presidential election less than three months away, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott boasted that the state had removed more than 1 million ineligible voters from its rolls, including more than 6,500 noncitizens.

The Republican governor said the Texas secretary of state’s office was turning over nearly 2,000 of those characterized as noncitizens to Attorney General Ken Paxton for investigation because records showed they had a voting history.

“Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated,” Abbott said in a press release.

The former registered voters whom Abbott called noncitizens, and the other people removed from the rolls since September 2021, were taken off through a routine practice local election officials conduct that includes culling the names of people who have moved or died. Election experts have urged caution in using the numbers to make definitive statements about registered noncitizens.

But Abbott did just that, initially stating in his news release that thousands of noncitizens had been stripped from the rolls.

His office then edited the press release after publication, softening it by adding the word “potential” before noncitizens.

The news release, put out Aug. 26, initially said “6,500 noncitizens” were removed from the rolls. By Aug. 28, the statement had been updated online to say “6,500 potential noncitizens.” (Highlight added by ProPublica)

Abbott’s claims helped to fan ongoing unsubstantiated Republican allegations that noncitizens plan to cast ballots en masse to sway elections for Democrats, assertions that former President Donald Trump and his party are using to cast doubt on the integrity of the upcoming November election.

An investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and Votebeat, however, found that the governor’s claims about noncitizens on the rolls appear inflated and, in some cases, wrong.

The secretary of state’s office identified 581 people, not 6,500, as noncitizens, according to a report it gave Abbott in late August that the newsrooms obtained through a public information request.

In response to questions about the basis for Abbott’s larger number, the secretary of state’s office told the news organizations that it had “verbally” provided the governor’s office with a separate number of people removed from the rolls who failed to respond to letters alerting them that there were questions about their citizenship.

The governor’s news release combined the two figures.

That means U.S. citizens who simply never received or responded to such letters are almost certainly included in Abbott’s 6,500 number. Abbott did not respond to requests for comment, and Secretary of State Jane Nelson declined to be interviewed.

After attempting to contact more than 70 people across both categories, the news organizations have so far found at least nine U.S. citizens in three Texas counties who were incorrectly labeled as noncitizens or removed from the rolls because they did not respond to the letters about their citizenship. In each case, they showed reporters copies of their birth certificates to confirm their citizenship, or reporters verified their citizenship using state records.

One of them is 21-year-old Jakylah Ockleberry.

Ockleberry, a native Texan who provided the news organizations with a copy of her birth certificate, had only left the state twice in her life, including a recent trip to California.

She had no idea Travis County had mislabeled her as a noncitizen until the news organizations contacted her. “How would something like that happen?”

When the governor’s press release came out, election experts and local officials were worried about cases such as Ockleberry’s, saying the press release implied officials had confirmed the noncitizen status of 6,500 people when they had not.

Five years ago, Texas officials suggested that nearly 100,000 noncitizens were registered to vote and that nearly half of them had cast ballots. Those claims quickly unraveled under scrutiny and spurred a lawsuit and settlement that now governs how Texas can flag someone as a potential noncitizen.

Asked whether the nine people the news organizations identified as U.S. citizens were included in Abbott’s latest figure, the secretary of state’s office said it could not confirm or deny the inclusion of any specific people. Local election officials said they don’t know which voters were included in Abbott’s tally, but emphasized the data originates at the county level.

The discrepancies show the pitfalls inherent in using this data to make assertions about noncitizens.

In Ockleberry’s case, as well as those of four others the newsrooms identified in Travis County, election workers should have selected a code that indicated the voters had moved. Instead, they mistakenly selected a code for noncitizens.

Bruce Elfant, the Travis County tax assessor-collector and voter registrar, acknowledged the errors made by his office. But he also said the numbers suggested that noncitizen voting “is an infinitesimal, small issue.”

Routine maintenance of voter rolls is important, and if noncitizens are registered, they should be removed, said Marc Meredith, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on election administration.

But Meredith said Abbott’s decision to announce without explanation that 6,500 noncitizens were removed from the rolls, and to initially do so without qualifying that these were only potential noncitizens, “reduces trust in the Texas voter registration process in an unnecessary way.”

Routine Maintenance, Political Purpose

Voter rolls are naturally fluid. People move, die, become citizens and turn 18. Election officials across the country are constantly adding and removing people for legitimate reasons.

“So long as we have requirements about keeping lists clean, and so long as we don’t have a police state that has a single database with all of our names in it, like in much of the rest of the world, including democratic nations, we’re going to come across these sorts of problems,” said Charles Stewart III, director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab.

Elfant, for one, said he was frustrated by Abbott’s public promotion of voter removal data. He said the governor’s press release created confusion among residents who feared they might have been wrongly removed and would not be able to cast ballots in the upcoming presidential election.

“It scared a lot of people. We’ve received a lot of phone calls and emails from people who are concerned that they’re not on the voter rolls,” Elfant said.

Any number of things can trigger a question about a voter’s eligibility.

For example, county registrars contact anyone who has marked on a jury summons that they’re not a citizen. The registrars need to confirm if that’s true, because it would mean the person is also ineligible to vote. The secretary of state’s office also gets information weekly from the Texas Department of Public Safety about people who have signed up for licenses and state identification and identified themselves as noncitizens. That information is then sent to counties.

In such cases, county election officials must follow up. They are required by law to notify voters and give them 30 days to respond before they’re removed from the rolls.

But election officials know those safeguards don’t always work.

“The post office messes up. We get a lot of cards back or mail back that says ‘undeliverable’ and the person will be like, ‘I’ve lived at this address for 20 years and I’ve never moved,’” said Trudy Hancock, elections administrator in Republican-leaning Brazos County, home to Texas A&M University. “So you have to consider that there are outside circumstances that can affect our efforts to reach them.”

Failure to respond to a letter questioning someone’s citizenship is not a confirmation that they are not a citizen, election officials said.

The 2019 episode, when the secretary of state’s office announced that it had identified 95,000 registered voters as potential noncitizens and said that more than half of them had previously cast ballots, highlighted failures in the process.

Paxton, the attorney general, immediately turned to social media, posting “VOTER FRAUD ALERT.” Abbott thanked Paxton and the secretary of state’s office on Twitter for “uncovering and investigating this illegal vote registration.” Trump also piled on with a tweet calling the state’s numbers “just the tip of the iceberg.”

Voting rights groups sued, decrying the state’s efforts as deliberate attempts to suppress the votes of actual citizens. Texas’ assertions didn’t hold up. Many of the flagged registered voters turned out to be naturalized citizens whom the state incorrectly identified as ineligible because it was using outdated DPS data from driver’s license and state identification card applications. (DPS did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

The state settled the case and agreed to only flag people with the secretary of state’s office if they identify as noncitizens when applying for a new ID with DPS and if they previously registered to vote.

State officials should be transparent about how they arrived at the latest assertions, said David Becker, executive director and founder of The Center for Election Innovation & Research.

The state appears to have presented a figure without fully explaining its methodology or double-checking the information, said Becker, who is a former senior trial attorney in the voting section of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

If the governor presented this data in a court of law without evidence, Becker believes it wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny.

“Their claims would likely be dismissed until they could come up with something that actually documents how they got to those numbers,” he said.

Labeled Noncitizens

When Justin Comer, 29, heard that the state had removed thousands of noncitizens from the voter rolls, it never occurred to him that he might be one of them. Comer was born in Harris County, the home of Houston, and grew up in conservative Montgomery County just outside the city. He said he’d been registered to vote there since he was 18 and had cast ballots in presidential elections since then.

“I’ve always been interested in especially local politics, and just making sure I stay up to date with that,” Comer said in a phone interview. “I’m always pushing my wife now, I’m like, ‘Hey, we need to stay active in that respect and do our part.’”

It wasn’t until the news organizations contacted him that he made the connection between a peculiar voter registration issue he encountered last year and the Republican leaders’ sweeping noncitizen voting claims.

In 2023, he received a notice from the county elections office that he’d been flagged as a potential noncitizen. He needed to show proof of his citizenship in the next 30 days or his registration would be canceled. The letter Comer received indicated he’d said he wasn’t a citizen in a response to a jury summons. Comer assumes he clicked the wrong button when responding to the notice online; he had meant to reply that he had moved. He’s now registered to vote in Collin County, where he lives.

“I was more just confused,” Comer said. “I’ve lived in Texas my whole life. It was never a question for me.”

In some cases, it’s unclear what happened. Diana Colon spent much of her life in the mountains of Puerto Rico, in the town of Aibonito, but moved to El Paso County on the far western edge of Texas in 2018 to be closer to her daughter.

She was surprised when she learned the county had kicked her off its voter rolls after she apparently failed to respond to a question about her citizenship. Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, and she is an American citizen. She showed a copy of her birth certificate to a reporter.

“That’s crazy,” she said.

Colon does not recall registering to vote, though the county said it received an application from her at some point in which she did not answer a question about her citizenship. Public information the county provided the news organizations indicated she was flagged as a potential noncitizen in DPS data.

Colon has since moved to California but would like to return to the El Paso area and would register to vote, if only to clear up the fact that she can. “I wouldn’t like people saying I’m not a U.S. citizen,” she said in an interview.

There are almost certainly additional U.S. citizens among the thousands of removed voters Abbott characterized as noncitizens. For example, reporters identified Texas birth certificates for another two voters whose registrations in Montgomery County were canceled for not responding to questions about their citizenship. The news organizations could not reach those voters for comment.

Noncitizens have occasionally voted, but experts say these cases are rare and there is no evidence that they affect election outcomes. Noncitizens who vote face criminal penalties, including the loss of their residency status and deportation. In 2017, Rosa Ortega, a U.S. permanent resident living in North Texas, said she believed her green card authorized her to vote and cast five ballots over a decade. A Tarrant County jury convicted her of voter fraud and sentenced her to eight years in prison.

Meredith, the University of Pennsylvania elections expert, said he wouldn’t be surprised if some people removed from the Texas rolls are indeed noncitizens who had cast ballots in a previous election. But that doesn’t mean the problem is widespread. “You shouldn’t use the fact there may be a few as evidence that it happens all the time,” Meredith said.

Reporters also found some noncitizens, including two who said they had inadvertently registered after receiving what they said were unsolicited voter registration applications, an ongoing concern for Republicans who believe this kind of outreach will result in large numbers of noncitizens signing up to cast a ballot. One got the application from a voting advocacy group. But the other got it while filling out other state paperwork.

In both cases, they had truthfully filled out the form and said they were noncitizens. Neither voted. Election workers in the two counties involved, Collin and Travis, said those voter registration applications should not have been processed because the applicants identified themselves as noncitizens and both people were added to the rolls through clerical error.

One of them, Austin resident Son Mai, had no idea he had ever been on the rolls until a reporter contacted him.

The news organizations viewed three voter registration applications from Mai in which he checked a box saying he was not a U.S. citizen. They interviewed Mai, who is originally from Vietnam and speaks limited English, through an interpreter.

Mai, who has been a permanent resident and green card holder for over 40 years, receives Social Security disability benefits and food stamps. Voter registration applications are included with that paperwork, which he believes is how he was mistakenly signed up.

However, Mai always marked that he is not a U.S. citizen on the forms, the county confirmed. As a result, Travis County should have automatically rejected his application, but elections officials said he was accidentally added to the rolls instead. The county confirmed Mai has never voted, though he said he hopes to become a naturalized citizen.

“I told them I couldn’t vote,” he told the reporters. “I never vote.”

Building a Case

With the election less than a month away, claims about noncitizen voting have continued to ratchet up despite numerous elections experts saying such instances are very rare. These efforts can have significant consequences.

The Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit last month in Nevada alleging that nearly 4,000 noncitizens may have cast ballots in the 2020 presidential election and that thousands could vote in the coming election. (Nevada’s former secretary of state, who is Republican, did not find evidence to substantiate the 2020 claims during an investigation at the time).

Last month, the Justice Department filed suit against Alabama after its secretary of state flagged more than 3,000 alleged noncitizens and instructed county officials to remove any noncitizens from their voter rolls, although systemic voter roll cleaning is illegal so close to a federal election. In a statement, the Justice Department said its review found that naturalized and native-born American citizens had been caught up in the effort.

In Texas, both Abbott and Paxton have promoted claims of noncitizens seeking to vote in the November election.

On a single day in August, Paxton said his office would investigate an allegation that nonprofits were setting up booths outside state driver’s license offices and signing up noncitizens to vote, which followed an unfounded claim peddled by a Fox News host, and announced his agency had raided homes in three South Texas counties to investigate allegations of voter fraud. The next day, the attorney general appeared on the radio show of conservative personality Glenn Beck pushing debunked claims that President Joe Biden is allowing immigrants to enter the country illegally so they can vote for Democrats in elections.

In recent weeks, Paxton put out a flurry of news releases, continuing the hunt for noncitizen voters.

Paxton, who did not respond to a request for comment, sent a public letter to Nelson, the secretary of state, last month urging her to demand the federal government’s assistance in identifying potential noncitizens on the rolls.

But Nelson, a Republican and an Abbott appointee, apparently didn’t move aggressively enough for Paxton. In an Oct. 2 news release, the attorney general expressed frustration with Nelson, saying she had not provided the federal government any information about the possible noncitizens. He then asked Nelson’s office to provide him with the list of names so he could send it on to the government himself.

Hours later, Nelson provided Paxton the voter records for anyone who does not have a Texas driver’s license or identification card number on file in its statewide voter registration system. The list was accompanied by an explicit warning.

“The records do not reflect, and are in no way indicative of, a list of potential non-United States citizens on the State’s voter rolls,” Nelson wrote.

Dan Keemahill of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, Alejandra Martinez of The Texas Tribune and Thomas Wilburn of Votebeat contributed data research and reporting.

by Matt Krupnick 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.

In the 1970s, Congress committed to funding a higher education system controlled by Indigenous communities. These tribal colleges and universities were intended to serve students who’d been disadvantaged by the nation’s history of violence and racism toward Native Americans, including efforts to eradicate their languages and cultures.

But walking through Little Big Horn College in Montana with Emerson Bull Chief, its dean of academics, showed just how far that idea has to go before becoming a reality. Bull Chief dodged signs warning “Keep out!” as he approached sheets of plastic sealing off the campus day care center. It was late April and the center and nearby cafeteria have been closed since January, when a pipe burst, flooding the building, the oldest at the 44-year-old college. The facilities remained closed into late September.

“Sometimes plants grow along here,” Bull Chief said nonchalantly as he turned down a hallway in the student union building.

Campus Snapshot: Little Big Horn College, Crow Agency, Montana

Little Big Horn College appears to be in better condition than most tribal schools, but expensive issues lurk below the surface. One of the newest buildings, a gym and wellness center, needs $1 million in repairs to its leaky roof. And with the day care center and cafeteria closed, it’s harder to attend classes for students with children and those who live too far away to drive home for meals. Sharon Peregoy, who teaches education and is a member of the Montana House of Representatives, lamented the chronic underfunding of tribal colleges and universities: “This is an atrocity. We’re getting pennies on the dollar.”

First image: Emerson Bull Chief, dean of academics, looks at leaky skylights. Second image: The closed cafeteria and child care center. (Matt Krupnick for ProPublica)

While the school appears to be in better condition than most tribal colleges, its roofs leak, sending rain through skylights in the gym and wellness center, which needs $1 million in repairs. An electronic sign marking the entrance has been sitting dark since a vehicle hit it months ago. College leaders said they have no idea when they will be able to afford repairs.

It’s a reality faced by many of the 37 schools in the system, which spans 14 states. Congress today grants the colleges a quarter-billion dollars per year less than the inflation-adjusted amount they should receive, ProPublica found.

President Joe Biden declared early in his term that tribal schools were a priority. Yet the meager funding increases he signed into law have done little to address decades of financial neglect. Further, the federal Bureau of Indian Education, tasked with requesting funding for the institutions, has never asked lawmakers to fully fund the colleges at levels called for in the law.

The outcome is crimped budgets and crumbling buildings in what the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights once called the “most poorly funded institutions of higher education in the country.” At a time when their enrollment is rising, the schools lack money to update academic programs and hire enough qualified instructors to train nurses, teachers and truck drivers and to prepare students to transfer to other universities. As they expand degree programs, their researchers are trying to conduct high-level work in old forts, warehouses and garages.

The laws that authorized the creation of the tribal colleges also guaranteed funding, which was set at $8,000 annually per student affiliated with a tribe, with adjustments for inflation. But the federal government has never funded schools at the level called for in the statute, and even experts struggle to explain the basis for current funding levels.

Since 2010, per-student funding has been as low as $5,235 and sits at just under $8,700 today, according to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which lobbies on behalf of the colleges in Washington. Had Congress delivered what’s required by statute, tribal colleges and universities would receive about $40,000 per student today.

The Bureau of Indian Education has not asked Congress for major funding increases for the bulk of the tribal colleges in the past three years, according to the agency’s budget documents, and congressional negotiations have done little to increase what they get.

The Bureau of Indian Education said in a written statement that when requesting funding, it follows guidelines set by the Department of the Interior and the White House. A department spokesperson directed ProPublica to the White House budget office for an explanation of the colleges’ funding; a spokesperson for the budget office declined an interview request and directed ProPublica back to the Interior Department.

Biden called the colleges “integral and essential” to their communities in a 2021 executive order that, among other things, established a tribal college initiative to determine systemic causes of education shortcomings and improve tribal schools and colleges. But while it has led to some forums and largely ceremonial events, that initiative has done next to nothing substantive, advocates say.

As funding has fallen behind the need, even the American Indian Higher Education Consortium — the schools’ primary pipeline to Congress and the Bureau of Indian Education — has asked for far less than the law says the colleges are entitled to. Its recent requests have been for around $11,000 per student.

Some people advocating for the tribal colleges have noted a frequent topic of debate: Should the schools ask for what they’re owed and risk angering lawmakers or just accept the meager amount they receive?

Separately, the colleges get very little for maintenance and capital improvements, money that isn’t part of the per-student funding.

Asked why the Bureau of Indian Education doesn’t better understand the facilities needs at tribal colleges, Sharon Pinto, the agency’s deputy director for school operations, said, “We really wouldn’t know that because the buildings located at these tribal colleges are not necessarily federal assets and they’re not in an inventory system.” In a follow-up email, the bureau said it was waiting for the colleges to let it know what their facility needs are.

Several college leaders and researchers said such responses are typical of a federal government that has routinely ignored its promises to Indigenous communities over the past two centuries.

Meredith McCoy, who is of Turtle Mountain Ojibwe descent and taught at the tribe’s college in North Dakota, noted that Native education is guaranteed by federal law and at least 150 treaties. Neglect of tribal colleges reflects a conscious decision by Congress and the federal government to dodge accountability, said McCoy, now an assistant professor at Carleton College who studies federal funding of tribal schools and colleges.

“The patterns of underfunding are so extreme that it’s hard not to see it as a systematic approach to underfunding Native people,” she said. “We’re teaching our children that it’s OK to make a promise and break it.”

An Outdated System

To evaluate the impact of the federal government’s underfunding of tribal colleges’ and universities’ academic mission, ProPublica sent a survey to the 34 fully accredited schools, of which 13 responded, and visited five campuses. Our reporting found classes being held in a former fort constructed more than a century ago; campuses forced to temporarily close because of electrical, structural and plumbing problems; broken pipes that destroyed equipment and disrupted campus life; and academic leaders who lack the resources to adequately address the issues, build new facilities and keep pace with growing enrollment.

The colleges that responded to the survey reported that they commonly have problems with foundations, roofs, electrical systems and water pipes because they couldn’t afford maintenance. One campus put the price tag for repairs at $100 million. Several noted they don’t have money to upgrade technology so students can keep pace with skills required by the job market.

Campus Snapshot: Diné College, Tsaile, Arizona

The country’s oldest tribal college, Diné routinely faces flooding, leaks and electrical outages on its main campus, not far from Canyon de Chelly National Monument. College leaders recently spent $30,000 to locate the source of a leak in the cafeteria, where the floor is criss-crossed with cracks. The school’s rodeo grounds are pocked with prairie dog holes, and roads to the mobile home park and hogans that house employees are mostly unpaved. Classes are sometimes canceled because of electrical outages. “I sleep with my ceiling fan going because I know if that stops, I’ll be getting a call,” said Claude Sandoval, a facilities manager.

First image: Maintenance foreman Wayne O’Daniel is concerned about peeling paint and crumbling concrete. Second image: O’Daniel shows where the floor of the cafeteria was repeatedly torn up. (Matt Krupnick for ProPublica)

The Bureau of Indian Education stated in its 2024 budget request that delays in addressing the problems only makes them more costly to fix. Continuing to ignore them could in some cases create “life-threatening situations for school students, staff, and visitors” and “interrupt educational programs for students, or force closure of the school,” the bureau told Congress.

But that same document did not request enough funding to fix the issues, college leaders say.

In 2021, Congress began providing $15 million per year for maintenance, to be shared by all tribal colleges. That has since increased to $16 million — less than $500,000 per college. The same year, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium estimated it would cost nearly half a billion dollars to catch up on deferred maintenance. Construction of new buildings would cost nearly twice that amount. The organization acknowledged the actual price tag could be far higher.

Tribal colleges are not allowed to raise taxes or use bond measures for basic academic or building costs.

The schools receive no federal funding for any non-Native students who attend. Their budgets were stretched even tighter by the COVID-19 pandemic, when non-Native enrollment rose sharply as classes moved online. It has remained above pre-pandemic levels.

The Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities Assistance Act of 1978, which funded the schools, contributes to confusion over what they should be paid. While it specifies base funding of $8,000 per student, it also notes that colleges will only be given what they need, without explaining how that should be calculated, and only when the government can afford it.

“When we think about the funding, it was set up for something that was needed 40 years ago,” said Ahniwake Rose, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium’s president. “What a school looked like and needed 40 years ago is absolutely not what it looks like and needs now.”

Few Alternatives for Funding

Though colleges and their representatives fault the Bureau of Indian Education, they say primary accountability falls on Congress.

ProPublica contacted 21 members of the U.S. House and Senate who either sit on an appropriations or Indian Affairs committee, or who represent a district or state with a tribal college to ask if they were aware of the condition of the campuses. Only Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a New Mexico Democrat, spoke to ProPublica. The others either didn’t respond or declined to be interviewed.

Leger Fernández, a member of the Indian and Insular Affairs subcommittee of the House Committee on Natural Resources, said she has pushed for the colleges to receive more funding but has been shut down by members of both parties, partly because of a lack of understanding about how they are funded.

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a New Mexico Democrat, says she has pushed for more funding for tribal schools but got shut down. (Tom Williams/Getty Images)

“Our tribal colleges are part of our federal trust responsibility,” said Leger Fernández, whose district in northern and eastern New Mexico is home to three tribal colleges. “We made a commitment. This is an obligation the federal government has.”

Former U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who chaired the Senate Indian Affairs Committee before retiring in 2005, said the colleges lose out to louder voices in Washington, D.C. “Federal money is always caught in a tug-of-war between needs,” Campbell said. “The needs are always higher than the amount available.”

Yet tribal colleges have fewer alternatives for bolstering their budgets.

Many of the colleges are far from industrial centers and have few wealthy alumni, college leaders say, so private donations are rare and usually small.

Campus Snapshot: Oglala Lakota College, Kyle, South Dakota

The campus on the Pine Ridge reservation is beset by leaks that flood hallways and cause mold to grow on the walls. Employees in the library, housed in an old warehouse, use trash cans to catch rain and safeguard the archives packed with tribal artifacts and documents. The college is proud of its STEM programs, which operate out of another warehouse with bowed ceilings and no insulation, making for brutal winters. A lack of space makes it difficult to use scientific equipment, which often is stored in hallways. “We have good stuff, just a shabby place to put it,” said Misty Brave, whose jobs range from teaching to community outreach. “But we make do. It’s something our ancestors taught us to do.”

First image: A leak in a storage room is one of many on the campus. Second image: Misty Brave points out a broken window in a laboratory. (Matt Krupnick for ProPublica) Krystal Brave Eagle, who works at the Oglala Lakota College historical center, stands in front of the center’s photos of Oglala Lakota chiefs, including Little Wound, from whom she is descended. (Matt Krupnick for ProPublica)

“We don’t have the alumni who can afford to donate,” said Marilyn Pourier, the development director at South Dakota’s Oglala Lakota College, which is perched on a hill on the Pine Ridge reservation. “We get a pretty good response, but it’s not enough.”

The schools’ tuition is among the lowest in the nation, but college leaders are hesitant to raise it because most reservation residents already can’t afford it.

Naomi Miguel, the executive director of the White House tribal college initiative, said she plans to press states to contribute more to tribal colleges and universities. At the moment, most provide little or nothing.

“If the states would support the TCUs, they’d be supporting jobs in their communities,” said Miguel. “It benefits them overall to create this sustainable workforce.”

“A Saving Grace”

Shyler Martin stands in front of a hogan at Navajo Technical University, where she is a senior. (Kayla Jackson, special to ProPublica)

Proof of the value of tribal colleges and universities, advocates say, can be found in what they accomplish despite their meager funding.

Many are the only places teaching their tribes’ languages at a time when nearly all of the 197 Indigenous languages in the United States are endangered.

They are often among the few places in their communities with access to high-speed internet. Nearly 28% of residents of tribal lands lack high-speed internet access, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

And some Native students find that the schools are a more welcoming place to pursue a degree and prepare for a career.

Shyler Martin, who grew up on the Navajo Nation near Navajo Technical University, enrolled there after leaving New Mexico State University during her second year there. Now entering her senior year, Martin said it’s been a relief to learn from instructors who understand the pressures she faces as the oldest child of a Navajo family, with whom she shares responsibility for raising her younger sister.

“They’re culturally sensitive and understanding,” Martin said of Navajo Tech’s staff. “I’m a parent, and they do what they can to help you continue school.”

Yet her time at the college has included winter days when classrooms were so cold that students had to bring blankets and classes that were canceled at the last minute because of a shortage of qualified instructors.

Tribes would be in dire straits without the colleges, said Carmelita Lamb, a professor at the University of Mary in North Dakota who has taught at and studied tribal colleges.

“The tribal college has been a saving grace,” said Lamb, a member of the Lipan Band of Apache. “Had we never had the tribal colleges, I really shudder to think where we’d be now.”

The colleges keep doing the best they can, but some are finding it increasingly difficult.

Campus Snapshot: Chief Dull Knife College, Lame Deer, Montana

Mostly squeezed into a decrepit former rehabilitation center, the 7-acre campus’s infrastructure problems are visible the moment students approach the crumbling concrete stairs at the entrance. Snow pours into hallways through doors that don’t seal and wind whistles through electrical outlets. “When I want to keep my lunch cold, I just put it here,” said Dean of Academic Affairs Bill Briggs, pointing at a plug behind his desk. Chairs roll across a sloped office floor, and the metal-and-wood outer walls of the main building are rusted and rotting. Without money for new classrooms and residence halls, the college has trouble attracting students and maintaining sought-after programs such as nursing.

First image: Dean of Academic Affairs Bill Briggs inspects rotting wood. Second image: Briggs’ office was once a bedroom in a rehabilitation center. (Matt Krupnick for ProPublica) Chief Dull Knife College hasn’t been able to fund a planned $20 million academic building and ceremonial arbor. (Matt Krupnick for ProPublica)

At Chief Dull Knife, college leaders planned three years ago to build a modern structure with classrooms and a ceremonial arbor, but the estimated price — $14 million at the time — was already out of reach even before it ballooned to more than $20 million because of inflation. The plans haven’t been scrapped, but Bill Briggs, the dean of academic affairs, talks about them in the past tense.

“If we’re going to change the course of this country, everyone needs to have an opportunity,” Briggs said. “All we’re asking for is an opportunity to educate our students.”

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

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

On May 1, a man in Anchorage, Alaska, called 911 to say he had “beat” his wife, according to a court document supporting an assault charge against him. When police stepped through the door of Vernon Booth’s apartment, they found the victim’s face bloody and her eye nearly swollen shut, the prosecution said.

You’re late, the charging document says he told officers. “She could have been dead by now.”

Four months later, prosecutors dropped the charge. It wasn’t because police made a mistake that got evidence tossed or because a jury found the defendant not guilty. Instead: The city said it did not have enough lawyers to take the man to trial. (Booth declined to comment on the case.)

Defendants in at least 930 Anchorage misdemeanor cases have walked free for this reason since May 1, the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica found. These include people accused of crimes ranging from violating a restraining order to driving drunk with children in the backseat.

In one case, prosecutors said a mother told police she’d beaten her 5-year-old daughter with a belt. The prosecution said the girl, who was found with bruises across her back, told police she’d also been struck with a wire and a stick.

Dismissed.

Prosecutors accused one man of animal cruelty after he allegedly punched and choked a dog, while another allegedly raised fighting roosters found tied to barrels.

Dismissed.

More than 270 DUI cases.

Dismissed.

A grand total of three defendants have gone to trial since May, according to the city.

The cascade of failed prosecutions is especially disturbing in a state with the nation’s highest rate of women killed by men. More than 250 of the cases dismissed since May included charges of domestic violence assault, such as men allegedly punching, kicking or threatening to kill their wives or girlfriends. They include charges dropped against a state official accused of elbowing his then-girlfriend in the nose.

Two factors are at work in the mass dismissals. First, Alaska’s overloaded court system has limped along for years by allowing extensive trial delays, defying a state requirement for speedy trials. Second, the Anchorage prosecutor’s office, as in many American cities and states, is struggling to hold onto lawyers.

When a judge this year tried to clear out a backlog of Anchorage misdemeanors by having them brought forward as a group to regularly check which ones were ready for trial, defense attorneys pounced. They began demanding speedy-trial rights for their clients. The city couldn’t keep up. Cases started dying.

City officials say they’re aware of the problem. They have raised prosecutor pay and are hiring attorneys to take more cases to trial, in hopes the prosecutor’s office will be “fully back in action” in three to four months, according to City Attorney Eva Gardner.

Mayor Suzanne LaFrance, who took office July 1, said her transition team knew the lack of prosecutors was a problem, but she was surprised by the number of dropped cases.

“Right now, the prosecutors are frustrated, the police are frustrated. The public is frustrated. Victims are frustrated,” she said in an interview. “We see that. I see that, and this is something that we are working to fix.”

Attorneys use a courtroom jury box for seating as they await their turn during trial calls at the Boney Courthouse in Anchorage. (Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)

Angela Garay, executive director of the state’s Office of Victims’ Rights, told an Anchorage judge in July that the city is doing wrong by people who call the police on abusers.

“This is unacceptable for victims to have cases dismissed because prosecutors can’t do their jobs,” Garay said.

At a hearing in which city prosecutors dropped two dozen cases, she warned that she planned to open an investigation if the mass dismissals continued.

“We’re Not Going to Hold You Accountable”

The widespread failure to prosecute crimes has stayed largely below the public’s radar because the charges are misdemeanors — which in Anchorage, home to 39% of Alaskans, are pursued by city prosecutors rather than the state. Despite the low profile of these cases, they include allegations of serious, sometimes outrageous acts.

At least 70 cases of child neglect or abuse have been dismissed since May.

And, at a time when Anchorage drivers are killing pedestrians at a record pace, the city has dismissed hundreds of drunken driving charges.

A charging document described police finding one woman slumped over the wheel after her SUV crashed into another car. Two whiskey bottles lay on the floorboards, according to the charges. Although prosecutors said that the woman’s blood alcohol level tested at 4.6 times the limit and that she was on probation for a prior DUI when the crash happened, the city dropped the case. The 120-day speedy-trial deadline had expired the day before.

“I would say there’s absolutely no justice right now in our system,” said Anchorage attorney Kara Nyquist, who represents domestic violence victims.

Nyquist has a unique perspective because she was also named as the victim in multiple cases of stalking, trespassing and violating protective orders against a fellow Anchorage attorney.

Jacob Sonneborn and Nyquist had worked on opposing sides of family law cases, and Nyquist filed a request for a restraining order saying Sonneborn’s behavior became threatening. A judge granted the request. Emails that Sonneborn allegedly sent her afterward led prosecutors to charge him with violating the judge’s order, but they dropped the charges on Oct. 2 because of the speedy-trial deadline.

In an email to the Daily News and ProPublica, Sonneborn said two other cases against him were dismissed in August for reasons other than the speedy-trial deadline. He said that he believes he would have been acquitted had any of the charges against him gone to trial and that he never intended to harm Nyquist. “From my perspective, the whole series of charges alleging I violated bail conditions or the protective order were an abuse of the justice system,” he wrote.

The Alaska Supreme Court has temporarily suspended Sonneborn’s law license in connection with Nyquist’s allegations and complaints from other attorneys.

Anchorage attorney Kara Nyquist represents domestic violence victims and was the named victim in a restraining order against a fellow attorney. After he was charged with violating the restraining order — a charge the city ultimately dropped because of its prosecutor shortage — she started keeping a pistol in her drawer for protection. (Bill Roth/Anchorage Daily News)

Nyquist now keeps a .38 Special pistol in her drawer and has armed staff members in her downtown Anchorage law firm with pepper spray and a Taser.

Nyquist said she recently had to tell a client that she couldn’t rely on the city to prosecute a pending domestic violence assault case, something she’s never had to do before in 24 years of practicing law.

“They’re going to cause a situation where it’s going to increase domestic violence,” she said, “because these perpetrators have now been told, ‘We’re not going to hold you accountable.’”

The city prosecutor’s office has said that about half the cases it handles involve domestic violence.

Among the domestic violence cases that have ended without a trial was the assault charge against the superintendent of a state youth detention center. Prosecutors said in charging documents that Darrell Garrison, head of the Mat-Su Youth Facility in Palmer, was recorded on video hitting his romantic partner in the face with his elbow.

The woman said in an interview that she thought he had broken her nose when the incident occurred. “I heard the crack,” she said. ”Three popping sounds.”

A woman who wants to remain anonymous shows her nails with purple on the ring finger, a sign of support for people who have been in violent relationships. She was named as the victim in a domestic violence assault charge against Darrell Garrison, head of the Mat-Su Youth Facility in Palmer, in November. It is among hundreds of criminal cases that the city has since dismissed, citing a lack of prosecutors. An attorney for Garrison, who is a state employee, had called for a trial and said his client was innocent. (Bill Roth/Anchorage Daily News)

Garrison told police the blow was accidental, court documents say. Garrison remains superintendent of Mat-Su Youth Facility in Palmer, part of the state Department of Family and Community Services, where he oversees 14 counselors and 15 juveniles accused or convicted of crimes.

As months passed, Garrison began declaring himself ready to stand trial. His attorney, John Cashion, said that it was because Garrison was innocent and that the video evidence contradicted the claims in the charging document. He also filed papers saying if the case went to trial, he might argue self-defense.

“Look, if you’re falsely accused of a crime, what do you do? You say you’re ready for trial,” Cashion said.

But once the clock ran out for a speedy trial in August, Cashion said, it made sense for his client’s case to come to an end. “Why would anybody take a risk of actually saying, ‘Now let’s do the trial, now that I’m entitled to a dismissal,’” Cashion said.

The woman said she learned the case had been dismissed after looking it up on a public database. No one from the police department or prosecutor’s office called to tell her they were going to drop the charges, she said, despite a state law requiring alleged victims to be notified.

“It’s like they’re just sweeping it under the rug,” she said.

Lead prosecutor Dennis Wheeler, a former city attorney who agreed to return to Anchorage this year with an offer of $12,500 beyond the normal salary cap, said the volume of dismissals has indeed meant the city failed to notify some victims.

“We’ve definitely dropped the ball in some cases,” he said.

“People Have Caught On”

Anchorage is letting people free, in part, because of Alaska state court rules that say prosecutors must bring defendants before a jury within 120 days unless their attorneys grant extensions.

The deadline has proved impossible for the Anchorage prosecutor’s office to hit. The number of prosecutors dwindled from 13 in July 2021 to nine in July of this year. All but three as of July were new hires. Some of the most experienced lawyers on staff left.

The departures took place under the leadership of then-Mayor Dave Bronson, during a chaotic era of employee turnover at City Hall that has threatened other core services. But the city has also said previously it’s hard to compete with other private and public employers that can offer attorneys better pay.

City officials cited the office’s staffing as one of the struggles facing key departments as they transitioned from Bronson’s administration to that of the newly elected LaFrance in July. The police department predicted the consequences.

“Misdemeanor crimes are unlikely to be prosecuted due to low attorney staffing,” the department wrote at the time. “This adds to morale issues as officers see repeat offenders free.”

The ultimate stress test for the office came when judges early this year moved to clear out gridlock in Alaska’s court system.

The city cases took an average of 90 days to resolve before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Jan. 31 order by Anchorage Presiding Judge Thomas Matthews. By the time the judge issued his order, more than 1,500 city misdemeanor cases had sat more than a year on the court calendar.

Pretrial delays lasting years are a long-standing problem in state court, while delays in Anchorage misdemeanor cases appear to be a more recent development.

To speed things up, Matthews ordered judges to end pretrial delays for misdemeanor charges filed before this year “unless the parties provide a good cause basis”; no more than three delays would be allowed in 2024 cases. Another judge started moving cases to weekly sessions known as “trial calls,” where the two sides declare whether they are ready to proceed.

Dozens of cases showed up every Wednesday. If every defense attorney refused further delays for defendants nearing or crossing their 120-day speedy-trial deadlines, the city would have to mount trials in all these cases at once. The attorneys saw an easy way to help their clients. They flooded the city with requests to go to trial.

“Yes, people have caught on, and yes, people are calling their bluffs, that is true,” said Amanda Lancaster, who works for a firm that provides public defender services. “I don’t think people are doing that in terms of like, malpractice. But certainly, people have figured out that trend.”

Matthews put the responsibility on the city in an interview with the Daily News and ProPublica, saying he was shocked to learn the number of domestic violence cases the city had dismissed because of speedy-trial deadlines. “It’s like: ‘Really? You aren’t prioritizing this?’” Matthews said.

“I don’t think it was ever our intention to have the city simply taking cases and throwing them out the window without looking at them,” he said.

Ugly Numbers

City officials say they have been working hard to turn things around.

“The numbers are ugly — both the dismissal numbers and the turnover rate in the office,” said Gardner, the new city attorney hired shortly after LaFrance took office as mayor in July.

Gardner said the prosecutor’s office has prioritized domestic violence and drunken driving cases when enough prosecutors are available to go to trial. But cases that make it to court have been few and far between.

Gardner said work on a fix began under the former mayor. The Anchorage Assembly approved 20% pay increases for prosecutors and other municipal attorneys in 2023.

Boney Courthouse in Anchorage. The city has dropped hundreds of cases since May because the deadline to hold a speedy trial had expired or was about to expire. (Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)

Gardner said that, in addition, her predecessor and the city’s lead prosecutor met with state officials on April 30 to ask for help prosecuting cases but that the state did not provide assistance.

The deputy attorney general in charge of criminal prosecutions for the state, John Skidmore, said the meeting did not involve any ask for help with caseloads.

“On April 30 there was NOT an ask for help from the state with cases, and certainly not help with DV cases,” Skidmore said in an email to the Daily News and ProPublica. “Nor am I aware of any subsequent request for help.”

Gardner said the city has considered hiring prosecutors on contract to avoid dropping cases but ultimately decided it was not practical. Alaska lacks a law school, she said, and the pool of private attorneys with prosecution experience is small. Contract prosecutors would need to receive special training and clearance to handle confidential criminal justice information, a process that takes 30 to 60 days.

The city has focused instead on recruiting permanent, full-time hires and retaining current prosecutors. The office is back up to 12 line prosecutors plus the lead, Wheeler. Five of the attorneys on staff are new to the practice.

In explaining its special $175,000 offer to Wheeler in August, the Anchorage Assembly said the city’s failure to prosecute cases “has had significant impacts on public safety and contributed to a perception that wrongdoers in the Municipality face no consequences.”

LaFrance has asked for an additional $75,000 for raises and higher salaries for new hires in her 2025 budget proposal — an effort to boost retention and recruitment.

Gardner said the recent hiring efforts are starting to pay off, and prosecutors are beginning to schedule more trials.

“Unfortunately, it’s not something that can be fixed overnight,” she said. “Fortunately, we knew this coming in.”

A Frustrating Marathon

Inside the courtroom where Anchorage misdemeanor cases get dropped week after week, measuring time on the speedy-trial clock is a tedious but essential task.

Defendants who showed up in person — many are free on bail — get to go first, followed by attorneys for clients who are absent.

The city prosecutors often don’t know which of their cases are nearing the 120-day deadline, the Daily News and ProPublica found when sitting in on three recent trial call sessions. A defense attorney will claim it’s about to expire, and the judge will make a quick calculation from the bench. In some cases, it turns out the countdown expired weeks earlier. In others, the city only had a day or two left to take the case to trial.

Almost always, the defense asks for a trial. In a defeated tone, the prosecutor asks the judge to toss out the case.

During these marathon case dismissals, defendants sometimes express surprise or delight to learn the charges against them have been tossed out. The voices of victims are almost never heard.

On a day in September, when District Judge David Wallace dismissed 31 cases at the city’s request, veteran city prosecutor Tyler Wright took a moment hours into the process and chatted with the judge about an upcoming trip. Wright said he was quitting the prosecutor’s office to work in private practice.

It’s been a discouraging few months, Wright acknowledged in response to a reporter’s question later on, after the courtroom emptied.

“It’s frustrating for everybody. Everybody involved. Judges, the court clerks, the prosecutors,” Wright said.

Wallace overheard Wright and completed his sentence from the bench: “The victims, the witnesses, police officers.” Wright added to it further. “The entire city,” he said.

Within weeks, the prosecutor was gone, replaced at the Wednesday court hearings by another city attorney.

He carried with him a list of 100 cases to dismiss.

About the Numbers

In order to calculate the minimum number of criminal cases that the city has dismissed because of speedy-trial deadlines, the newsrooms reviewed audio recordings from all weekly trial call hearings between May 1 and Oct. 2. The number of dismissed cases does not include cases that prosecutors dismissed without any discussion of the speedy-trial deadline or cases dropped for other stated reasons, such as the arresting officers moving out of state.

The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica plan to continue reporting on issues with Alaska's court system. Do you have information that we should know? Kyle Hopkins can be reached by email at khopkins@adn.com.