ProPublica

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.

When a firefighter dies in the line of duty, a small team of federal health workers is often called on to pinpoint what went wrong and identify how to avoid similar accidents in the future.

That’s what happened after two firefighters died in California in 2020 while searching for an elderly woman in a burning library. It happened in 2023 when a Navy firefighter died in Maryland after a floor collapsed in a burning home. And it happened last year in Georgia when a career battalion chief died after a semitrailer truck exploded.

But President Donald Trump’s administration has taken steps to fire nearly all of the Department of Health and Human Services employees responsible for conducting those reviews.

At least two-thirds of the employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency within HHS, were notified on April 1 that they had been laid off or will be in June. These cuts included seven of the eight members of the Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program, the team that studies firefighter line-of-duty deaths, one of the laid-off investigators told ProPublica.

Most nonunionized NIOSH workers were given until the end of the day to clear out their desks. The layoffs were so abrupt, staff said, that lab animals were left without staff to care for them and had to be euthanized, and an experimental mine used to test protective gear beneath the agency’s Pittsburgh campus was at risk of flooding and polluting the surrounding environment.

“It was pure chaos,” another NIOSH employee said.

The fatality investigation team was examining deaths at 20 fire departments when the layoff notices arrived. Those probes are now unlikely to be completed, the investigator said.

“The whole intent of this program was that people would learn through tragedy — what happened to one person — so we can prevent it from happening to others,” the investigator said.

The administration’s moves will also halt a first-of-its-kind study of the causes of thousands of firefighters’ cancer cases and disrupt a program that provides health care to emergency personnel who responded to the World Trade Center terrorist attacks.

ProPublica spoke with five NIOSH employees who either led or contributed to firefighter health initiatives and received layoff notices. Most requested anonymity for fear of retribution from the administration.

“The existence of NIOSH is a hard-earned right by the people of America to have a healthy and safe working environment,” said Micah Niemeier-Walsh, vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3840, which represents agency employees. “This is an attack on NIOSH employees and federal employees, but it is also an attack on American workers generally.”

Neither the White House nor Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which has called the shots on many of the administration’s cuts, responded to a request for comment. A NIOSH spokesperson referred questions to HHS.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made some public indications that aspects of the World Trade Center program could be spared, but details remain sparse. The department’s spokesperson said in a statement that programs required by law — such as some of those focused on firefighter health — will continue to operate.

They did not respond to a follow-up question about how those programs will continue after their staffs were terminated.

“It Breaks My Heart”

The investigations performed by the Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program are initiated at the request of the fire department that suffered the casualty. The findings are shared with the firefighter’s family in hopes of providing some closure. And the reports are then published, so the broader firefighting community can strengthen its procedures to avoid similar losses.

The Trump administration had already hamstrung the program shortly after the inauguration, initially barring the investigative team from traveling to conduct research, communicating with other agencies and publishing reports, according to the investigator. While the department eventually allowed several of the casualty reports to be published, the rest remain unfinished.

“It breaks my heart that we’re going to just destroy these programs that have made so much progress in protecting the health and safety of our firefighting community,” the investigator said.

The layoff notice the investigator received from HHS said that termination of much of the agency’s staff was “because your duties have been identified as either unnecessary or virtually identical to duties being performed elsewhere in the agency.”

“Leadership at HHS are appreciative of your service,” the notice stated.

The federal firefighting force faces a daunting year, with spending cuts canceling prescribed burns to reduce flammable vegetation and the termination of hundreds of firefighting support staff, even in the face of climate-change-lengthened wildfire seasons.

“At a time when we need to be bolstering these efforts and personnel, it’s pretty damn appalling that we’d be trying to diminish the health benefits for our firefighters and first responders,” a Forest Service firefighter said.

Dismantling the World’s Largest Firefighter Cancer Study

On April 1, the Trump administration also began laying off much of the staff working on the National Firefighter Registry for Cancer.

Its creation in 2018 was a landmark win in a yearslong fight to study why firefighters suffer from certain types of cancer at vastly higher rates than the general population. Both chambers of Congress unanimously passed the bill to create the registry. Trump signed it into law during his first term.

While HHS said in a statement that programs required by law would remain intact, it did not answer a question about whether it would bring back staff to keep the registry running.

Wildland firefighters don’t typically wear respirators while they’re exposed to high levels of smoke. And the protective clothing firefighters wear while battling active blazes contains high levels of PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” that have been linked to various types of cancer. But the exact causes of some cancers that occur at high rates among firefighters are not well understood. Female-specific cancers such as ovarian and cervical, for example, have only recently been linked to firefighting.

More than 23,000 firefighters have signed up to participate since the registry launched in April 2023, and the research team recently began an outreach campaign to get to 200,000 participants. With this trove of data, NIOSH researchers planned to dig into numerous under-studied questions, such as what workplace exposures led to cancers that specifically harmed female firefighters, a NIOSH scientist who worked on the program told ProPublica.

Among the thousands who signed up was a federal wildland firefighter who was concerned about spending a career breathing wildfire smoke without a respirator. The decision to throw away such research is disturbing, the firefighter told ProPublica. “I was hoping that something would happen with all that research, that they would protect wildland firefighters.”

With a hollowed-out IT department, the registry’s portal to enroll firefighters quickly went offline.

“It’s devastating,” said Judith Graber, an associate professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health and co-chair of the board that advises the registry research team. She said the study is “the largest effort ever taken anywhere to understand cancer in firefighters,” but it’s an effort that can’t simply be restarted after the researchers running it are laid off.

Diane Cotter became an activist when her husband, a career firefighter, developed prostate cancer, and she fought for funding of research such as the registry. While she’s a Kennedy supporter, Cotter said the administration went too far in cutting the program and other first responder health initiatives such as the World Trade Center program, which she called “sacred.”

“It’s very important we hold the line on these studies,” she said.

by Alec MacGillis

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

More children ages 1 to 4 die of drowning than any other cause of death. Nearly a quarter of adults received mental health treatment in 2023, an increase of 3.4 million from the prior year. The number of migrants from Mexico and northern Central American countries stopped by the U.S. Border Patrol was surpassed in 2022 by the number of migrants from other nations.

We know these things because the federal government collects, organizes and shares the data behind them. Every year, year after year, workers in agencies that many of us have never heard of have been amassing the statistics that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and inform the judgments of business leaders, school administrators and medical providers nationwide.

The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy.

Reaction to those cuts has focused understandably on the hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs or are on the verge of doing so and the harm that millions of people could suffer as a result of the shuttering of aid programs. Overlooked amid the turmoil is the fact that many of DOGE’s cuts have been targeted at a very specific aspect of the federal government: its collection and sharing of data. In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.

The data collection efforts that have been shut down or are at risk of being curtailed are staggering in their breadth. In some cases, datasets from past years now sit orphaned, their caretakers banished and their future uncertain; in others, past data has vanished for the time being, and it’s unclear if and when it will reappear. Here are just a few examples:

The Department of Health and Human Services, now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid off the 17-person team in charge of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which for more than five decades has tracked trends in substance abuse and mental health disorders. The department’s Administration for Children and Families is weeks behind on the annual update of the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, the nationwide database of child welfare cases, after layoffs effectively wiped out the team that compiles that information. And the department has placed on leave the team that oversees the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a collection of survey responses from women before and after giving birth that has become a crucial tool in trying to address the country’s disconcertingly high rate of maternal mortality.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has eviscerated divisions that oversee the WISQARS database on accidental deaths and injuries — everything from fatal shootings to poisonings to car accidents — and the team that maintains AtlasPlus, an interactive tool for tracking HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to stop requiring oil refineries, power plants and other industrial facilities to measure and report their greenhouse gas emissions, as they have done since 2010, making it difficult to know whether any of the policies meant to slow climate change and reduce disaster are effective. The EPA has also taken down EJScreen, a mapping tool on its website that allowed people to see how much industrial pollution occurs in their community and how that compares with other places or previous years.

The Office of Homeland Security Statistics has yet to update its monthly tallies on deportations and other indices of immigration enforcement, making it difficult to judge President Donald Trump’s triumphant claims of a crackdown; the last available numbers are from November 2024, in the final months of President Joe Biden’s tenure. (“While we have submitted reports and data files for clearance, the reporting and data file posting are delayed while they are under the new administration’s review,” Jim Scheye, director of operations and reporting in the statistics unit, told ProPublica.)

And, in a particularly concrete example of ceasing to measure, deep cutbacks at the National Weather Service are forcing it to reduce weather balloon launches, which gather a vast repository of second-by-second data on everything from temperature to humidity to atmospheric pressure in order to improve forecasting.

Looked at one way, the war on measurement has an obvious potential motivation: making it harder for critics to gauge fallout resulting from Trump administration layoffs, deregulation or other shifts in policy. In some cases, the data now being jettisoned is geared around concepts or presumptions that the administration fundamentally rejects: EJScreen, for instance, stands for “environmental justice” — the effort to ensure that communities don’t suffer disproportionately from pollution and other environmental harms. (An EPA spokesperson said the agency is “working to diligently implement President Trump’s executive orders, including the ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.’” The spokesperson added: “The EPA will continue to uphold its mission to protect human health and the environment” in Trump’s second term.) The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment.

Laura Lindberg, a Rutgers public health professor, lamented the threatened pregnancy-risk data at the annual conference of the Population Association of America in Washington last week. In an interview, she said the administration’s cancellation of data collection efforts reminded her of recent actions at the state level, such as Florida’s withdrawal in 2022 from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey after the state passed its law discouraging classroom discussion of sexual orientation. (The state’s education secretary said the survey was “inflammatory” and “sexualized.”) Discontinuing the survey made it harder to discern whether the law had adverse mental health effects among Florida teens. “States have taken on policies that would harm people and then are saying, ‘We don’t want to collect data about the impact of the policies,’” Lindbergsaid. “Burying your head in the sand is not going to be a way to keep the country healthy.” (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

Making the halt on data gathering more confounding, though, is the fact that, in some areas, the information at risk of being lost has been buttressing some of the administration’s own claims. For instance, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have repeatedly cited, as an argument for tougher border enforcement, the past decade’s surge in fentanyl addiction — a trend that has been definitively captured by the national drug use survey that is now imperiled. That survey’s mental health components have also undergirded research on the threat being posed to the nation’s young people by smartphones and social media, which many conservatives have taken up as a cudgel against Big Tech.

Or take education. The administration and its conservative allies have been able to argue that Democratic-led states kept schools closed too long during the pandemic because there was nationwide data — the National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka the Nation’s Report Card — that showed greater drops in student achievement in districts that stayed closed longer. But now NAEP is likely to be reduced in scope as part of crippling layoffs at the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, which has been slashed from nearly 100 employees to only three, casting into doubt the future not only of NAEP but also of a wide array of long-running longitudinal evaluations and the department’s detailed tallies of nationwide K-12 and higher education enrollment. The department did not respond to a request for comment but released a statement on Thursday saying the next round of NAEP assessments would still be held next year.

Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, cast the self- defeating nature of the administration’s war on educational assessment in blunt terms: “The irony here is that if you look at some of the statements around the Department of Education, it’s, ‘We’ve invested X billion in the department and yet achievement has fallen off a cliff.’ But the only reason we know that is because of the NAEP data collection effort!”

Shelly Burns, a mathematical statistician who worked at NCES for about 35 years before her entire team was laid off in March, made a similar point about falling student achievement. “How does the country know that? They know it because we collected it. And we didn’t spin it. We didn’t say, ‘Biden is president, so let’s make it look good,’” she said. “Their new idea about how to make education great again — how will you know if it worked if you don’t have independent data collection?”

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert liked to quip, and there have been plenty of liberal commentators who have, over the years, taken that drollery at face value, suggesting that the numbers all point one way in the nation’s political debates. In fact, in plenty of areas, they don’t.

It’s worth noting that Project 2025’s lengthy blueprint for the Trump administration makes no explicit recommendation to undo the government’s data-collection efforts. The blueprint is chock full of references to data-based decision-making, and in some areas, such as immigration enforcement, it urges the next administration to collect and share more data than its predecessors had.

But when an administration is making such a concerted effort to stifle assessments of government and society at large, it is hard not to conclude that it lacks confidence in the efficacy of its current national overhaul. As one dataset after another falls by the wayside, the nation’s policymakers are losing their ability to make evidence-based decisions, and the public is losing the ability to hold them accountable for their results. Even if a future administration seeks to resurrect some of the curtailed efforts, the 2025-29 hiatus will make trends harder to identify and understand.

Who knows if the country will be able to rebuild that measurement capacity in the future. For now, the loss is incalculable.

Jesse Coburn, Eli Hager, Abrahm Lustgarten, Mark Olalde, Jennifer Smith Richards and Lisa Song contributed reporting.

by Audrey Dutton

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.

Just weeks after creating a $50 million tax credit to help families pay for private school tuition and homeschooling, Idaho has shut down a program that helped tens of thousands of public school students pay for laptops, school supplies, tutoring and other educational expenses.

The Republican leading the push to defund Idaho’s Empowering Parents grants said it had nothing to do with the party’s decision to fund private schools. But the state’s most prominent conservative group, a strong supporter of the private school tax credit, drew the connection directly.

The Idaho Freedom Foundation, on its website, proposed adding the $30 million that fueled Empowering Parents to the newly created tax credit, paying for an additional 6,000 private and homeschool students to join the 10,000 already expected to benefit from the program.

The new voucher-style tax credits have major differences from the grants lawmakers killed.

The tax credits are off-limits to public school students, while the grants went predominantly to this group. And there’s limited state oversight on how the private education tax credits will be used, while the grants to public school families were only allowed to be spent with state-approved educational vendors.

Rep. Soñia Galaviz, a Democrat who works in a low-income public elementary school in Boise, condemned the plan to kill the grants in a speech to legislative colleagues.

“I have to go back to the families that I serve, the parents that I love, the kids that I teach, and say, ‘You no longer can get that additional math tutoring that you need,’” she said, “that ‘the state is willing to support other programs for other groups of kids, but not you.’”

When states steer public funds to private schools, well-off families benefit more than those in lower income brackets, as ProPublica has reported in Arizona. The programs are pitched as enabling “school choice,” but in reality, research has found the money tends to benefit families that have already chosen private schools.

Idaho lawmakers passed such a program this year with the new tax credit, which some describe as a version of school “vouchers” that parents in other states spend on schools of their choosing.

The credit allows private and homeschool families to reduce their tax bills by $5,000 per child — $7,500 per student with disabilities — or get that much money from the state if they owe no taxes. Lower-income families have priority, and there’s no cap on how many credits each family can claim. The law says funds must go to traditional academic expenses like private school tuition or homeschool curricula and textbooks, plus a few other costs like transportation. But families don’t have to provide proof of how they spent the money unless they’re audited.

The Empowering Parents grant program that lawmakers repealed was open to students no matter where they learn, although state data shows at least 81% of the money went to public school students this academic year — more than 24,000 of them. It offered up to $1,000 per student, with lower-income families getting first dibs and a family limit of $3,000.

Idaho Gov. Brad Little created a similar program in 2020 called Strong Families, Strong Students with federal pandemic funds, to help families make the abrupt shift to remote learning. State lawmakers created the current program in 2022, also using one-time federal pandemic recovery money, and liked it so much they renewed it with ongoing state funding in 2023.

Charlene Bradley used the grant this school year to buy a laptop for her daughter, a fifth grader in Nampa School District. Before the purchase, Bradley’s daughter could use computers at school, but there was no way to do schoolwork at home, “besides my cell phone which we did have to use sometimes,” Bradley said in a Facebook message.

Debra Whiteley used it for home internet and a printer for her 12-year-old daughter, who attends public school in north-central Idaho. Whiteley’s daughter resisted doing projects that needed pictures or graphs. “Now when she has a project she can make a tri fold display that’s not all hand written and self drawn, which looking back on, I didn’t have a clue she may have been embarrassed about,” Whiteley said in a Facebook message.

Annie Coltrin used it to get “much needed” tutoring for her daughter, a sophomore in an agricultural community in southern Idaho. The grant paid for Coltrin’s daughter to receive math tutoring in person twice a week, which took her grade from a low D to a B+.

Such families were on the minds of education leaders like Jason Sevy when they advocated for preserving the Empowering Parents program this year.

Sevy, who chairs a rural public school district board in southwestern Idaho and is the Idaho School Boards Association’s president-elect, said families in his district used the Empowering Parents grants for backpacks and school supplies, or laptops they couldn’t afford otherwise.

“You’re looking at families with five kids that were only making $55,000 a year. Having that little extra money made a big difference,” Sevy said. “But it also closed that gap for these kids to feel like they were going to be able to keep up with everybody else.”

Few families in Sevy’s district will be able to use the state’s new tuition tax credits for private education, he said. A tiny residential school is the only private school operating in Sevy’s remote county. The next-closest options require a drive to the neighboring county, and Sevy worries those schools wouldn’t take English-language learners or children who need special education. (Unlike public schools, private schools can accept or reject students based on their own criteria.)

“This is the program that was able to help those groups of people, and they’re just letting it go away” to free up money for private schools, Sevy said.

The freshman legislator who sponsored the bill to end Empowering Parents is Sen. Camille Blaylock, a Republican from a small city west of Boise.

Blaylock’s stance is that the grants aren’t the proper role of government.

Speaking on the Senate floor in March, Blaylock highlighted the fact that the vast majority of the Empowering Parents money went to electronics — mostly computers, laptops and tablets.

“This program has drifted far from its original intent,” Blaylock said. “It’s turning into a technology slush fund, and if we choose to continue funding it, we are no longer empowering parents. We are creating entitlements.”

In an interview, Blaylock denied any desire to divert public school money to private education and said she was unaware the Idaho Freedom Foundation took that “unfortunate” position.

“The last thing I want is for this to be a ‘taking away from public schools to give to school choice,’ because that is not my intent at all,” Blaylock said.

She told the Senate’s education committee this year that her hope in ending the grants was to cut government spending by $30 million. But if the savings had to go somewhere, she’d want it to benefit other public school programs, especially in a year when lawmakers created the $50 million tax credit for private and homeschooling.

Regardless of how the $30 million in savings will be spent in the future, Blaylock’s assertion that the grants weren’t supposed to help families buy computers goes against what’s in the legislative record.

Lawmakers pitched Empowering Parents three years ago as a way to help lower-income students be on equal footing with their peers, with one legislator arguing that tablets and computers are such a part of education now that “without the ability of families to afford those devices, a student’s learning is substantially jeopardized.”

Republican Sen. Lori Den Hartog, opening debate on her bill to create Empowering Parents in 2022, said it was partly to address pandemic learning loss. “But,” she said, “it’s also a recognition of the ongoing needs that students in our state have, and that there is a potential different avenue to provide resources to those students.”

First in the list of eligible expenses Den Hartog spelled out: computer hardware, internet access, other technology. Then came textbooks, school materials, tutoring and everything else. (Den Hartog, who voted to repeal the program this year, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Killing the grants also went against the praise that Little, the state’s Republican governor, has showered on it. He has described the program as itself a form of “school choice,” touting how it helped low-income parents afford better education.

“The grants help families take charge of tools for their children’s education — things like computers and software, instructional materials and tutoring,” Little said in January 2023 when announcing his intent to make Empowering Parents permanent.

He called the grants “effective, popular and worthy of continued investment” because they “keep parents in the driver’s seat of their children’s education, as it should be.”

In the months before Idaho lawmakers voted to kill the program, Little again cited Empowering Parents as a success story, a way “to ensure Idaho families have the freedom and access to choose the best fit for their child’s unique education and learning needs.” He pointed out that the grants mainly went to public school students. He again touted it in his State of the State address in January, not as a temporary pandemic-era program but as “our popular” grant program “to support students’ education outside of the classroom.”

Nonetheless, the Idaho House and Senate both voted to kill the grant program by wide margins, and Little signed the bill on April 14.

Blaylock disagreed that the grant’s creators foresaw it would be used mostly for laptops and electronics. And, despite acknowledging state lawmakers decided to make it permanent, she disagrees that it was intended to be an ongoing program. She said public schools already get $36 million a year from the state to spend on technology, which they use to furnish computers students can take home, so families don’t need state money to buy more.

Little, in a letter explaining his decision to join lawmakers in killing the grants, said he was “proud of the positive outcomes” from the program. But, he wrote: “Now that the pandemic is squarely in the rearview mirror and students have long been back in school, I agree with the Legislature that this program served its purpose.”

When looking back at how Empowering Parents was created, Sevy, the local school board chair, suspects it was a soft attempt “to get the foot in the door” toward vouchers, not purely an effort to meet the needs of all students.

He remembers telling Den Hartog that the program was helping low-income families in his district. “She was super-excited to hear that,” Sevy said. “It’s like, OK! And here we are two years later, just getting rid of it.”

by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica and FRONTLINE, and James Bandler, ProPublica

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

A Wisconsin teenager accused of murdering two family members and plotting to assassinate President Donald Trump was inspired by Terrorgram, a white supremacist network that operated on the Telegram messaging and social media platform for half a decade, according to federal court records.

The Terrorgram community, which has been linked to around three dozen criminal cases around the globe, including at least three mass shootings, was profiled last month in stories and a documentary produced by ProPublica and FRONTLINE.

The court documents allege that Nikita Casap, a 17-year-old from Waukesha, Wisconsin, wrote a three-page manifesto calling for the assassination of Trump in order to “foment a political revolution in the United States and ‘save the white race’ from ‘Jewish controlled politicians.’”

In his manifesto, Casap allegedly encouraged people to read the writings of Juraj Krajčík, a longtime Terrogram figure who murdered two people in an attack on an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2022, according to the court records. Casap also allegedly recommended two publications produced by the Terrorgram Collective, a secretive group that produced alleged hit lists, videos and written publications — including instructions for building bombs and sabotaging critical infrastructure — and distributed them throughout the Terrorgram ecosystem.

Launched in 2019, Terrorgram was a constellation of scores of Telegram channels and chat groups focused on inciting acts of white supremacist terrorism and anti-government sabotage. At the network’s peak, some Terrorgram channels drew thousands of followers. Over the past six months, however, the network has been disrupted as authorities in Canada, the U.S. and Europe have arrested key Terrorgram influencers and community members.

But the violence hasn’t stopped.

Casap in February allegedly shot and killed his mother, Tatiana Casap, and stepfather, Donald Mayer; stole their property; and fled in their Volkswagen Atlas, Waukesha County prosecutors say. He was arrested in Kansas. Prosecutors have charged the teen with two counts of first-degree homicide, as well as identity theft and other theft charges. He is expected to be arraigned on May 7, according to court records.

A witness told local investigators that Casap “was in touch with a male in Russia through the Telegram app and they were planning to overthrow the U.S. government and assassinate President Trump,” according to charging documents in the Wisconsin case.

The newly unsealed federal court filings indicate that the FBI is investigating Casap in connection to the alleged assassination plot.

The bureau declined to comment on the matter.

Last fall, federal prosecutors accused two Americans of acting as leaders of the Terrorgram Collective and charged them with soliciting the murder of federal officials and a host of other terrorism-related offenses. The U.S. State Department has officially designated the Terrorgram Collective as a terrorist organization, as have officials in the United Kingdom and Australia. The two Americans have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

“Do absolutely anything you can that will lead to the collapse of America or any country you live in,” Casap allegedly wrote in his manifesto, according to an FBI affidavit. “This is the only way we can save the White race.”

The teen’s writings and online postings that are cited in the affidavit indicate that he is a believer in militant accelerationism, a concept that has become increasingly popular with neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists over the past decade. Militant accelerationists aim to speed the collapse of modern society through acts of spectacular violence; from the ruins of today’s democracies, they aim to build all-white ethno-states organized on fascist principles.

Matthew Kriner, executive director of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism, a nonprofit think tank, called the alleged Casap plot unique. “It’s the first time we’re explicitly seeing an individual tie an accelerationist act or plot with the president of the United States as a means of collapsing society,” Kriner said. “I think what we have here is a fairly clear-cut case of an individual who is being groomed to take drastic terrorist action in an accelerationist manner.”

Casap’s public defender could not be reached for comment.

A Telegram spokesperson said, “Telegram supports the peaceful exchange of ideas; however, calls for violence are strictly prohibited by our Terms of Service and are removed proactively as well as in response to user reports."

A ProPublica and FRONTLINE review shows that Casap was recently active in at least five extremist Telegram channels or chat groups, including a Russian-language neo-Nazi chat in which posters uploaded detailed instructions for crafting explosives, poisons and improvised firearms. He was also a member of a chat group with more than 4,300 participants run by the Misanthropic Division, a global neo-Nazi organization.

Casap, according to the federal documents, also sought out information online about the Order of Nine Angles, a cult that blends Satanic concepts and Nazi ideology and has increasingly turned to Telegram to recruit and proselytize.

“This is a clear example of how Terrorgram continues to influence murder,” said Jennefer Harper, a researcher who studies online extremism. “Nikita was influenced online by an assortment of ideologies and groups that intersect with the Terrorgram ecosphere.”

by Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro

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

Four days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, financial technology startup Ramp published a pitch for how to tackle wasteful government spending. In a 4,000-word blog post titled “The Efficiency Formula,” Ramp’s CEO and one of its investors echoed ideas similar to those promoted by Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk: Federal programs were overrun by fraud, and commonsense business techniques could provide a quick fix.

Ramp sells corporate credit cards and artificial intelligence software for businesses to analyze spending. And while the firm appears to have no existing federal contracts, the post implied the government should consider hiring it. Just as Ramp helped businesses manage their budgets, the company “could do the same for a variety of government agencies,” according to the blog and company social media posts.

It didn’t take long for Ramp to find a willing audience. Within Trump’s first three months in office, its executives scored at least four private meetings with the president’s appointees at the General Services Administration, which oversees major federal contracting. Some of the meetings were organized by the nation’s top procurement officer, Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service.

GSA is eying Ramp to get a piece of the government’s $700 billion internal expense card program, known as SmartPay. In recent weeks, Trump appointees at GSA have been moving quickly to tap Ramp for a charge card pilot program worth up to $25 million, sources told ProPublica, even as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency highlights the multitudes of contracts it has canceled across federal agencies.

Founded six years ago, Ramp is backed by some of the most powerful figures in Silicon Valley. One is Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who was one of Trump’s earliest supporters in the tech world and who spent millions aiding Vice President JD Vance’s Ohio Senate run. Thiel’s firm, Founders Fund, has invested in seven separate rounds of funding for Ramp, according to data from PitchBook. Last year Thiel said there was “no one better positioned” to build products at the intersection of AI and finance.

To date, the company has raised about $2 billion in venture capital, according to startup tracking website Crunchbase, much of it from firms with ties to Trump and Musk. Ramp’s other major financial backers include Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures; Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; and 8VC, a firm run by Musk allies.

The special attention Gruenbaum paid to Ramp raised flags inside and outside the agency. “This goes against all the normal contracting safeguards that are set up to prevent contracts from being awarded based on who you know,” said Scott Amey, the general counsel with the bipartisan Project on Government Oversight. He said career civil servants should lead the process to pick the best choice for taxpayers.

A senior GSA official, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, said the high level attention Ramp received was unusual, especially before a bid had been made public. “You don’t want to give this impression that leadership has already decided the winner somehow.”

GSA told ProPublica it “refutes any suggestion of unfair or preferential contracting practices,” with a spokesperson adding that the “credit card reform initiative has been well known to the public in an effort to address waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Ramp did not respond to requests for comment.

Rabois, one of Ramp’s earliest investors, is part of an influential group of tech titans known as the “PayPal Mafia.” Leaders of the early payments company include several influential players surrounding the Trump administration, including Musk and Thiel. Rabois and his husband, Jacob Helberg, hosted a fundraiser that pulled in upwards of $1 million for Trump’s 2024 campaign, according to media reports. Trump has nominated Helberg for a senior role at the State Department.

Rabois sits on Ramp’s board of directors. He has said he had no plans to join the Trump administration, instead telling CNBC: “I have ideas, I can spoon-feed them to the right people.” He told ProPublica his comments to CNBC were about big-picture policy ideas and that he had “no involvement in any government-related initiatives for the company.” Ramp “could be a great choice for any government that wants to improve its efficiencies,” Rabois added.

Helberg said he has no involvement “in anything related to Ramp whatsoever.”

Thrive Capital, Kushner’s firm, did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Thiel did not provide a comment. 8VC did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the White House or Musk; previously, Musk has said “I’ll recuse myself” if conflict-of-interest issues arise.

Ramp’s meetings with Gruenbaum — who comes from private equity firm KKR and has no prior government experience — came at an opportune moment. GSA will decide by year’s end whether to extend the SmartPay contract, and preparations are afoot for the next generation of the program. SmartPay has been worth hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for the financial institutions that currently operate it, U.S. Bank and Citibank.

Gruenbaum and acting GSA administrator Stephen Ehikian entered the agency with a strong belief that SmartPay and other government payment programs were rife with fraud or waste, causing huge losses, sources within GSA say — an idea echoed in Ramp’s January memo.

Yet both GOP and Democratic budget experts, as well as former GSA officials, describe that view as ill-informed. SmartPay, which provides Visa and Mastercard charge cards to government employees, enables the federal workforce to purchase office supplies and equipment, book travel and pay for gas.

The cards typically are used to fund travel and purchases up to $10,000.

“SmartPay is the lifeblood of the government,” said former GSA commissioner Sonny Hashmi, who oversaw the program. “It’s a well-run program that solves real world problems … with exceptional levels of oversight and fraud prevention already baked in.”

Jessica Riedl, a GOP budget expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, said the notion that there was significant fraud in the charge card technology was far-fetched. She had criticized waste in government credit card programs before the latest SmartPay system was implemented in 2018.

“This was a huge problem about 20-25 years ago,” she said. “In the past 15 years, there have been new controls put into government credit card purchases.”

A 2017 audit of the program by the Government Accountability Office concluded there was “little evidence of potential fraud” in SmartPay small purchases, though it found documentation errors. More recent government audits found some instances where officials did not always use anti-fraud tools.

GSA’s new leaders are convinced SmartPay is entirely broken, a view they shared in private meetings, sources said. In February, they put a temporary $1 limit on government cards and severely restricted the number of cardholders, choking off funds to workers in the field.

Chaos ensued across the government, news organizations reported: Staff at the National Institutes of Health were reportedly unable to purchase materials for experiments, Federal Aviation Administration workers worried they would be unable to pay for travel to test systems in the field, and National Park Service employees could not travel to oversee road maintenance projects.

At the time, GSA released a statement saying the limitations were “risk mitigation best practice” and internally began moving to revamp SmartPay.

$25 Million Opportunity

Ramp’s first bite of the SmartPay business could come through a pilot program worth up to $25 million that GSA announced several weeks after agency leadership began meeting with the company.

At the tail end of the Biden administration, GSA had sent out a request for information, or RFI, seeking industry input about how to improve the next iteration of SmartPay. But some industry players who submitted responses said they did not hear back from the government. Instead, GSA started meeting with Ramp.

GSA put out a new RFI for the pilot program on March 20, 2025, leaving it open for less than seven business days.

John Weiler, co-founder of the nonprofit research group the IT Acquisition Advisory Council, said such a short window appeared unusual. “A week is nothing, it gives the impression they had already picked the winner,” said Weiler, who has worked with Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley to investigate IT contracting issues.

Ramp is the clear-cut “favorite,” to secure this work, one source inside GSA and another former official told ProPublica. The winner has not yet been announced.

Procurement experts told ProPublica that consulting with industry leaders before a major overhaul is good practice — but that the fact-finding process must be evenhanded and led by professional contracting officers.

The GSA spokesperson said that “any and all communications with potential vendors, of which there were multiple, has been a part of market research in order to provide the best solution for American taxpayers.” The agency declined to answer questions about whether Ramp had already been chosen internally for SmartPay work.

The pilot program is unique because it uses a special GSA purchasing authority known as commercial solutions opening. This process has been used by the Pentagon to help speed up the acquisition of products for fighters in armed conflict zones. The designation means the chosen contractor can be selected faster and without the same level of controls.

It’s not clear how Ramp originally secured private meetings with GSA leaders. Nor is it clear if Ramp will ultimately take over the entire SmartPay contract from Citibank and U.S. Bank. Spokespeople for U.S. Bank and Citibank declined to comment.

It is clear that Ramp has never had a client like the federal government. The only public-sector partner listed on its webpage is a charter school network in Nashville, Tennessee.

Still, even before the RFI was publicly announced, Ramp had begun reaching out to contacts in the payment industry asking about the special bank identification numbers required to process government payments, said an industry source. Such steps, two former GSA officials said, were another sign that Ramp was preparing to work on the program.

Ramp’s meetings with GSA come as the agency is poised to take on a more significant role in spending decisions across government. The same day the SmartPay pilot was announced, Trump issued an executive order that seeks to centralize much of government procurement inside of GSA. The DOGE initiative has been effectively headquartered out of the agency — staffers have installed beds and dressers for overnight stays in the building, and Musk’s right-hand man Steve Davis is a key adviser to the agency’s leadership.

The SmartPay contract negotiation has so far flown under the radar. But changes to the credit card program could further transform daily life for federal employees and fundamentally change how agencies operate. It also represents a giant business opportunity.

“There’s a lot of money to be made by a new company coming in here,” said Hashmi, the former GSA official. “But you have to ask: What is the problem that’s being solved?”

Doris Burke contributed research.

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.

Update, April 18, 2025: After this story was published, the family of a transgender boy who changed his legal name at 15 years old learned a judge approved their request to retroactively seal his name-change documents. Wisconsin state Sen. Melissa Ratcliff and other Democrats have also introduced the bill that would eliminate the publication requirement for transgender people, so long as they can prove they’re not avoiding debt or a criminal record.

In 2022, after living as a boy and going by a new name for several years, a 15-year-old from Madison, Wisconsin, wanted to make it official. Like most teenagers, he dreamed of getting his driver’s license, and his family wanted his government identification to reflect who he really was.

But Wisconsin law has a caveat: He would have to publish his old, feminine name and new name in the local newspaper for three weeks — essentially announcing to the world that he is transgender.

In many instances, if he had committed a crime, the law would afford him privacy as a minor. But not as a transgender teenager changing his name.

His parents worry the public notice now poses a risk as President Donald Trump has attacked transgender rights, asserted that U.S. policy recognizes only two sexes and described efforts to support transgender people as “child abuse.” The publication requirements endanger the community, lawyers working with trans people say, by creating a de facto dataset of likely transgender people that vigilantes and even the government could use for firing, harassment or violence.

Transgender people are over four times more likely to be victims of violence, research shows. Most transgender people and their families agreed to be interviewed for this story only if they weren’t named, citing safety concerns.

“Publication requirements really leave folks open and vulnerable to discrimination and to harassment more than they already are,” said Arli Christian, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “It can put people at risk of violence and blatant discrimination simply because of who they are.”

Wisconsin’s legal process stems from a 167-year-old law, one of many statutes across the country that Christian said were intended to keep people from escaping debts or criminal records. Changing one’s name through marriage is a separate process that does not require publication in a paper.

Although the right to change one’s legal name exists in every state, the effort and risk required to exercise it vary. Less than half of states require people to publicize their name changes in some or all cases, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a think tank that tracks voting and LGBTQ+ rights.

Wisconsin law grants confidentiality only if a person can prove it’s more likely than not that publication “could endanger” them. But the statute does not define what that means. For years, some judges interpreted that to include psychological abuse or bullying, or they accepted statistics documenting discrimination and violence against transgender people nationwide.

In 2023, however, a state appeals court set a stricter standard after a trans teenager was denied a confidential name change in Brown County, home to Green Bay. The teen said he had endured years of bullying, in which peers called him slurs and beat him up. Court records show the Brown County judge asserted that publishing the teen’s name wouldn’t expose him to further harm because his harassers already knew he was transgender.

The teen argued that a public process would create a record available to people he met in the future. While the appeals court conceded a “reasonable judge” could agree, it found the Brown County judge had not improperly exercised her discretion in denying the request. Crucially, the appeals court determined that “endanger” meant only physical harm. The case wasn’t appealed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Both of these trans girls living in Wisconsin requested the confidential name-change process after the 2024 presidential election. First image: A 14-year-old likes cuddling her cat, playing video games and practicing piano. Second image: A 12-year-old shares her artwork. (Illustrations by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images obtained by ProPublica.)

The combination of Wisconsin’s public requirement, the restrictive ruling and the Trump administration’s anti-trans policies has dissuaded at least one person from going through with a name change.

J.J Koechell, a 20-year-old LGBTQ+ advocate from suburban Milwaukee, tried to change his name in November but decided against it after a judge denied his request for confidentiality, ordering him to publish his change in the local paper and create a public court record if he wanted to proceed.

“That’s already dangerous,” Koechell said of a public process, “given our political atmosphere, with an administration that’s trying to erase trans people from existence completely, or saying that they don’t exist, or that there’s something wrong with them.”

At the end of March, Wisconsin Democrats announced plans to introduce a bill that would eliminate the publication requirement for transgender people, so long as they can prove they’re not avoiding debt or a criminal record. Republicans, who control the Legislature, will decide whether it will receive a hearing or vote.

There has been a push in some states to make it easier and safer for transgender people to update their legal documents. Michigan and Illinois laws removing publication requirements took effect earlier this year. And a California lawmaker introduced a bill that would retroactively seal all transition-related court records.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, did not respond to emails and a phone call to his office seeking comment. Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica sought comment from four other Republican leaders in the Assembly and Senate. Of the two whose offices responded, a staffer for Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August, R-Walworth, said, “It doesn’t look like something we’d consider a priority,” and a staffer for Senate Assistant Majority Leader Dan Feyen, R-Fond du Lac, said he was not available for comment.

Asked about the safety concerns people raised, a White House spokesperson said, “President Trump has vowed to defend women from gender ideology extremism and restore biological truth to the Federal government.”

No Exceptions for Minors

Wisconsin’s law requires a transgender person to publish the details of their identity to change their name whether they are an adult or a child. The notice requirement makes no distinction based on age.

This is less privacy than the legal system typically affords young people, confirmed Cary Bloodworth, who directs a family law clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Bloodworth said both child welfare and juvenile courts tend to keep records confidential for a number of reasons, including that what happens in a person’s youth will follow them for a lifetime.

“I certainly think having a higher level of privacy for kids is a good thing,” Bloodworth said, adding that she thinks the publication requirement is unnecessary for people of any age.

An 11-year old trans girl recently went through the name-change process. She enjoys playing with her dog and swimming, and her mom describes her as a “major science geek.” (Joe Timmerman/Wisconsin Watch)

A mom living near the Wisconsin-Illinois border whose 11-year-old daughter recently went through the name-change process said these proceedings should automatically be private for children.

“The fact that we still have to fight to get something as simple as a confidential name change for a minor who is obviously not running away from criminal or debt charges is just so frustrating and overwhelming,” she said.

The judge deciding their case seemed reluctant to grant confidentiality at first, questioning whether her daughter was being threatened physically, she said. The judge granted the confidential change. But the family remains shaken.

“We live just in constant terror of the wrong person finding out that we have an 11-year-old trans child,” she said. “All it takes is one wrong person getting that information, and what we could end up going through, becoming a target, is horrifying.”

Right before the pandemic, a teenager told her parents she was transgender. She spent much of that first year of her transition at home, attending virtual school like the rest of her peers in the Madison school district. She came out to only a few friends and wanted to keep her gender identity private, so she kept her camera off and skipped her high school graduation.

When she decided to legally change her name, the prospect of publicizing her transition terrified her, according to her mom.

“I explained to her that it’s in tiny, tiny print, and it’s in some page of the paper that no one is going to read,” her mom said. “But it felt to her like she was just standing out there in public with a ‘TRANS’ sign on her.”

A trans teenager was terrified of the public name-change requirement. She loves playing board games, reading and spending time with friends and her partner. (Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images obtained by ProPublica.)

While fewer people read physical newspapers these days, much of their content gets published online and is easily searchable. The court case, too, becomes a public record that is stored online and sometimes aggregated by other websites that show up at the top of search results.

The parents of the then-15-year-old boy who changed his name before getting his driver’s license discovered that happened to their son. When anyone — say, a prospective employer — searches the young man’s name, one of the first results shows his old name and outs him as trans.

“This is what somebody would use as their first judgment of him,” his mom said. “We certainly don’t want that to be something that people would use to rule him out for a job, or whatever it is he might be doing.”

Like many other states, Wisconsin does not have laws that ban discrimination against transgender people in credit and lending practices or in public spaces like stores, restaurants, parks, doctor’s offices and hotels. However, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, issued an executive order in 2019 banning transgender discrimination in state employment, contracting and public services.

After Trump took office again and began issuing executive orders attacking trans rights, the boy’s family started to investigate how they could retroactively seal the court records related to the name change. It wouldn’t change what was in the newspaper, but it could help them remove the online records. The court records also contain sensitive information like their home address that someone could use to harass them.

A friend who was a retired attorney helped their son craft an affidavit describing his experiences. His mom read from it during an interview. “‘Because of recent political events, I fear violence —’” she said before breaking off. “Oh God, I hate even reading this. ‘I fear violence, harassment, retribution because of my status as a transgender person.’”

Her son, who is now 18, shared a statement over email.

“At this moment in time I’m probably more scared about being a trans person than I ever have been before, with the public record if you have my first and last name you can easily find my deadname and therefore find out I’m trans,” he said. “I would love to say that I feel safe and valued in our society but unfortunately I can’t, at times I feel that my personhood is being stripped away under this government.”

A trans teenager officially changed his name and now fears violence because that information is public. He enjoys doing puzzles with his family and creating metal artwork. (Joe Timmerman/Wisconsin Watch)

Anne Daugherty-Leiter, who has guided transgender clients and their families through the name-change process as board president of Trans Law Help Wisconsin, said where a person lives in Wisconsin, and therefore what court they must petition, affects their likelihood of getting a confidential change.

Confidentiality is important, she said, because of how the state handles changes to birth certificates. Wisconsin birth certificates that are issued through a confidential name change show only the new name. But if a person has to announce their name change publicly, birth certificates are amended to list both the person’s old and new names. Any time the person has to use that document, at the DMV or while getting a loan, it outs them, she said.

“This Is Not Who I Am”

Koechell, a trans man and LGBTQ+ activist, was unwilling to go through with the name-change process after being denied confidentiality by a judge late last year.

Koechell lives in Waukesha County, a Republican stronghold where multiple schools have enacted policies critics have called anti-LGBTQ+.

A judge denied J.J Koechell’s confidential name change with an order that referred to the trans man as “she” and “her.” (Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images courtesy of J.J Koechell, obtained by ProPublica.)

In a letter to the judge, Koechell wrote that people had sent him multiple threats and posted his family members’ addresses online, all for “being an advocate and being transgender openly in my community.”

“I do not want to publish my deadname for people to use against me,” he said in an interview, using a term common among transgender people to refer to their birth names. “I don’t see a reason why people who are not particularly fond of me wouldn’t show up at a hearing like that and try and cause trouble.”

Court records show the judge denied Koechell’s confidentiality request and his request to reconsider. The judge’s order referred to Koechell, a trans man with a masculine voice and beard, as “she” and “her.”

Koechell decided the public process wasn’t worth the risk. But it’s hard, he said, to move through life with his old identification.

“When I go to a new doctor or new appointment or something, then that’s the name on my chart, and then I get called that in a waiting room full of people, and it’s super uncomfortable. I just want to disappear,” Koechell said. “Then eventually, I have to correct the doctors, and I’m like, ‘Hey, just to let you know, I don’t go by that name. This is not who I am.’”

Data from the latest U.S. Transgender Survey found that 22% of people who had to show an ID that did not match their identity experienced some form of negative consequence, including verbal harassment, discrimination or physical violence.

If the U.S. Senate passes the SAVE Act, which would require voters to prove citizenship with a passport or birth certificate, those consequences could include disenfranchisement. Transgender people who can’t change the name on their birth certificate or passport would be ineligible to vote, according to the liberal think tank Center for American Progress.

U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican and chief sponsor of the bill, has said the legislation directs states to create a process for citizens with a “name discrepancy” to register. “No one will be unable to vote because of a name change,” he said.

Trace Schlax, a trans man in Wisconsin, has tried to change his gender marker and name on official documents. (Joe Timmerman/Wisconsin Watch)

After Trump won in November, Trace Schlax, a 40-year-old IT project manager, decided to expedite changing his gender marker on his passport, figuring he could update his name later in state court.

“It matters,” Schlax said. He loves to travel but has encountered extra scrutiny from airport security with outdated documents. “I get comments from TSA when I go through to travel domestically, about my hair, about how I look. I get extra pat-downs."

He sent his application in early December and crossed his fingers. He received it back in February, rejected. By that time, Trump had issued an executive order banning trans people from changing the gender markers on their passports.

Schlax decided to continue updating what records he could, like his birth certificate and driver’s license. He worries about having conflicting documents. Will he get accused of fraud? Will he have trouble flying?

But in the end, he decided it was still important to change his name and update his license to improve his day-to-day experience.

And he decided to go about it publicly. It felt less painful, he said, to accept the risks rather than detail his personal, traumatic experiences to a judge only to have them decide he hadn’t endured sufficient danger.

“Me changing my name and my gender marker affects absolutely no one but me,” said Schlax, who has a court date to change his name in late April. “Why does this have to be so hard? Why do I have to prove myself so hard?”

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Anjeanette Damon, ProPublica, and Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and photography by Cengiz Yar, ProPublica

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

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

Within hours of taking office, President Donald Trump declared an emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border, giving him authority to unilaterally spend billions on immigration enforcement and wall construction. He has since reportedly urged Congress to authorize an additional $175 billion for border security, far exceeding what was spent during his first term.

In the coming months, border towns in Texas and Arizona will receive more grants to fund and equip police patrols. New wall construction projects will fill border communities with workers who eat at restaurants, shop in stores and rent space in RV parks. And National Guard deployments will add to local economies.

But if the president asked Sandra Fuentes what the biggest need in her community on the Texas-Mexico border is, the answer would be safe drinking water, not more border security. And if Trump put the same question to Jose Grijalva, the Arizona mayor would say a hospital for his border city, which has struggled without one for a decade.

Although billions of state and federal dollars flow into the majority-Latino communities along the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, many remain among the poorest places in the nation. In many towns, unemployment is significantly higher and income much lower than their interior counterparts, with limited access to health care, underfunded infrastructure and lagging educational attainment. Security walls are erected next to neighborhoods without running water, and National Guard units deploy to towns without paved roads and hospitals.

By some estimates, about 30,000 border residents in Texas lack access to reliable drinking water, among more than a million statewide. For 205,000 people living along Arizona’s border with Mexico, the nearest full-service hospital is hours away.

Such struggles aren’t confined to the border. But the region offers perhaps the most striking disparity between the size of federal and state governments’ investment there and how little it’s reflected in the quality of life of residents.

“The border security issue takes up all the oxygen and a lot of the resources in the room,” said state Rep. Mary González, a Democrat from El Paso County who has sponsored bills to address water needs. “It leaves very little space for all the other priorities, specifically water and wastewater infrastructure, because most people don’t understand what it’s like turning your faucet and there’ll be no water.”

Here’s how residents in two border towns, Del Rio, Texas, and Douglas, Arizona, experience living in places where the government always seems ready to spend on border security while stubborn obstacles to their communities’ well-being remain.

Nearly a fifth of the nearly 50,000 residents in Val Verde County, Texas, live in poverty, compared with the state’s 14% average.

When Cierra Flores gives her daughter a bath at their home in Del Rio, she has to keep a close eye on the water level of the outdoor tank that supplies her house. Like any 6-year-old, her daughter likes to play in the running water. But Flores doesn’t have the luxury of leaving the tap open. When the tank runs dry, the household is out of water. That means not washing dishes, doing laundry or flushing the toilet until the trip can be made to get more water.

Flores lives on a ranch in Escondido Estates, a neighborhood where many residents have gone decades without running water. Flores’ family has a well on their property. But during the summer and prolonged droughts, as the region is now experiencing, their well runs dry.

At those times, the family relies on a neighbor who has a more dependable well and is willing to sell water. Flores’ husband makes hourlong trips twice on weekends to fill the family’s water tank. Their situation has felt even more tenuous lately, as her neighbor’s property was listed for sale, prompting worries about whether they’ll continue to have access to his well.

“I have no idea where we would go here if that well wasn’t there,” Flores said. “It’s frustrating that we don’t have basic resources, especially in a place where they know when the summer comes it doesn’t rain. It doesn’t rain, we don’t have water.”

Val Verde County, where Del Rio is located, is three times the size of Rhode Island and hours from a major city. About a fifth of its nearly 50,000 residents live in poverty, a rate nearly twice the national average. Some live in colonias — rural communities along the U.S.-Mexico border, including illegal subdivisions that lack access to water, sewers or adequate housing.

The county has worked for years to bring water to residents, piecing together state and federal grants. Yet about 2,000 people — more than 4% of the county’s population — still lack running water, according to a database kept by the Texas Office of the Attorney General. For those residents, it means showering at fitness centers and doing the dishes once a week with water from plastic jugs.

Some neighborhoods along the Mexican border on the outskirts of Del Rio, such as the area where Cierra Flores and her 6-year-old daughter, Olivia, live, still lack infrastructure like paved roads and access to safe drinking water.

In the early 1990s, then-Gov. Ann Richards, a Democrat, toured some of the state’s colonias along the border to assess the living conditions. After stepping into the mud on an unpaved street, she’s said to have been so moved by the scene that she told a staffer, “Whatever they want, give it to them.”

Fuentes, a community organizer, likes to tell that story because it drives home how long residents have fought for water and other improvements but been stymied by state and local politics and limited funds.

“It’s going to be an uphill battle, but we are going to keep on battling,” she said. “What else is there to do?”

Over the past 30 years, the state has provided more than $1 billion in grants and loans to bring drinking water and wastewater treatment to colonias and other economically distressed areas. Texas 2036, a nonpartisan public policy think tank, estimates Texas needs nearly $154 billion by 2050 to meet water demands across the state amid population growth, the ongoing drought and aging infrastructure.

Texas state leaders said they are committed to investing in water projects and infrastructure. Gov. Greg Abbott’s office said he is calling on the Legislature to dedicate $1 billion a year for 10 years and is looking forward to working with lawmakers “to ensure Texans have a safe, reliable water supply for the next 50 years.”

Kim Carmichael, a spokesperson for Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows, a Republican from Lubbock, said, “Texas is at a critical juncture with its water supply, and every lawmaker recognizes the need to act decisively and meaningfully invest to further secure our water future.” The Texas House’s base budget proposes $2.5 billion for water infrastructure.

One of the challenges — at the federal and state level — is that infrastructure needs often exceed available funds, said Olga Morales-Pate, chief executive officer of Rural Community Assistance Partnership, a national network of nonprofits that works with rural communities on access to safe drinking water and wastewater issues. “So it becomes a competitive process: Who gets there faster, who has a better application, who is shovel ready to get those funding opportunities out?” she said.

Community organizer Karen Gonzalez is frustrated that residents of the Del Rio area still lack water access while state leaders focus on border security.

The plight of people without water often gets overlooked, said Karen Gonzalez, an organizer who used to work with Fuentes. Even though she grew up in Del Rio, it wasn’t until she started to work with the community that she learned some county residents didn’t have water.

“Every person that I come across that I tell that we’re working this issue is like, ‘There’s people that don’t have water?’” she said. “It’s not something that is known.”

Unlike border security, which is constantly in the spotlight.

During his inauguration, Trump praised Abbott as a “leader of the pack” on border security. In 2021, Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, a multibillion-dollar effort aimed at curbing illegal immigration and drug trafficking. As part of the operation, the state has awarded Val Verde County and the city of Del Rio more than $10 million in grants, state data obtained by The Texas Tribune shows.

A state-funded border wall that has gone up in the county a short distance from the Rio Grande stretches in fits and starts, including next to a neighborhood without running water. As of November, about 5 miles of it had cost at least $162 million, according to the Tribune. The state Legislature’s proposed budget includes $6.5 billion to maintain “current border security operations.”

Meanwhile, organizers, elected officials and residents say state and federal programs to fund water infrastructure will continue to fall short of the need. Last year, the state fund created by lawmakers in 1989 to help underserved areas access drinking water had $200 million in applications for assistance and only $100 million in available funding.

When grants are awarded, water projects can take years to complete because of increasing costs and unforeseen construction difficulties — like hitting unexpected bedrock while laying pipe, said Val Verde County Judge Lewis Owens. Project delays — some of them, Owens acknowledged, the county’s fault — impede the ability to get future grants.

Organizers like Fuentes and Karen Gonzalez said their frustration with the slow progress on water has grown as they’ve watched the border wall go up and billions more dollars spent to deploy state troopers and the National Guard to aid federal border security officers.

“It’s just infuriating,” Karen Gonzalez said. She said she hopes elected officials “focus on what our actual border community needs are. And for us, I feel like it’s not border security.”

Sections of the border wall are being built as part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star on the outskirts of Del Rio, near neighborhoods without access to safe drinking water.

Watch video ➜

As paramedics loaded her 8-year-old son into a helicopter in the Arizona border town of Douglas, Nina Nelson did her best to reassure him. Days earlier, Jacob and his father had been riding ATVs on their ranch in far southeastern Arizona, along the U.S.-Mexico border. Dust irritated Jacob’s lungs, and over the next few days his breathing deteriorated until Nelson could see him fight for every breath.

He needed care that isn’t available in Douglas, a town of about 15,000. And he would have to make the trip without her.

“Buddy, you’re gonna be OK,” she recalled telling him. She knew it would take more than twice as long to drive the 120 miles to Tucson and the nearest hospital that could provide the care he needed. “I’m gonna be racing up there. I’ll be there. I’m gonna find you,” she said.

Douglas lost its hospital nearly a decade ago. Southeast Arizona Medical Center had struggled financially for years and by 2015 was staffed by out-of-state doctors. When it ran afoul of federal rules too many times, jeopardizing patient safety, the government pulled its ability to bill Medicare and Medicaid and it closed within a week.

As her son’s breathing took a turn for the worse, Nelson considered the variables everyone in Douglas confronts in a medical emergency. Should she go to the town’s stand-alone emergency room, which treats only the most basic maladies? Drive the half hour to Bisbee or an hour to Sierra Vista for slightly higher levels of care? Or could Jacob endure the two hours it takes to drive to Tucson?

“That is the kind of game you play: ‘How much time do I think I have?’” Nelson said.

Nina Nelson’s son Jacob has been transported twice by helicopter to get medical care because Douglas lacks a full-service hospital.

Arizona hasn’t been as aggressive as Texas in funding border security. But when concerns about the border surge, money often follows.

In 2021, the state created the Border Security Fund and allocated $55 million to it. A year later, then-Gov. Doug Ducey asked state lawmakers for $50 million for border security. They gave him more than 10 times that amount, including $335 million for a border wall. The measure was proposed by Sen. David Gowan, a Republican who represents Douglas. In October 2022, crews began stacking shipping containers along the border in Cochise County, where Douglas is located. Gowan’s spokesperson said he wasn’t available for comment.

The container wall wasn’t effective. Migrants slipped through gaps between containers, and a section toppled over. When the federal government sued, claiming the construction was trespassing on federal land, Ducey had the container wall removed.

The cost of erecting, then disassembling the wall: $197 million. (The state recouped about $1.4 million by selling the containers.)

Daniel Scarpinato, Ducey’s former chief of staff, said border security is a significant issue for nearby communities and requires resources, “especially given the failures of the federal government.” He noted that the Ducey administration didn’t ignore other needs in the area, including spending to attract doctors to rural Arizona. “But we will make no apologies for prioritizing public safety and security at our border,” he said.

Southeast Arizona Medical Center closed in 2015, leaving the Douglas area without a full-service hospital.

Grijalva, a Douglas native, was sworn in as mayor in December with a list of needs he is determined to make progress on: a community center, more food assistance for the growing number of hungry residents and a hospital. Money the state spent on the container wall would’ve been better used on those projects, he said. “I appreciate Doug Ducey trying that, but those resources could have gone into the community,” he said.

The median income in Douglas is $39,000, about half the state’s median income, and almost a third of the town’s residents live in poverty. A shrinking tax base makes it difficult for Douglas to provide basic services. The town doesn’t have enough money for street repairs, let alone to reopen a hospital. The backlog of repaving projects has climbed to $67 million, while Douglas nets only $400,000 a year for street improvements.

Money for wall construction or National Guard units gives a short-term boost to the economy, but those efforts can also interfere with the economic lifeblood of towns like Douglas: cross-border traffic.

Both Trump and Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, have deployed hundreds of guard members and active military personnel to the border. None have shown up in Douglas yet, Grijalva said. When they do, they’ll spend money. But a couple dozen troops don’t compare to the 3.6 million people who cross the border each year. The Walmart in Douglas, a stone’s throw from the port of entry, is packed daily with shoppers from Agua Prieta, Sonora, Grijalva said. More troops on both sides of the port bottleneck traffic and raise people’s fears of being detained, which may discourage them from crossing, even when they are doing so legally, he said.

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Grijalva declared a state of emergency, which could make the city eligible for federal aid if its economy takes a hit. “I know the executive orders didn’t do anything to stop the legal immigration, but it’s the perception,” Grijalva said. “If our economy dips in any way, they could give us some funding.”

Douglas’ new mayor, Jose Grijalva, declared a state of emergency in January over concerns that Trump’s executive orders on border security and immigration will harm the border town’s fragile economy.

Attracting a new hospital is a longer-term effort. Construction alone could cost upwards of $75 million. But then it would have to be staffed. In its final years, the hospital in Douglas suffered from the shortage of health care professionals plaguing much of rural America. The year it closed, it had no onsite physicians, said Dr. Dan Derksen, director of the Arizona Center for Rural Health. The state has programs to address that problem, including helping doctors in rural areas repay school loans. But the shortage has persisted. If a hospital were to open again in Douglas, it could cost as much as $775,000 to launch a residency program there, according to Derksen and Dr. Conrad Clemens, who heads graduate medical education for the University of Arizona.

“There’s policy strategies that you can do at the state level that help, but there’s no single strategy that is a cure-all,” Derksen said. “You have to do a variety of strategies.”

Border security funding, on the other hand, is easier to get.

Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels is known for his aggressive border enforcement activities. His office soaks up state and federal grants to help with drug interdiction, human trafficking and surveillance equipment on the border. The state also awarded him $20 million for a new jail and $5 million to open a border security operations center, a base for various agencies enforcing the border, in Sierra Vista, about an hour from Douglas.

At its grand opening in November, Dannels said all he had to do was ask for the money.

“I was speaking with Gov. Ducey and the governor asked me, ‘What do you guys need?’” Dannels said. “I said, ‘We need a collective center that drives actions.’” Shortly after, the plan came together, he said.

However, if Cochise Regional Hospital were still open, Dannels’ office would have one less security concern. The abandoned building, which is deteriorating in an isolated pocket of desert on the outskirts of Douglas, is a common waypoint for smugglers.

Lexi Churchill of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune and Dan Keemahill of The Texas Tribune contributed research.

by Patricia Callahan

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

Glenmark Pharmaceuticals has recalled two dozen generic medicines sold to American patients because the Indian factory that made them failed to comply with U.S. manufacturing standards and the Food and Drug Administration determined that the faulty drugs could harm people, federal records show.

In February, the FDA found problems with cleaning and testing at the plant in Madhya Pradesh, India, which was the subject of a ProPublica investigation last year. The current recalls, listed in an FDA enforcement report last week, cover a wide range of commonly prescribed medicines, including ones that treat epilepsy, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, heart disease and high blood pressure, among other ailments. ​​A full list of the recalled medications is available here.

The agency determined that the drugs could cause temporary or reversible harm and that the chance of more serious problems was remote. However, the FDA didn’t say what symptoms the flawed drugs could cause. ProPublica asked the FDA and Glenmark for more specifics, but neither responded.

Records show that Glenmark first alerted wholesalers about the recalls in a March 13 letter. That letter suggests that Glenmark pulled the drugs because of potential cross-contamination. Thomas Callaghan, Glenmark’s executive director of regulatory affairs for North America, wrote that 148 batches of the recalled medicines were made “in a shared facility” with two cholesterol-lowering drugs, ezetimibe and a combination of that drug and simvastatin.

That’s a concern because the chemical structure of ezetimibe contains what’s known as a beta-lactam ring. FDA safety experts pay attention to this because many beta-lactam drugs, particularly penicillin, can cause life-threatening allergies and hypersensitivity reactions. It’s the most commonly reported drug allergy in the U.S. Because of that danger, the FDA requires manufacturers to follow special precautions to prevent cross-contamination with drugs that contain a beta-lactam ring, even if they aren’t antibiotics.

The chemical structure of ezetimibe, Callaghan wrote to Glenmark’s wholesalers, shows it is unlikely to cause such hypersensitivity reactions. Nevertheless, Glenmark was recalling the drugs “based on risk assessment and out of an abundance of caution,” Callaghan wrote. He added, “This recall is being made with knowledge of the Food and Drug Administration.”

According to Callaghan’s letter, the potential problem dates back years. The executive wrote that Glenmark began shipping the drugs on Oct. 4, 2022.

In December, ProPublica revealed that the Glenmark factory was responsible for an outsized share of U.S. recalls for pills that didn’t dissolve properly and could harm people. At the time, the FDA hadn’t inspected the plant since before the COVID-19 pandemic, even though one of those recalls had been linked to deaths of American patients.

About two months after that investigation was published, FDA officials returned to the factory — the agency’s first inspection in five years. Inspectors discovered that Glenmark hadn’t properly cleaned equipment to prevent contamination of medicines with residues from other drugs. The federal investigators also noted that Glenmark routinely released some drugs to the U.S. market using test methods that hadn’t been adequately validated, according to the inspection report.

What’s more, when some Glenmark tests found problems with a drug, the company at times declared those results invalid and “retested with new samples to obtain passing results,” the inspection report said. “The batches were ultimately released to the US market.”

In their detailed report, the inspectors listed drugs shipped to U.S. customers who had been affected by the potential contamination and testing problems, but FDA censors redacted page after page, making it impossible to know which medicines may not be safe. An FDA attorney said the information was being withheld because it contained trade secrets or commercial information that was considered privileged or confidential.

ProPublica first asked Glenmark about that inspection on March 7 after obtaining the FDA report through the Freedom of Information Act. Glenmark alerted wholesalers about the recalls less than a week later, but the company and the FDA didn’t tell ProPublica.

Instead, a Glenmark spokesperson sent a statement saying the company was “committed to working diligently with the FDA to ensure compliance with manufacturing operations and quality systems.” And the FDA said it could discuss potential compliance matters only with the company involved.

The FDA first mentioned the recalls publicly in its April 8 enforcement report, which is like an electronic filing cabinet for recalls. The recalls do not appear on the FDA’s recalls website, which compiles press releases written by pharmaceutical companies.

ProPublica asked the FDA and Glenmark why they didn’t alert the public last month that these medicines had been recalled, but neither responded.

Glenmark is embroiled in a federal lawsuit that alleges recalled potassium chloride capsules made at its Madhya Pradesh factory caused the death of a 91-year-old Maine woman in June. The FDA had determined last year that more than 50 million of those recalled Glenmark extended-release capsules had the potential to kill U.S. patients because they didn’t dissolve correctly and could lead to a perilous spike in potassium. In court filings, Glenmark has denied responsibility for the woman’s death.

Since that potassium chloride recall, Glenmark has told federal regulators it has received reports of eight deaths in the U.S. of people who took the recalled capsules, FDA records show. Companies are required to file such reports so the agency can monitor drug safety. The FDA shares few details, though, so ProPublica was unable to independently verify what happened in each case. In general, the FDA says these adverse event reports reflect the opinions of the people who reported the harm and don’t prove that the drug caused it.

by Amy Yurkanin

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

When Max Rykov started reading a Jan. 24 letter sent to the leaders of the country’s 10 refugee resettlement agencies, he found the wording vague but ominous. The agencies were ordered to “stop all work” funded by the Department of State and “not incur any new costs.”

At first, he wondered if the order from the Trump administration was only targeting refugee work in other countries. Rykov, then the director of development and communications at a refugee resettlement partner in Nashville, began texting colleagues at other agencies. “What does it mean?” he asked.

By Monday, three days after the memo, it became clear. The Nashville International Center for Empowerment, along with similar nonprofits across the country, would not have access to the money the government had promised to refugees for their first three months in the United States. That day, NICE laid off 12 of its 56 resettlement staff members and scrambled to free up funds to pay for the basic needs of nearly 170 people dependent on the frozen grants.

Max Rykov arrived in the U.S. as a child and went on to become the director of development and communications at the Nashville International Center for Empowerment, which helps refugees resettle. (Arielle Weenonia Gray for ProPublica)

Rykov knew exactly what was at stake, and that delivered an additional dose of dread. Born in the former USSR, he and his family arrived in the U.S. as refugees in 1993, fleeing the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economic devastation and discrimination against Soviet Jews. He was 4 years old, and it was bewildering. Though his family was part of one of the largest waves of refugee resettlement in U.S. history, they ended up in a place with few Russian immigrants.

Life in Birmingham, Alabama, a post-industrial city shaped by the Civil Rights movement and white flight, revolved around Saturday college football games and Sunday church. Rykov said his family felt “barren” in the U.S. away from their culture. Birmingham’s Jewish community was small and the Russian population tiny.

But a local Jewish organization sponsored the Rykovs and paired them with a “friendship family.” The group rented them an apartment and furnished it. Then the organization helped Rykov’s parents find work. And Birmingham’s Jewish community banded together to fund scholarships for Rykov and other Soviet refugee children to attend a private Jewish school, where Rykov felt less isolated.

He went on to attend the University of Alabama and overcame his feeling of otherness. After graduation, he found purpose in bringing people together through his work organizing cultural events, including arts festivals and an adult spelling bee, doing social media outreach for the Birmingham mayor and, in 2021, finding a dream job at a Nashville nonprofit devoted to the very efforts that he believes helped define him.

When Rykov heard that President Donald Trump’s second administration had ordered cuts to the refugee program, his thoughts raced to the Venezuelan refugee family his organization was assisting, an older woman in poor health, her daughter who cared for her and the daughter’s two children, one not yet kindergarten age. None of them spoke English, and there was no plan for how they would cover the rent, which was due in four days.

“This is a promise that we made to these people that we have reneged on,” he said. “Is that really what’s happening? Yeah, that’s exactly what’s happening.”

As the realization of what lay ahead set in, Rykov started to cry.

Over the next two months, the Trump administration carried out and defended its destabilizing cuts to the refugee program. The moves brought wave after wave of uncertainty and chaos to the lives of refugees and those who work to help resettle them.

One of the largest nonprofit agencies that carry out this work, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, laid off a third of its staff in February and said Monday that it would end all of its refugee efforts with the federal government. A Jewish resettlement organization, HIAS, cut 40% of its staff. As the groups fight legal battles to recoup the millions of dollars the government owes them, some have been forced to close resettlement offices entirely.

The Nashville International Center for Empowerment is still struggling to keep its own afloat. Although NICE staff members had anticipated some cuts to refugee programs under Trump, they said they were caught off guard when reimbursements for money already spent failed to appear and by the dwindling opportunities to seek recourse.

After a judge ordered the Trump administration to restart refugee admissions, the administration responded by canceling contracts with existing resettlement agencies and announcing plans to find new partners. And the administration has indicated it will remain resistant, refusing to spend millions appropriated by Congress for refugees.

“Many have lost faith and trust in the American system because of this,” said Wooksoo Kim, director of the Immigrant and Refugee Research Institute at the University of Buffalo. “For many refugees, it may start to feel like it’s no different from where they came from.”

In court documents, lawyers for the Department of Justice argued the U.S. does not have the capacity to support large numbers of refugees.

“The President lawfully exercised his authority to suspend the admission of refugees pending a determination that ‘further entry into the United States of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States,’” the motion said.

In Nashville, that anxiety has been playing out week after week in tear-filled offices and in apartment complexes teeming with families who fled war and oppression.

Rykov couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by the extreme shift in attitudes about immigrants in just a few years. In 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, his family’s dormant fears about Russia were reawakened — but they felt a surge of pride for the U.S. when it stepped up to help Ukraine and welcome its refugees.

Months after the invasion, Ukrainian athletes came to Birmingham for the World Games, which is similar to the Olympics. When they entered the stadium waving the Ukrainian flag, the crowd gave them a standing ovation. His parents, who’d never felt quite at home in the U.S., loudly joined in the “U-S-A” chant that followed.

But now, three years later, was all of America now ready to abandon refugees? Rykov was starting to see the signs, but he refused to believe it and instead recommitted himself to the work.

He and his colleagues reached out to every donor in their network and called an online meeting with local churches who might be able to help with rent payments, food, job searches and transportation.

Agencies would struggle without the help of the churches. And churches don’t have the resources, training or bandwidth to carry out the work of the agencies.

But Rykov knew that for the time being, he’d need more help than ever from church volunteers.

“Without your intervention here, this is gonna be a humanitarian disaster in Nashville,” he told them in the online meeting held about a week after the cuts. “And in every community, obviously, but we were focusing on ours. We’re not gonna be in a position to help in the same way much longer, and this is a stark reality that we’re facing.”

Then he went on the local news, warning that “this immediate funding freeze puts those recently arrived refugees really at risk of homelessness.” The responses on social media reflected the hate and intolerance that had polluted the national conversation about immigration.

“The common theme was, ‘Refugees? Do you mean “illegal invaders”?’” Rykov recalled. “People are so completely misinformed, clearly not reading the article or watching the story, and it’s very disappointing to see that. And I guess it’s sad too that I expect it.”

One Month After the Cuts “No Time to Screw Around”

In late February, church volunteer Abdul Makembe and a program manager from NICE squeezed into the cramped apartment of a family of five from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Both Makembe and NICE had been working with the family for months, but with the loss of funding, NICE could no longer offer support and had asked Makembe to be more involved.

Abdul Makembe, who immigrated from Tanzania, volunteers to help African families settle in the U.S. (Arielle Weenonia Gray for ProPublica)

A native of Tanzania, Makembe moved to Tennessee in the late 1970s. After working in infectious disease research and nonprofit management, which involved several trips to Africa, he retired in 2015 and began volunteering to help newly arrived African families. Rykov came to know him as a fixture of the refugee community, always eager to help.

In the apartment, Makembe perched on the edge of a couch and Mungaga Akilimali sat across from him on the floor.

“So, the situation has improved a little bit?” Makembe asked.

The Congolese man ran his hands over his head.

“The situation, so far, not yet,” Akilimali said. “I’m just trying to apply and reapply and reapply, but so far nothing.”

Akilimali and his family fled the Democratic Republic of Congo more than 10 years ago. Since 1996, soldiers and militias have killed 6 million people there and committed atrocities against countless civilians. War, political instability and widespread poverty have displaced millions of others.

Akilimali and his wife settled for a time in South Africa, where they encountered xenophobia and anti-immigrant violence. Immigrants and refugees have become political scapegoats there, spawning a rash of attacks and even murders. His wife, Bulonza Chishamara, nearly died there in 2018 after an ambush by an anti-immigrant mob.

Doctors gave her eight units of blood and Chishamara spent days paralyzed in a hospital bed, Akilimali said. She still walks with a limp.

The family had rejoiced when they got approved for refugee resettlement in 2024 in Tennessee. Their new life in Nashville began with promise. Akilimali, who speaks fluent English and trained as a mechanic, got a driver’s license and a job at Nissan.

However, he lost the job before his probationary period ended due to layoffs, and he hasn’t been able to find another one. NICE used to have a robust staff of employment specialists. But the cuts forced the organization to reassign them.

That left fewer resources for people like Akilimali, who had been in the U.S. longer than the three months during which new refugees were eligible for state department aid but who still needed help finding work.

For Rykov, the work of spreading awareness about the cuts and raising funds to offset them intensified throughout February. He and others working with refugees across the country were hoping that the courts might force the administration to release the federal money — that if they could keep things afloat in the short term, relief would come.

Then, on Feb. 25, a federal judge in Washington ruled in favor of the agencies. He ordered the administration to restore payments and restart refugee admissions.

The relief was short-lived. A day later, the administration canceled contracts with resettlement agencies, and lawyers for the administration have appealed the order. Their argument: The gutted refugee agencies no longer have capacity to restart resettlement, making it impossible to comply with court orders.

Rykov said some of the diminished number of remaining staff members began to look for new jobs.

After that, Rykov and his team kicked into emergency mode. They worked long hours making phone calls and arranging meetings with potential volunteers and donors.

“It was a cocktail of emotions,” he said. The generosity of donors and volunteers filled him with gratitude. But he couldn’t escape the sense of foreboding that consumed the office, where many desks sat empty and remaining employees voiced deepening concerns about the fates of their clients.

Rykov likened the urgent energy at NICE to the aftermath of a natural disaster. “There’s no time to screw around.”

At the same time, staffers worried about the cratering budget and the future of the organization. And it was hard not to notice how much the mood in Tennessee and around the country was shifting. In an order suspending refugee admissions, Trump described immigrants as a “burden” who have “inundated” American towns and cities.NICE had always felt protected, powered by an idealistic and diverse staff who chose to work in refugee resettlement despite the long hours and low pay. The cuts and the discourse eroded that sense of safety, Rykov said.

In February, a tech company offered him a job in Birmingham. It was a chance to be closer to his parents and back in the city where he’d come of age — a reminder of an era that felt kinder than the current one. He took the job.

“Working at NICE, it’s the best job I ever had and the most meaningful job I ever had,” he said.

Rykov packed up a few things from NICE. A Ukrainian flag lapel pin. A signed photograph of him and his coworkers. In his Birmingham apartment, he placed the picture on a bookshelf next to one of him and his parents at his high school graduation.

By the time he left, NICE’s refugee resettlement team was down to 30 employees; it had been 56 before the cuts. For its part, NICE has vowed to carry on. The organization has paired 24 families with volunteer mentors since the funding cuts.

Church volunteers, who were accustomed to helping furnish and decorate apartments for new arrivals, now had to help prevent evictions. They had to track down documents and help complete paperwork lost in the confusion of the nonprofit’s layoffs. And the group of mostly retired professionals now had to assist with the daunting task of finding unskilled jobs for refugees who didn’t speak much English.

Two Months After the Cuts One Volunteer, Many People in Need

On a mid-March morning, Makembe woke at 6 a.m. to begin tackling his volunteer work for NICE. Despite the long hours he clocks volunteering, the 74-year-old has kept his energy level and his spirits up. As he left the garage apartment he shares with his wife in a rough north Nashville neighborhood, he made sure to double-check the locks.

On this day, he was working not with the Akilimali family but with a family of four who recently arrived from Africa. The child needs to see a specialist at the Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt.

It was Vanderbilt that brought Makembe to Nashville decades ago, for his master’s degree in economic planning. He followed that with a doctorate in health policy and research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Over the years that followed, he made repeated trips back to Tanzania to do research on malaria and parasitic infections.

All that took a toll on Makembe’s marriage, and he and his first wife divorced when his two children were very young. They are now grown and successful. His son is an accountant and his daughter recently finished law school and works at a firm in New York. That leaves him more time to spend with refugees.

But the volunteer work does bring some financial stress. He is trying to save $5,000 to apply for a green card for his wife, which is tough. Because he spent much of his career working outside the U.S., Makembe receives less than $1,000 a month from Social Security. He drives a 2004 Toyota that was donated to his church to aid the congregation’s work with refugees, but he pays out of pocket for gas and car insurance. The costs can add up. It’s not uncommon for him to burn a quarter tank of gas a day when he is volunteering.

Makembe’s church, Woodmont Hills Church, is a significant contributor to the city’s refugee resettlement work — an ethos shared by its current congregants but that has led to the loss of members over the years. Though it had a congregation nearing 3,000 members in the late ’90s, attendance shrank as the church’s ideology grew more progressive and Tennessee’s grew more conservative. It’s now down to 800 members.

Yet the church remained steadfast in its commitment to helping refugees. Its leaders invited NICE to hold classes in its empty meeting rooms and made space to house a Swahili church and a Baptist church formed by refugees from Myanmar. And when NICE lost funding, Woodmont Hills members donated their time and money.

Makembe has helped dozens of refugees over the years but was particularly worried for the family he had to take to the Children’s Hospital that March morning, serving as both driver and translator. They arrived right before Trump cut off funding, and they had struggled to get medical care for their 5-year-old’s persistent seizures. A doctor at a local clinic had prescribed antiseizure medication, but it didn’t work, and the child experienced episodes where his muscles tensed and froze for minutes at a time.

Nashville has world-class medical facilities, but NICE no longer had staff available to help the family understand and navigate that care, leaving them frustrated.

It took months for the family to get in to see a specialist. During the long wait, Makembe said, the boy’s father began to lose hope. His son’s seizures had become longer and more frequent. Makembe stepped in to help them get a referral from a doctor at the local clinic.

The child’s father had to miss the doctor’s appointment that March morning so that he could go to an interview at a company that packages computer parts. Both he and his wife had been searching for jobs and striking out. Makembe has tried to help but has run into barriers. He does not have the same connections with labor agencies that NICE staffers did.

Makembe said he wants to get the child enrolled in a special school for the fall and find a wheelchair so his mom won’t have to carry him.

And that’s just this family. Makembe said new refugees have been waiting for months to get job interviews. When he visits the five families he mentors, their neighbors approach him asking for help. Many of their requests are for the assistance NICE and other refugee agencies once offered.

“I’m very much worried,” he said. “I mean, they have no idea of what to do.”

by Nicole Foy

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

Just a week into President Donald Trump’s second term, Rep. Adriano Espaillat began to see reports of Puerto Ricans and others being questioned and arrested by immigration agents.

So Espaillat, a New York Democrat, did what members of Congress often do: He wrote to the administration and demanded answers. That was more than 10 weeks ago. Espaillat has not received a response.

His experience appears to be common.

At least a dozen members of Congress, all Democrats, have written to the Trump administration with pointed questions about constituents and other citizens whom immigration agents have questioned, detained and even held at gunpoint. In one letter, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee demanded a list of every citizen detained during the new administration.

None has received an answer.

“What we are clearly seeing is that with this administration, they are not responding to congressional inquiries,” said Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a New Mexico Democrat.

Leger Fernández and others wrote to Trump and the Department of Homeland Security on Jan. 28 after receiving complaints from constituents and tribal nations that federal agents were pressing tribal citizens in New Mexico for their immigration status, raising concerns about racial profiling.

The congresswoman and others say the lack of response is part of a broader pattern in which the administration has been moving to sideline Congress and its constitutional power to investigate the executive branch.

“That is a big concern on a level beyond what ICE is doing,” Leger Fernández said, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a branch of DHS. “This administration does not seem to recognize the power and authority and responsibility” of Congress.

Norman Ornstein, a longtime congressional observer at the American Enterprise Institute, said prior administrations’ lack of responsiveness has frustrated lawmakers too. But he’s never seen one so thoroughly brush off Congress.

“What’s clear now is that the message from Donald Trump and his minions is: ‘You don’t have to respond to these people, whether they are ours or not,’” Ornstein said, referring to Republicans and Democrats. “That’s not usual. Nothing about this is usual.”

A White House spokesperson denied that the administration has been circumventing Congress or its oversight. “Passage of the continuing resolution that kept our government open and commonsense legislation like the Laken Riley Act are indicative of how closely the Trump administration is working with Congress,” said Kush Desai in a statement.

The White House did not answer questions about the letters. DHS also did not respond to ProPublica’s questions.

Last month, ProPublica detailed how Americans have been caught in the administration’s dragnet. Such mistakes have been made by many administrations over decades. The government often has not taken steps to reduce errors, such as updating its files when agents confirm somebody’s citizenship. But experts and advocates have warned that Trump’s aggressive immigration goals — including arrest quotas for enforcement agents — make it more likely that citizens will get caught up.

ICE and its sister agency, Customs and Border Protection, said in earlier statements to ProPublica that agents are allowed to ask for citizens’ identification. The agencies did not provide explanations for their actions in most of the cases ProPublica asked about.

Answers were also hard to come by during Trump’s first term, even when Democrats controlled the House and had more power over hearings.

At a House hearing in 2019 about family separation, lawmakers pressed then-Border Patrol Chief Brian Hastings about another issue: the three-week detention of a Dallas-born high school student and citizen, who was only released after The Dallas Morning News reported what happened.

Hastings said the student never claimed to be a citizen during his detention — though the newspaper reported that the agency’s own paperwork noted the opposite. Hastings also declined to give any broader accounting of how often the agency had held Americans. “I don’t have information about specific cases,” he said. (Hastings did not respond to requests for comment.)

Espaillat, the New York representative, has been in office for eight years. He said he frequently raised immigration questions and concerns during the Biden administration too, and got responses.

Republicans complained about the opposite experience during the Biden administration. They said the administration was unresponsive to Congress’ questions on immigration, forcing lawmakers to subpoena officials for answers. (The administration dismissed the moves as “political posturing.”)

Espaillat said he’s not surprised the Trump administration has been silent. “They probably don’t have a good answer.”

by Topher Sanders

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

When news broke in January that the Trump Justice Department was freezing significant work on civil rights litigation, including police reform cases, attention immediately focused on two cities: Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky.

Both places were on the cusp of entering court-enforced agreements to overhaul their police forces after high-profile police killings there sparked a nationwide reckoning over race and policing.

But it’s now clear that the administration’s move will be felt well beyond those two cities. In fact, it throws into question police reform efforts in at least eight other communities across the country, according to a ProPublica review. The need for change in these places was documented in a flurry of investigations published by the Justice Department in the final year of Joe Biden’s presidency. All of the probes found a “pattern or practice” of unlawful behavior that was routine enough that the federal government recommended reforms.

From Phoenix to Trenton, New Jersey, federal officials investigating the eight agencies found unjustified killings, excessive force, debtors’ prisons, retaliation against police critics, racial discrimination, unlawful strip searches and officers having sexual contact with sex workers during undercover operations.

Such findings are typically the first step toward a department agreeing to federal oversight and court-ordered reform. Over the years, the DOJ has credited such agreements, known as consent decrees, for having helped departments reduce unnecessary use of force, cut crime rates and improve responses to people with behavioral health needs. President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, however, has ordered its civil rights attorneys to pause such work until further notice, effectively reinstating the limited approach it took during the president’s first term. Department officials did not respond to questions about the pause or how long it would remain in effect.

For now, that means any reform efforts will be up to local leadership — a dynamic that experts say could bode poorly for communities with long histories of police abuse.

Cliff Johnson, an attorney and director of the Mississippi office of the MacArthur Justice Center, a nonprofit legal organization, was not optimistic.

“While those DOJ reports sometimes can lead municipalities, police departments and other offenders to come to Jesus,” Johnson said, “what we’ve been seeing, from our perspective, is folks saying, ‘I don’t need Jesus. I got Trump.’”

Louisiana leaders, for example, have slammed the Justice Department’s report, which found a pattern of problems in the way the state police used force against civilians. Gov. Jeff Landry said the report was an attempt by the Biden administration to “diminish the service and exceptionality” of the state police. And state Attorney General Liz Murrill said the Justice Department was being used to “advance a political agenda.”

The report was partly spurred by the 2019 death of Ronald Greene, who was killed while in the custody of Louisiana State Police. Officers repeatedly shocked him with a Taser, dragged him by his ankle shackles and then left him face down in the road. Some officers deactivated or muted their body cameras during the incident. Louisiana troopers had claimed Greene died when his car crashed after a high-speed chase. The department was forced to change its story when The Associated Press obtained and published body-camera footage of the incident.

Federal investigators found the episode was not an outlier. According to their report, officers in the department used Tasers without warning and against people who were restrained or who did not pose a threat, didn’t give people the chance to comply before using force, used force against people who weren’t a threat, and used excessive force against people running from officers.

A spokesperson for the Louisiana State Police did not answer questions about the report’s findings but said the agency is working to improve its relationship with citizens and other stakeholders. Landry’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the report and the state’s response, and Murrill’s office declined to comment.

Across the state line in Lexington, Mississippi, the Justice Department’s shift away from police accountability could also be consequential. Department officials said residents there were so afraid of local police that they were hesitant to meet with investigators in public, fearful of retaliation.

They had good reason to be concerned. In 2023, officers arrested an attorney who was representing citizens in police abuse cases against the department. She had been filming a traffic stop at the time.

The police force — made up of about 10 officers, some of whom are part time — is the smallest the Justice Department has investigated in decades. Federal investigators ultimately found that its officers use excessive force, discriminate against Black people, conduct stops and searches without probable cause, and arrest people purely for not having the money to pay fines.

It’s unclear what steps, if any, the Lexington Police Department is taking in response to the report. Police Chief Charles Henderson declined to comment and directed questions to the city attorney, who did not return a call.

Reform advocates have put their hopes in upcoming elections in Lexington that could bring in new leadership that is more interested in making changes at the police department.

In Mount Vernon, New York, advocates say they’ve seen little movement since the Justice Department found police there use excessive force, conduct unlawful strip and body cavity searches of arrestees, and fail to properly train officers and supervisors. It also found police discriminated against Black people. One group is considering legal action to bring the city to the table.

“It seems like Mount Vernon has put lip service on addressing the findings,” said Daniel Lambright, an attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union. “It remains unclear actually what they’re doing to address the findings.”

In their report, federal investigators expressed concern that the police department’s “overly aggressive tactics unnecessarily escalate encounters.” In one instance, they wrote, five Mount Vernon officers used force on a man they thought was selling drugs — without announcing their presence or attempting to arrest him peacefully. Instead, one of the officers approached the man from behind and attempted to put him in an “upper body hold,” which started an altercation, according to the report. Police then threw the man to the ground. One officer drove his Taser into the suspect five times while another repeatedly punched him in the head. The man suffered a broken nose.

“The reform efforts have to continue,” said the Rev. Stephen Pogue, a member of the United Black Clergy of Westchester, an organization that works on social justice matters in Mount Vernon and surrounding areas. “We’re not in one of those places where Trump is our god. In Mount Vernon, we still need Jesus.”

Pogue said he hopes the city will host a public meeting about the report before the summer.

Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard and a police spokesperson did not reply to interview requests. But in December, the mayor said in a statement that the city would work with the Justice Department to address its findings. “We wholeheartedly support our good officers and at the same time will not tolerate and will punish unconstitutional policing,” she said.

In Phoenix, city and police officials have sent conflicting signals about the federal investigation, which found the Police Department used excessive and deadly force, violated the rights of homeless people, and discriminated against Black, Latino, Native American people, as well as those who have behavioral disabilities. “Why the hell would anybody ever accept a consent decree?” said one City Council member months before the report was released. Afterward, the head of the police union said the investigation was a “farce” and part of an “unprofessional smear campaign.”

But Mayor Kate Gallego has said the city is taking the report seriously. In September, the City Council passed several police reform measures, including requiring all officers who deal with the public to use body-worn cameras, even the special units that have been at the center of controversial shootings.

“Regardless of the new federal administration, these reforms are moving forward, and the mayor’s commitment to improving the police department is unwavering,” a mayoral spokesperson told ProPublica.

Some of the other cities the Justice Department had targeted are taking small steps toward fixing problems the federal investigators identified, though it’s unclear whether the efforts will result in lasting change.

In Oklahoma City, where Justice found in January that police officers discriminate against people with behavioral health disabilities, the city recently began funding mobile mental health units that can respond to incidents instead of police, said Jessica Hawkins, chair of the city’s Crisis Intervention Advisory Group. She said the city is also working on a written response to the DOJ report but didn’t know when it would be completed.

Police Chief Ron Bacy declined ProPublica’s request for an interview and through a spokesperson said the department was “still reviewing the report.”

In Memphis, Tennessee, where federal investigators found that police use excessive force, conduct unlawful stops and discriminate against Black people, the mayor put together a reform task force, led by a retired federal judge. “The DOJ report, in our case, kick-started a conversation that had sort of gone cold,” said Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, an organization that works on litigation and justice matters in Memphis.

And in Trenton, New Jersey, where the Justice Department found that local police have a pattern or practice of using excessive force and conducting unlawful pedestrian and vehicle stops, City Council member Jasi Edwards has been hosting community meetings to introduce the idea of a civilian complaint review board and build support for the measure. Edwards said she plans to formally put forth her proposal sometime in the fall.

It will likely run into resistance, though. Representatives of the Police Department and mayor told ProPublica that they didn’t believe a civilian review board was necessary because it would be costly and there are existing ways for citizens to complain about police conduct. The DOJ report, they said, highlighted some areas in need of improvement but mischaracterized a number of cases and gave an inaccurate depiction of the department’s culture.

In Worcester, Massachusetts, reforms are already moving forward in response to the Justice Department’s investigation.

Last month, the police chief released a 15-page report on proposed measures intended to remedy the problems identified by federal investigators. The changes, which are still awaiting legal review, include prohibiting police from releasing K-9 dogs into mass gatherings or riot scenes and requiring a supervisor to go to a scene if someone reports being injured by police.

The police chief, Paul Socier, has also proposed several changes to how officers approach prostitution. Investigators found the department engaged in “outrageous government conduct” with sex workers by having sexual contact during undercover operations.

“We are hopefully headed in the right direction,” said Audra Doody, co-executive director of Safe Exit Initiative, an organization in Worcester that provides services, housing and counseling to sex workers who want to leave the sex trade. “With a time of such uncertainty, I want to believe our people in the community are telling the truth and actually are going to do what they say they’re going to do, which they seem like they are, right now.”

ProPublica is reporting on how the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the federal government will impact the Department of Justice and its work on civil rights. If you’re a former or current Justice Department employee and you want to send us a tip, please contact us. We’re especially interested in the department’s Civil Rights Division. Topher Sanders can be reached by phone or on Signal at 904-254-0393 or by email at topher.sanders@propublica.org.

by Hannah Allam

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

With a line of cars waiting behind them at the train station, the two women hugged tightly as they said goodbye at the end of a spring break that hadn’t turned out to be the relaxing vacation they’d imagined.

Their girls trip had transformed into endless conversations about security precautions as one of the friends, 30-year-old Turkish national Rümeysa Öztürk, grew increasingly worried she would become a target of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign.

Öztürk, a former Fulbright scholar in a doctoral program at Tufts University, was stunned to find out in early March that she had been targeted by a pro-Israel group that highlighted an op-ed she co-wrote last year criticizing the school’s response to the war in Gaza.

Her concern deepened days later with the detention of former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident the government is trying to deport over his role in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus.

By the time of Öztürk’s spring break trip on March 15, she was consumed with anxiety, said her friend E., an Arab American academic on the East Coast who asked to withhold her name and other identifying details for security reasons.

During their reunion in E.’s hometown, the first time they’d been together since the summer, the friends looked up know-your-rights tutorials and discussed whether Öztürk should cut short her doctoral program. They spent their last day together filling out intake forms for legal aid groups — just in case.

Right up until their last minutes together at the train station, they wrestled with how cautious Öztürk should be when she returned to Massachusetts. Öztürk wondered if she should avoid communal dinners, a feature of Muslim social life during the holy month of Ramadan.

“I told her to keep going out, to be with her community. I wanted her to live her life,” E. recalled, her voice breaking.

“And then she got abducted in broad daylight.”

By now, much of the country has seen the footage of Oztürk’s capture.

Surveillance video from March 25 shows her walking to dinner in Somerville, Massachusetts, near the Tufts campus, chatting on the phone with her mother when she is swarmed by six masked plainclothes officers. Öztürk screams.

Within three minutes, she’s bundled into an unmarked car and whisked away, a jarring scene that showed the nation what President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign looks like on the street level: federal agents ambushing a Muslim woman who co-wrote an op-ed in a college newspaper.

The footage drew worldwide outrage and turned Öztürk into a powerful symbol of the Department of Homeland Security dragnet.

Surveillance Video of Rümeysa Öztürk’s Capture (Obtained by ProPublica)

Watch video ➜

To piece together what’s happened since then, ProPublica examined court filings and interviewed attorneys and Öztürk’s close friend, who regularly speaks to her in detention. What emerges is a more intimate picture of Öztürk and how a child development researcher charged with no crime ended up in a crowded cell in Louisiana. The interviews and court records also provide a glimpse into a sprawling, opaque apparatus designed to deport the maximum number of people with minimum accountability.

Her lawyers describe it as the story of a Trump-era rendition, a callback to the post-9/11 practice of federal agents grabbing Muslim suspects off the street and taking them to locations known for harsh conditions and shoddy oversight.

Öztürk is among nearly 1,000 students whose visas have been revoked, according to a tally by the Association of International Educators. And she is among several students and professors who have been detained.

Her detention was exceptional, immigration attorneys said, because it was caught on camera. What’s scariest, they say, is how fast the removals happen and how little is known about them.

Homeland Security spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment.

The video of Öztürk’s arrest surfaced because Boston-area activists had set up a hotline for locals to report interactions with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The call that came in about Öztürk reported a “kidnapping,” said Fatema Ahmad of the Muslim Justice League, part of the advocacy network that obtained the footage.

“What broke me was her screaming. And knowing that the same thing had just happened to almost 400 people in the Boston area the week before,” she said, referring to a recent six-day ICE operation.

After her arrest, Öztürk was held by ICE incommunicado for nearly 24 hours, her attorneys said, during which time she suffered the first of four asthma attacks.

Only later, through court filings and conversations with Öztürk, her attorneys learned that in the course of a single night she was taken from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and then Vermont, where the next morning, she was loaded onto a plane and flown to an ICE outpost in Alexandria, Louisiana.

Her last stop was a detention center in Basile about an hour away, where she remains, one of two dozen women in a damp, mouse-infested cell built to hold 14, according to court filings.

ICE officials say in court documents they couldn’t find a bed for Öztürk in New England, adding that out-of-state transfers are “routinely conducted after arrest, due to operational necessity.”

Immigration attorneys say the late-night hopscotch was an ICE tactic to complicate jurisdiction and thwart legal attempts to stop Öztürk’s removal. Louisiana and Texas, they say, are favored destinations because the courts there are viewed as friendlier to the Trump administration’s MAGA agenda, issuing decisions limiting migrant rights.

“It was like a relay race, and she was the baton,” Öztürk’s attorney Mahsa Khanbabai said.

“Whole Other Level of Terror”

On March 4, two weeks before their spring break reunion, Öztürk texted her friend E. to say she’d been “doxxed” by Canary Mission, part of an array of shadowy, right-wing Jewish groups that are criticized for using cherry-picked statements and distorted context to portray even mild criticism of Israel as antisemitism or support for terrorism.

For more than a decade, hard-line pro-Israel groups have publicized the names of pro-Palestinian activists, academics and students, often with scant or dubious “evidence” to back allegations of anti-Jewish bigotry. The goal, civil liberties advocates say, is to silence protesters through campaigns that have cost targets jobs and led to death threats. On its website, Canary Mission said it is “motivated by a desire to combat” antisemitism on college campuses. It says it investigates individuals and groups “across the North American political spectrum, including the far-right, far-left and anti-Israel activists.”

The effort was stepped up during the wave of student protests that erupted in opposition to the war in Gaza.

Öztürk’s entry on the Canary Mission site, posted in February, claims she “engaged in anti-Israel activism in 2024,” citing the op-ed she co-wrote more than a year ago that accused Tufts of ignoring students’ calls to divest from companies with ties to Israel over human rights concerns.

“I can not believe how much time people have,” Öztürk texted her friend when she saw the post.

E. responded with an open-mouthed “shocked” emoji. The Canary Mission entry, she said, had unlocked “a whole other level of terror” for Öztürk.

“It was that feeling of having your privacy be so violated — for people to spend all this time and energy on one op-ed,” E. said.

The op-ed published in The Tufts Daily was signed by four authors, including Öztürk, and endorsed by more than 30 other unnamed students. The language echoed the statements of United Nations officials and international war crimes investigators about the death toll in Gaza, which according to health officials there has passed 50,000, with about a third of the casualties under 18.

Öztürk, an advocate for children in communities plagued by violence, was personally heartsick over images of burned and mangled Palestinian children. But she was not a prominent activist or a fixture at campus protests, her friends and attorneys say.

Öztürk’s attorneys, who are scheduled to appear Monday before a federal judge in Vermont, say the sole basis for revoking her visa appears to be the op-ed highlighted by Canary Mission.

Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer representing Öztürk, said pro-Israel groups are providing the administration with lists of targets for its deportation campaign against noncitizen student protesters. “The sequence of events,” he said, “is op-ed, doxxing, detention.”

Pro-Israel groups, including Canary Mission, have boasted about their influence on the Trump administration’s targeting of student protesters. Immigration officials insist that they make their own removal decisions based on a number of factors, including a hard line on criticism of Israel.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he has revoked more than 300 student visas, including for Khalil and Öztürk, under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which permits the deportation of noncitizens who are deemed “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests” of the United States.

“We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist who tears up our university campuses,” Rubio told a news conference last month in response to a question about Öztürk’s detention. “Every day I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”

A spokesperson said the State Department does not comment on ongoing litigation.

In a call with reporters on Thursday, attorney Marc Van Der Hout of Khalil’s legal team said the authority Rubio cites was intended for rare occasions involving high-level diplomatic matters, “not to be used to go after people for First Amendment-protected activity.”

Overnight Odyssey

Surrounded by masked officers on March 25, Öztürk had no idea who was seizing her or where she was being taken, according to a statement filed on Thursday in federal court. The operatives were dressed in civilian clothes, she wrote, so at first she worried they were vigilantes spurred by Canary Mission.

“I had never seen police approach and take someone away like this,” she wrote. “I thought they were people who had doxxed me and I was afraid for my safety.”

Öztürk’s statement details her harrowing night being shuttled across New England with little food after a day of fasting for Ramadan. She describes being shackled by her feet and stomach and then driven to different sites for meetings with unidentified men, some in uniform and some not. One group so unsettled her, Öztürk wrote, that she “was sure they were going to kill me.”

At another stop, described in the statement as an isolated parking lot, Öztürk repeatedly asked an officer if she was in physical danger.

“He seemed to feel guilty and said ‘we are not monsters,’” Öztürk wrote.

At the last stop in Vermont, Öztürk wrote, she arrived famished and with “a lot of motion sickness from all the driving.” Officers took her biometric data and a DNA sample.

She would stay there for the night, in a cell with just a hard bench and a toilet. Officers gained access to her cellphone, she wrote, including personal photos of her without her religious headscarf.

“During the night they came to my cell multiple times and asked me questions about wanting to apply for asylum and if I was a member of a terrorist organization,” Öztürk wrote. “I tried to be helpful and answer their questions but I was so tired and didn’t understand what was happening to me.”

Around 4 the next morning, she wrote, she was shackled again in preparation for a trip to the airport. She was told the destination was Louisiana. Her statement to the court recounts the parting words of one of her jailers: “I hope we treated you with respect.”

At nearly every stage of her detention, Öztürk, who takes daily preventative medication for asthma, experienced asthma attacks, which she says are triggered by fumes, mold or stress, court files say.

During one in Louisiana, Öztürk wrote, a nurse took her temperature and said, “You need to take that thing off your head,” before removing her hijab without asking. When Öztürk protested, the nurse told her, “This is for your health.”

By her fourth wheezing episode, Öztürk wrote, she didn’t bother to seek attention from her jailers in Louisiana: “I didn’t feel safe at the medical center.”

After the portrait Öztürk paints of ICE detention, her statement turns back to her old life, a reminder of how abruptly her world has shifted. From her cell in Louisiana, she described the plans she had in the coming months. Completing her dissertation. A conference in Minnesota. Students to mentor. A summer class to teach.

“I want to return to Tufts to resume all of my cherished work,” she concluded.

Reunion Interrupted

Öztürk and E. bonded in 2018 after meeting at a Muslim study group in New York, where they were both attending Columbia University.

They were in their 20s then, two bookish cat lovers who were serious about their studies and their faith. They went on nature walks and liked afternoon naps.

“Old ladies,” E. said with a laugh.

They remained close and took turns visiting after Öztürk left for Tufts and E. moved away from the city. Over the years, the pressures of grad school and distance had made their visits less frequent, E. said, so they’d been looking forward to their three-day spring break catch-up.

During the visit, E. said, the women broke their fast together and visited a mosque for late-night Ramadan prayers. They stopped by a children’s library Öztürk wanted to visit. They stayed up late talking, gaming out how to keep Öztürk safe from the Trump administration’s crackdown.

“She said, ‘I think this is going to be the last time I get to visit you,’” E. recalled. “I told her, ‘No, no, you’re going to be able to come again, don’t worry, and I’m going to come visit you.’ That all turned out to be wrong.”

The friends had kept in touch daily after parting at the train station. They exchanged mundane texts and voice notes about doing taxes and eating cookies. E. sent Öztürk a photo of the park where they had walked during their visit. “Rümeysa! The trees are starting to bloom again,” she wrote.

They last texted on March 25, a couple hours before Öztürk was detained on the way to dinner in Somerville.

E. didn’t find out what happened until the next morning, when she stumbled out of bed before dawn for the early meal Muslims eat before the daily Ramadan fast. Sipping her tea, E. scrolled through her phone and spotted a message that said, “Have you seen this?” alongside an alert about Öztürk’s arrest.

“It was like: ‘Is this real? Am I still asleep?’” she recalled.

E. said the idea of her gentle friend being swept into ICE custody still didn’t seem real until later that morning, when the video was released and she saw a familiar figure, in the same white jacket she’d worn on her visit.

“It was utterly nauseating to watch,” E. said. “So horrifying and so heartbreaking to see her have to be so violently taken that way.”

E. and Öztürk (Courtesy of E.) Trying to Be a “Good Detainee”

Two days after Öztürk’s transfer to Louisiana, E. received a call from a strange number that came up on her phone as “Prison/Jail.” It was Öztürk, in the first of what would become regular check-ins at random times of the day.

In interviews, E. showed ProPublica corroborating photos, text messages and voice notes of her interactions with her friend.

“She always starts with, ‘Is this a good time to talk?’ And I’m, like, ‘I’ve been waiting for this,’” E. said.

Some days, Öztürk sounds upbeat. Turkish diplomats, she told E., had delivered her a new hijab. Öztürk found a cookbook and noted a citrus salad recipe she might try someday. She cracked jokes about being too old to climb into a bunk bed every night.

In one call, Öztürk expressed relief that she’d filed her taxes before getting detained — a perfect example, E. said, of her overachieving friend’s wry sense of humor.

“She read the detainee handbook two times,” E. said. “She said, ‘I’m trying to be a good detainee.’”

Other calls are not as easy, E. said, adding that she didn’t want to divulge specifics out of respect for her friend’s privacy. In those harder talks, E. said, she wishes she could “be there to tell her it’ll be OK, give her a hug.”

Their conversations are sprinkled with reminders that Öztürk’s nightmare might not end soon. She asked for help canceling appointments and returning library books. She’s also in the process of requesting a single paperback, per detention regulations.

If approved, she wants E. to find her a guide for writing children’s literature, preferably with exercises she could do from her cell. E. said her heart ached when Öztürk asked her to make the book a long one.

The calls and tasks ease feelings of helplessness, E. said, an antidote for the guilt that sneaks up on her when she walks outside on a sunny day.

“How is it that we’re moving forward,” she said, “while my closest friend is rotting in this place?”

by T. Christian Miller

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

On a late afternoon in November 2017, Witney Arch told her 1-1/2-year-old son to stop playing and come inside. Upset, he grabbed her right breast when she picked him up. She experienced a shock of pain but did not think it was anything serious. A week later, however, the ache had not subsided. After trips to several doctors, a biopsy revealed that Arch had early-stage breast cancer. Her surgeon told her that it was likely invasive and aggressive.

By the end of January, she had made two critical decisions. She would get a double mastectomy. And she wanted her operation at the Center for Restorative Breast Surgery in New Orleans, a medical facility renowned for its highly specialized approach to breast cancer care and reconstruction. The two surgeons who founded it had pioneered techniques that used a woman’s own body tissue to form new breasts post mastectomy. The idea of a natural restoration appealed to Arch. “I don’t judge anybody for getting implants, especially if you’ve had cancer,” she said. “But I felt like I was taking something foreign out of my body, cancer, and I did not want to put something foreign back in.”

Arch was a 42-year-old preschool teacher for her church, with four young children, living in a suburb of New Orleans. The 1-1/2-year-old had been born with Sturge-Weber syndrome, a rare neurological disorder. Caring for him consumed her life. By nature upbeat and optimistic, Arch felt blessed that her son’s act of defiance had led to an early diagnosis. “We’re going to pray about this and we’re going to figure it out,” she told her husband.

Arch asked her insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana, for approval to go to the center for her care, and the company granted it, a process known as prior authorization. Then, a week or so before her surgery, Arch was wrangling child care and meal plans when she got a call from the insurer. The representative on the line was trying to persuade her to have the surgery elsewhere. She urged Arch to seek a hospital that, unlike the center, was in network and charged less. “Do you realize how much this is going to cost?” Arch remembered the agent asking. Arch did not need more stress, but here it was — from her own health plan. “I feel very comfortable with my decision,” she replied. “My doctor teaches other doctors around the world how to do this.” Over the next year, Arch underwent five operations to rid herself of cancer and reconstruct her breasts.

Witney Arch received authorization from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana for her mastectomy and breast restoration, but the insurer did not pay the full bill from the Center for Restorative Breast Surgery. (Daniella Zalcman for ProPublica)

Arch did not know it at the time, but her surgery would become evidence in a long-running legal fight between the breast center’s founders, surgeons Frank DellaCroce and Scott Sullivan, and Blue Cross, Louisiana’s biggest health insurance company, with an estimated two-thirds share of the market. DellaCroce and Sullivan had repeatedly sued the insurer, alleging that it granted approvals for surgery but then denied payments or paid only a fraction of patients’ bills. They pointed to calls like the one Arch received as proof of the company’s effort to drive away patients. The aggressive legal attack, they knew, was fraught. Litigation against the $3.4 billion company would take a long time and a lot of money. The chances of winning were slight. “You fight dragons at great peril,” DellaCroce would tell friends. But this September, after 18 years and several defeats in court, jurors found Blue Cross liable for fraud. They awarded the center $421 million — one of the largest verdicts ever to a single medical practice outside of a class-action lawsuit. In a statement, Blue Cross said it “disagrees with the jury’s decision, which we believe was wrong on the facts and the law. We have filed an appeal and expect to be successful.”

Frustration with insurers is at an all-time high. The December fatal shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson allegedly by Luigi Mangione serves as an extreme and tragic example. Doctors and insurers are locked into a perpetual conflict over health care costs, with patients caught in the middle. Doctors accuse insurance plans of blocking payments for health care treatments that can save the patients’ lives. Insurance companies insist they shouldn’t pay for procedures that they say are unnecessary or overpriced. It is easy to emerge from an examination of the American health care system with a cynicism that both sides are broken and corrupt.

However, interviews with scores of doctors, patients and insurance executives, as well as reviews of internal documents, regulatory filings and academic studies, reveal a fundamental truth: The two sides are not evenly matched. Insurance companies are players in the fight over money, and they are also the referees. Insurers produce their own guidelines to determine whether to pay claims. When a doctor appeals a denial, insurers make all the initial decisions. In legal settings, insurers are often given favorable standing in their ability to set what conditions they are required to cover. Federal and state insurance regulators lack the resources to pursue individual complaints against multibillion-dollar companies. Six major insurers, which include some of the nation’s largest companies, cover half of all Americans. They are pitted against tens of thousands of doctors’ practices and large hospital chains.

The Blue Cross trial provides a rare opportunity to expose in detail the ways that health insurance companies wield power over doctors and their patients. Blue Cross executives testified that the breast center charged too much money — sometimes more than $180,000 for an operation. The center, they said, deserved special attention because it had a history of questionable charges. But the insurer’s defense went even further, to the very meaning of “prior authorization,” which it had granted women like Arch to pursue surgery. The authorization, they said in court, recognized that a procedure was medically necessary, but it also contained a clause that it was “not a guarantee of payment.” Blue Cross was not obliged to pay the center anything, top executives testified. “Let me be clear: The authorization never says we’re going to pay you,” said Steven Udvarhelyi, who was the CEO for the insurer from 2016 to 2024, in a deposition. “That’s why there’s a disclaimer.

From 2015 through 2023, the Baton Rouge-based insurer paid, on average, less than 9% of the charges billed by the breast center for more than 7,800 individual medical procedures — even though it had authorized all of them. Thousands of such claims were never paid at all, according to court records. Testimony revealed that the health plan never considered thousands of appeals filed by the center. Corporate documents showed Blue Cross executives had set up secret processes for approving operations and reimbursing the clinic and its doctors that resulted in reduced fees and payment delays. One lucrative strategy: A national-level policy allowed Blue Cross Louisiana to take a cut of any savings it achieved in paying the breast center on behalf of patients covered by out-of-state Blue Cross companies, meaning the less the insurer paid out, the more it earned.

Let me be clear: The authorization never says we’re going to pay you. That’s why there’s a disclaimer.

—Steven Udvarhelyi, former Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana CEO

In Sullivan’s words, the insurer was hypocritical, “morally bankrupt.” Blue Cross had stranded many of the center’s patients with high bills, amounts that it had absorbed over the years. On several occasions, though, Blue Cross executives had signed special one-time deals with the center, known as single case agreements, to pay for their wives’ cancer treatment. To Sullivan, it seemed the insurer was willing to pay the center when patients had connections but would fight when patients did not.

Blue Cross declined to comment on any individual cases but said in a statement that single case agreements were “common in the industry” and were available to all members when needed to access out-of-network providers.

Dr. Scott Sullivan, left, and Dr. Frank DellaCroce, the founding surgeons of the Center for Restorative Breast Surgery and St. Charles Surgical Hospital (Daniella Zalcman for ProPublica) Chapter 1 The Center

Nobody would take the breast center and its adjoining hospital as an ordinary medical establishment. The two facilities take up a city block along St. Charles Avenue, the thoroughfare famous for its streetcars, Mardi Gras parades and Queen Anne mansions. Patients access the complex — created by merging a former law office, funeral home, car dealership and Dunkin’ Donuts — by driving around back where a porte cochere leads into a soaring atrium. Light pours in through windows set in the high ceiling. Arrangements of white orchids are scattered among comfortable couches and chairs. Here, women consult with doctors to plan their treatment. Surgeries are performed at the 39-bed hospital, which has an Icee machine in a family room. New-age music plays softly throughout the building. Rooms are designed to be as homey as possible, with medical gear hidden away and seascapes by a local artist hanging on the wall. One patient’s husband referred to it as a “spa-spital.”

The idea of combining the luxury feel of an upscale plastic surgery practice with the mission-driven zeal of a medical clinic came to DellaCroce and Sullivan while they were young surgeons. The two grew up in Louisiana. Sullivan spent much of his childhood in Mandeville, a suburb of New Orleans on the north side of Lake Ponchartrain, his dad employed in the oil and gas industry. His mother wanted him to be a priest or a doctor. “I definitely was not going to become a priest,” he said. DellaCroce’s father worked at the paper mill in West Monroe in the state’s northern neck. His mother, a nurse, gave him an appreciation for medicine as a career that was “meaningful and challenging.”

They became friends while working at the Louisiana State University medical center, where they earned the nickname “the Sushi Brothers” for their favorite lunch. They were drawn to microsurgery and breast reconstruction because it was an emerging field that was innovating and improving care. Both men became board-certified in plastic surgery. Sullivan, 60, is the hard-charging businessman, stocky, direct and blunt. DellaCroce, 58, with a ponytail, goatee and soft drawl, is more the diplomat, patient and cerebral. The pair have lectured around the world and written numerous medical journal articles.

A patient room in the St. Charles Surgical Hospital in New Orleans (Daniella Zalcman for ProPublica)

They opened their first office in 2003 in a single room rented from a fellow doctor at what was then known as Memorial Medical Center, the hulking private hospital in New Orleans. They performed operations at facilities throughout the region but found that most gave little consideration to their patients’ comfort. They wanted to build a different kind of hospital. “Can we give them that little bit of extra without breaking the budget to make the experience less awful? Can’t make it great, but can you make it less awful?” DellaCroce explained. “Can you attend to the human side of this patient and give them the added value of peace and confidence?” Hurricane Katrina set back their construction plans, and the new edifice, named the St. Charles Surgical Hospital, did not open its doors until 2009. It boasts of being the only hospital in the country devoted solely to care for breast cancer patients who have received mastectomies. The center does not provide radiation or chemotherapy treatments. The majority of patients come from out of state.

Women seeking to have their breasts restored after a mastectomy face two paths. Some choose a relatively straightforward surgical procedure using implants filled with silicone or another gel. The center specializes in the other option, what’s known as autologous tissue reconstruction, where a woman’s own fat is taken from one part of the body, like the bottom or the stomach, and used to rebuild the breast. The procedure requires a longer recovery time, but the new breasts become part of the body.

The transplant surgery is lengthy and complex. Operations can last up to 12 hours with big medical teams involved. One surgeon performs the mastectomy while another creates a new breast by knitting together layers of fat and tissue. Concentration is intense. The surgeons stare through glasses with microscopes to connect new blood vessels with a needle that’s thinner than an eyelash, using thread less than half the width of a human hair. DellaCroce and Sullivan invented techniques, for example, allowing tissue to be taken from multiple sites when a woman did not have enough fat in one part of her body for a full restoration.

Sullivan operates on a patient at St. Charles Surgical Hospital. (Daniella Zalcman for ProPublica)

One afternoon last fall, DellaCroce strode into a cavernous operating room to check on a patient. On the table in front of him, a woman lay covered in curtains of blue surgical cloth, only her torso exposed. Earlier in the day, a surgical oncologist had removed her right breast as part of a mastectomy to treat her cancer. Later, another surgeon had taken flaps of fat from her stomach and interlaced them with blood vessels to create a new breast to replace the lost one. Now, in the fifth hour of surgery, a physician’s assistant leaned over her midsection, closing an incision along her side with some final stitches. Nurses hurried around the space, preparing to wrap up the operation. Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al” played in the background. The smell of burnt flesh hung in the air. A blue light signaled that the new arteries were successfully pumping blood. “Wow, that woman looks really good,” DellaCroce told the physician’s assistant. “Nice job.”

There is no denying that the center’s high-end treatment means high costs. The median charge for an operation and hospital stay is about $165,000. DellaCroce and Sullivan hired consultants to review other well-regarded practices, who advised them their prices were competitive with their peers. “We weren’t asking to be paid LeBron James, best of the best, even though we feel we’re in the top 1 or 2% of the country,” Sullivan said. “We just wanted something fair.”

Chapter 2 Blue Cross and Blue Shield

It is one of the quirks of the American health care system that insurers almost never pay the prices for procedures demanded by doctors and hospitals.

To understand why requires a tour of the grand bargain at the heart of the health insurance system. Insurance companies negotiate with hospitals and doctors to discount reimbursements on medical procedures, like office visits or MRI scans. Providers who sign these contracts are in network. Insurance companies like in-network doctors because they can budget for health expenses and set premiums accordingly. Doctors and hospitals agree to be in network because they get a steady stream of insured patients.

DellaCroce and Sullivan held contracts with insurers that resulted in average payments to the center’s doctors in the $20,000 to $30,000 range. But DellaCroce and Sullivan never came to an agreement with Blue Cross. That made them an exception in Louisiana — the insurer is so dominant that 97% of local physicians and hospitals are in network. DellaCroce and Sullivan said the company was not offering them enough money — in some cases not even enough to cover the cost of the surgeries, they argued in court documents. The doctors and their hospital remained out of network, meaning they charged Blue Cross the full price for their procedures.

Such charges are controversial. Insurance companies and many health experts say they are too often inflated and untethered from actual costs. Physicians and hospitals say their fees are justified, reflecting the true price of medical care. In the end, insurers — especially in states like Louisiana, with few competitors — use their market power in negotiations to set reimbursements at what they want to pay, not what doctors charge.

At Blue Cross, Dwight Brower was charged with reviewing the bills from the breast center. He had worked as a physician at a small family practice in Baton Rouge and then at a local hospital before joining Blue Cross as a medical director. He helped oversee prior authorizations. While many patients assume that an approval means an insurer will pay for an operation, it is simply a recognition that a procedure is medically necessary. Federal law mandates that private insurers cover breast restorations for women who undergo mastectomies because of cancer or genetic risk. And patients, in general, are allowed to choose their own doctors.

However, since the center was out of network and had no contract with the insurer, Blue Cross determined how much it would pay for the treatment, and Brower believed that the breast center’s bills were exorbitant. “I did not think that they were reasonable,” he would later testify. Surgeons doing lung transplants or brain surgery rarely billed Blue Cross more than $50,000 for their work. Why should DellaCroce and Sullivan get so much more? “Don’t get me wrong. The surgeons at the center are extremely skilled,” he acknowledged. The operations were often lengthy. “But so are open-heart surgeries,” he said. “Relative to some of the other extremely complicated surgeries done by other surgeons in other areas of the body, it just seemed like their fee schedule was extremely high.”

Blue Cross Louisiana executives testified that they did not even consider doctors’ invoices when making decisions on what to reimburse because such charges were “unregulated” and “nonstandard.” Instead, they paid “an amount we establish” — unless the doctor’s bill was cheaper. In the end, the insurer said it settled on reimbursing the breast center about the same as in-network doctors performing similar operations, even though DellaCroce and Sullivan did not benefit from having patients referred to them. In practice, that meant the insurer paid out a fraction of the breast center’s bills. Of the 7,837 medical procedures in dispute in the lawsuit, involving 1,680 patients, Blue Cross paid about $43 million on invoices totaling $500 million. Some 60% of the claims weren’t reimbursed at all. The difference between the bill and the payment could be striking. For example, in the case of Arch, Blue Cross paid $8,580 out of $102,722 for one operation. For another, it paid $3,190 out of $34,975.

Fundamentally, I think their problem was that we were doctors who had control. That was regarded as a threat.

—Dr. Frank DellaCroce, Center for Restorative Breast Surgery co-founder

Executives said the Blue Cross reimbursements were fair, designed to keep premiums low for the nearly 2 million Louisianans who depended on the insurer to cover their health care. Paying the breast center’s full fees would add to its customers’ burden, they said. “If we were to just agree to any rates or any prices set by physicians or any providers, it would cause cost to be exorbitantly high for both the plan and for members particularly, because we wouldn’t be able to forecast or make sure those plans are actually sound,” said Curtis Anders, the vice president of provider networks for Blue Cross. “Premiums would increase.”

For many out-of-network doctors, payments lower than their invoices are an infuriating part of doing business. They absorb the costs, or pass them on to their patients, a practice known as balance billing that can result in medical debt. DellaCroce and Sullivan were the rare physicians with the tenacity to fight. The center collected money from both insurers and patients — but it carried the unpaid portion of invoices on its books. That amount grew every year as it battled Blue Cross.

DellaCroce and Sullivan were convinced that Blue Cross had singled them out for their obstreperousness, but they had no proof. Then, during a phone call one day, an employee for the center was talking to a Blue Cross representative to obtain a prior authorization. The representative let slip that the request required special handling. The breast center’s doctors were flagged on an internal roster. It was called the targeted list.

Chapter 3 Discoveries

On Dec. 8, 2023, several dozen attorneys and paralegals from Chehardy Sherman Williams, one of New Orleans’ top law firms, were celebrating their annual holiday party. They had gathered in a private dining room with gilded mirrors and shimmering chandeliers at Arnaud’s restaurant, a bastion of Creole cuisine in the heart of the French Quarter. The waiters served shrimp remoulade, prime rib and turtle soup. Small talk filled the air.

Suddenly, several attorneys’ cellphones buzzed as they all received the same email, a message from the lawyers for Blue Cross. It contained discovery for the case, more than 42,000 pages of internal documents, emails and policies. Matthew Sherman, one of the attorneys representing the center, turned to a colleague. “Can you believe this?” he asked. It was like something from a John Grisham novel, the kind of thing he and his friends had joked about at law school, a document dump at Christmas time. By long tradition, many of New Orleans’ biggest law firms hold their holiday parties on the same Friday afternoon in December. Afterward, rival attorneys from around town gather for drinks under a flag of truce at a local bar. Sherman realized there would be no afterparty this year. Nor much of a holiday vacation.

The delivery of the documents was a Christmas gift nearly 20 years in the making. DellaCroce and Sullivan’s first lawsuits against Blue Cross, involving 88 breach-of-contract claims filed in a Louisiana civil court beginning in 2006, were dismissed because of a federal court ruling regarding jurisdiction. A second lawsuit, which lasted from 2010 through 2017, resulted in limited discovery and a two-day trial in federal court. Jurors found that Blue Cross had failed to tell the center how much it would pay for procedures, but they also ruled the center had not been financially harmed. A judge dismissed the remaining claims.

DellaCroce and Sullivan launched their third lawsuit in February 2017 with a novel legal theory: They accused Blue Cross of fraud. They contended that for years the insurer had issued prior authorizations without the intention of paying the actual bills. Their lawyers had sought the targeted list during discovery to help prove the case. Blue Cross denied it existed.

But now, as Sherman and fellow attorney Patrick Follette began poring over the thousands of documents, they came upon a spreadsheet that said “Targeted Provider List.” The first names on the list were DellaCroce and Sullivan. It was labeled “confidential” and dated June 2007 — about a year after the pair had filed their first lawsuit against Blue Cross alleging nonpayment. More digging turned up other documents. There was a “blocked” list that also featured the two doctors.

A corporate policy document provided what DellaCroce and Sullivan considered the most revealing explanation for Blue Cross’ financial motivation. Blue Cross insurers are independent companies that operate under a common set of rules, similar to franchisees in a fast-food chain. When a person covered by Blue Cross in their home state receives treatment in another state, the Blue Cross where the treatment occurs pays the provider and then recoups the cost from the home-state plan. What the attorneys discovered was that Blue Cross Louisiana would receive a share of any savings it could generate for the home-state plan. Say, for instance, Blue Cross Alabama was facing a bill of $5,000 for a procedure. If Blue Cross Louisiana instead paid $1,000, it saved the Alabama plan $4,000. The policy allowed Blue Cross Louisiana to earn 16% of the savings — in this scenario, $640.

For DellaCroce and Sullivan, the revelations cemented their belief that Blue Cross was a bad corporate actor more interested in power and control than health care. The percentage fee incentivized the insurer to pay the doctors as little as possible. The bigger the savings, the more Blue Cross made. “It’s win-win,” DellaCroce said. “That’s their pay day.”

As the trial approached, Blue Cross attempted to settle the case. DellaCroce and Sullivan refused the offer as too low.

James Williams, left, and Matthew Sherman, the lawyers who represented DellaCroce and Sullivan in their suit against Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana (Daniella Zalcman for ProPublica) Chapter 4 The Trial

On the afternoon of Sept. 5, 2024, the case — St. Charles Surgical Hospital, L.L.C. and Center for Restorative Breast Surgery, L.L.C. v. Louisiana Health Service & Indemnity Company D/B/A Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Louisiana, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Louisiana, Inc. and HMO Louisiana, Inc. — opened in Division C of the Orleans Parish Civil District Court, a high-ceilinged room with dark brown benches and tables, fake marble columns and fluorescent lights. James Williams, the chief litigator for the hospital, had already impressed the 45 potential jurors by memorizing all their names and backgrounds during jury selection. Now, he stood up and placed a football on the plaintiff’s table in front of the 12 chosen to try the case, which included a third grade teacher, a movie stunt double and a hotel manager. He warned them that they would hear a lot of “insurance talk” from Blue Cross. “I’m going to ask you, ladies and gentlemen on the jury, keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on what this case is about,” Williams told them. “If they start saying things like, ‘Well, oh, we paid them what we thought was fair, 9%,’ keep your eye on the ball, right?”

Over 10 days — interrupted by a two-day break to allow a hurricane to pass across Louisiana — Williams made his case that Blue Cross had defrauded his clients by making promises to pay but failing to deliver.

Much of Blue Cross’ defense had relied on the notice that a prior authorization was no guarantee of payment. The insurer had not committed fraud, it said, since it never explicitly promised the center to reimburse anything. Udvarhelyi, the former CEO, had insisted on that. But on the stand, Blue Cross witnesses provided a more nuanced explanation. They acknowledged that the disclaimer was not meant as a general excuse to free the company from paying bills. A prior authorization “usually” resulted in a payment, testified Brower, who reviewed the center’s bills. He said that the notice was intended for specific situations. For instance, Blue Cross would not cover a woman who dropped out of her insurance before the operation. Nor would it pay anything if a patient had not met her deductible. But otherwise, Brower said, Blue Cross intended to compensate for a procedure that it had authorized. “It’s inappropriate for us as a company to approve a code and then turn around and deny it,” Brower said.

During the trial, Williams told jurors to “keep your eye on the ball.” (Daniella Zalcman for ProPublica)

Over the years, the center had appealed thousands of reimbursements for being too low. It hired additional employees to manage the paperwork. At the trial, Blue Cross revealed that it had never considered any of the appeals — nor had it ever told the center that they were pointless. “An appeal is not available to review an underpayment,” acknowledged Paula Shepherd, a Blue Cross executive vice president. The insurer simply issued an edict — the payment was correct.

This was the core of the case. The insurer set the rules. The insurer set the prices. Doctors could appeal to a state insurance regulator. But if that failed, and it often did, the only recourse was a long, costly lawsuit.

Williams summed up for the jury the center’s treatment at the hands of Blue Cross: “Our payments are slow pay, low pay or no pay.”

In countering those arguments, Blue Cross witnesses explained that the insurer was committed to paying for Louisianans’ health care and keeping costs low. As a nonprofit, it directed any excess revenue from operations back into the business. (Udvarhelyi, the CEO, did acknowledge that his salary, over $1 million, included bonuses that depended on hitting revenue targets and increasing membership.)

Brian West, a Blue Cross executive who monitored payments, said the center had engaged in “egregious” billing practices. “They are bad actors in the billing world,” he said. But company witnesses offered only a handful of examples. Sometimes the center mistakenly coded its bills in a way that appeared to charge for four separate breast reconstructions in a single operation. In other cases, the center asked for payment for two surgeons in the room at the same time. But Blue Cross, following Medicare guidelines, would pay two surgeons only 20% more than the reimbursement for a single surgeon.

An appeal is not available to review an underpayment.

—Paula Shepherd, Blue Cross Louisiana executive vice president

Blue Cross did not accuse the center of any intentional miscoding — but the sloppy billing led to additional scrutiny, the company’s witnesses said. The targeted list, a witness testified, had been created especially for the center, requiring all prior authorization requests to bypass normal routes for a special review by company doctors. The blocked list meant that each bill from the center received a manual scrub by payment specialists before reimbursement. Blue Cross acknowledged the careful checking often resulted in the need for more information from the center, which could result in slower processing of claims. But the lists, executives insisted, were not designed to reduce payments. “Basically, no harm was done,” said Becky Juncker, who was involved in approving surgical procedures.

Company witnesses explained that the 16% received in saving money for out-of-state Blue Cross insurers was a fee to cover the costs of handling adjustments of the claim — though they were not able to explain why Blue Cross did not charge a flat fee for its services.

Blue Cross also defended itself against the accusation that it had paid nothing for 60% of the charges for individual procedures. Witnesses said the insurer had followed industry practice in bundling charges to make a single payment for an operation. An attorney for the center noted that it had never agreed to take bundled payments — Blue Cross had imposed them.

As to the calls to women like Arch? That was an effort to save members money. “Our medical area would reach out to our members who were utilizing out-of-network providers to help them understand the, I would say, the financial implications,” said Shepherd, the Blue Cross executive vice president, in a deposition. “It could be financially catastrophic to a member to have an out-of-network claim that they are financially responsible for. It’s a huge difference.”

In summing up the case, Kim Boyle, the lead attorney for the company, told jurors that Blue Cross had not committed fraud. It had acted to ensure the company and its members paid a fair price for the center’s services, she said. “There’s no scheme. There’s no plot. There’s no mafia. There are no Blue Cross employees of Louisiana that are sitting in some smoke-filled room in Baton Rouge, plotting against these plaintiffs on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans,” Boyle said. “It’s fiction; it’s fancy; it’s completely made up.”

On Sept. 20, at 1:57 p.m., Judge Sidney H. Cates IV sent the jurors to deliberate. The center attorneys retreated to a nearby hotel to await the verdict. About two hours later, they were summoned back to Division C. Williams put his head down and swore. He worried that such a quick return in the legally complex case meant victory for Blue Cross.

The center’s lawyers paid close attention to Cates as he reviewed the jurors’ decision. It was a two-page form. If the jurors found in favor of Blue Cross, the judge would have no reason to read on. Cates flipped to the second page: The jurors had found Blue Cross liable for fraud. “Please express in dollars the total monetary compensation, if any, Blue Cross owes the hospital and the center for the damages,” Cates said, reading from the verdict. “Net damages, $421,488,633.” The center’s lawyers stood and shook hands as the insurer’s attorneys prepared to leave the courtroom.

DellaCroce was in surgery at the hospital, having expected a longer deliberation. Sullivan was in the courtroom to hear the verdict. Afterward, jurors approached and thanked him for his work. He teared up. “We would have given more if we had been asked for more. That’s how egregious the fraud was,” Juliet Laughlin, a 58-year-old property manager who served as forewoman, later said. “There had been wrong done.”

Blue Cross has appealed the verdict. A health insurance trade group has warned that the finding sets a dangerous precedent. If allowed to stand, insurance companies in Louisiana may find themselves forced to pay whatever price is demanded by out-of-network doctors — which in turn could raise health insurance premiums across the state, the Louisiana Association of Health Plans said in a statement.

For DellaCroce and Sullivan, the verdict was vindication. They had refused to sign contracts they thought unfair. They had rejected settlement offers they thought too low. The trial had revealed Blue Cross’ domineering behavior. “Fundamentally, I think their problem was that we were doctors who had control,” DellaCroce said. “That was regarded as a threat.”

In the months since the judgment, Blue Cross has not changed its practices, the doctors said. It has not approached with an offer that would bring the hospital in network. It still issues prior authorizations for women’s surgeries. And it still pays only a fraction of the billed fees.

How We Reported the Story

This account is based on a review of thousands of pages of trial transcripts, depositions, federal and state court records, and internal corporate documents from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana, the Center for Restorative Breast Surgery and the St. Charles Surgical Hospital; scores of interviews with doctors, patients and insurance executives; medical records; regulatory filings; and reports by academics, experts and the Louisiana state Senate. Some corporate documents discussed in court were placed under seal after the trial’s conclusion. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana was provided a detailed list of questions and responded with a written statement, cited in part in the story. The company declined to make any employees available for an interview. Former Blue Cross CEO Steven Udvarhelyi declined to comment, and former employee Dwight Brower did not respond to phone calls or emails.

Freelance photographer Daniella Zalcman contributed reporting.

Correction

April 14, 2025: This story originally misspelled the name of the material used in some breast implants. It is silicone, not silicon.

by Lisa Song

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

Update, April 16, 2025: Janitorial services at Montlake Laboratory were restored on Monday.

Federal scientists responsible for monitoring the health of West Coast fisheries are cleaning office bathrooms and reconsidering critical experiments after the Department of Commerce failed to renew their lab’s contracts for hazardous waste disposal, janitorial services, IT and building maintenance.

Trash is piling up at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, staffers told ProPublica. Ecologists, chemists and biologists at Montlake Laboratory, the center’s headquarters in Seattle, are taking turns hauling garbage to the dumpster and discussing whether they should create a sign-up sheet to scrub toilets.

The scientists — who conduct genetic sampling of endangered salmon to check the species’ stock status and survival — routinely work with chemicals that can burn skin, erupt into flames and cause cancer. At least one said they’d have to delay mission-critical research if hazardous waste removal isn’t restored.

The deteriorating conditions at Montlake stem from a new policy at the Commerce Department that says Secretary Howard Lutnick must personally approve all contracts over $100,000. NPR reported that the bottleneck has disrupted operations at many NOAA facilities.

ProPublica spoke to three Montlake employees who described what it was like to work there as, one by one, service contracts expire and aren’t renewed. People are running around looking for compost bags and wondering who will empty out the female sanitary waste containers in the bathrooms, they said. The floors are getting dirty and workers have no access to vacuums or mops. Some scientists have bought their own soap and cleaning supplies.

Nor can people escape by working from home: the Trump administration has increasingly ordered federal workers to return to the office five days a week. At Montlake, that policy will apply to everyone by April 21.

“It’s making our work unsafe, and it’s unsanitary for any workplace,” but especially an active laboratory full of fire-reactive chemicals and bacteria, one Montlake researcher said.

Press officers at NOAA, the Commerce Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Montlake employees were informed last week that a contract for safety services — which includes the staff who move laboratory waste off-campus to designated disposal sites — would lapse after April 9, leaving just one person responsible for this task. Hazardous waste “pickups from labs may be delayed,” employees were warned in a recent email.

The building maintenance team’s contract expired Wednesday, which decimated the staff that had handled plumbing, HVAC and the elevators. Other contacts lapsed in late March, leaving the Seattle lab with zero janitorial staff and a skeleton crew of IT specialists.

During a big staff meeting at Montlake on Wednesday, lab leaders said they had no updates on when the contracts might be renewed, one researcher said. They also acknowledged it was unfair that everyone would need to pitch in on janitorial duties on top of their actual jobs.

Nick Tolimieri, a union representative for Montlake employees, said the problem is “all part of the large-scale bullying program” to push out federal workers. It seems like every Friday “we get some kind of message that makes you unable to sleep for the entire weekend,” he said. Now, with these lapsed contracts, it’s getting “more and more petty.”

The problems, large and small, at Montlake provide a case study of the chaos that’s engulfed federal workers across many agencies as the Trump administration has fired staff, dumped contracts and eliminated long-time operational support. Yesterday, hundreds of NOAA workers who had been fired in February, then briefly reinstated, were fired again.

Local management had new service contracts ready to go ages ago, Tolimieri said. The delay from headquarters means employees will struggle to get repairs for their computers or basic building maintenance; the aging elevators at Montlake already break so often that Tolimieri joked it would be easier to send notices on the occasions when they did work.

The fisheries center employs more than 350 people, most of whom work at Montlake. The rest are scattered across several research stations in Oregon and Washington.

Staff at the center conduct research and provide scientific advice for policies on sustainable fishing and endangered species, including a population of orcas in Puget Sound. They test seafood after oil spills to ensure the fish are safe to eat. Their work helps restore native salmon populations and support regional farming.

NOAA is “so uncontroversial,” said the Montlake researcher who’s worried about hazardous waste disposal. Employees are just “trying to do weather reports and give people good seafood.”

The researcher said lab workers are trained in basic lab safety, so the chemicals are properly stored, handled and placed into appropriate waste containers after use. But there’s a limit to how much chemical waste can be kept on site. And the contractors who left were experts on handling emergencies like large chemical spills or serious toxic exposures.

If those contractors don’t return soon, the researcher said, the lab may need to delay or pause important research.

That could include chemical-intensive lab work like testing sea lions, killer whales and walruses from Alaska for environmental contaminants, Tolimieri said.

“For a bunch of people who are screaming about efficiency,” he said, referring to the administration’s efforts to downsize the federal government, “they’ve done the most inefficient things possible.”

by Peter Elkind

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

Donald Trump makes no secret of his loathing for regulations that limit water and energy use by home appliances. For years, he has regaled supporters at his campaign rallies with fanciful stories about their impact. He is so exercised by the issue that, even as global stock markets convulsed Wednesday in response to his tariff plans, Trump took time out to issue an executive order titled “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads.”

Contemporary shower fixtures are only one of the items that rankle the president, who complains that “there’s no water coming and you end up standing there five times longer,” making it difficult to coif his “perfect” hair. He has frequently denounced dishwashers that he claims take so long and clean so poorly that “the electric bill is ten times more than the water”; toilets that require flushing “ten or 15 times”; and LED lightbulbs, which he faults for making him look orange.

In his first term, Trump pursued an array of gimmicks to try to undermine the rules. His moves were opposed by industry and environmental groups alike. If it’s possible for regulations to be popular, these ones are. They have cut America’s water and energy consumption, reduced global-warming emissions and saved consumers money. Legal prohibitions stymied most of Trump’s maneuvers back then, and the Biden administration quickly reversed the steps Trump managed to take.

Trump’s executive order on showerheads generated headlines, but it’s likely to have little effect (more on that later). Far more consequential steps have been taken outside the Oval Office.

With the aid of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team, Trump appears to be attempting an end run that could succeed where his past attempts failed: by simply terminating the consulting contract that the Department of Energy relies on to develop and enforce the rules. In late March, DOGE’s “wall of receipts” stated that it had “deleted” a Department of Energy contract for Guidehouse LLP (a PricewaterhouseCoopers spinoff) for “Appliance Standards Analysis and Regulatory Support Service,” producing a listed savings of $247,603,000. That item has now disappeared from the DOGE website, and its current status remains unclear.

This has produced confusion for everyone from appliance manufacturers to government officials to the contractors paid to enforce the rules. If the contract is indeed canceled, experts told ProPublica, it would cripple the government’s efficiency standards program, which relies on the consulting firm’s technical expertise and testing labs to update standards, ensure compliance and punish violators.

“It would have a huge impact,” said George Washington University law professor Emily Hammond, who helped run the program as deputy general counsel at the Department of Energy and now serves on its appliance standards advisory committee. “DOE does not have the internal capacity to do that work. Taking that away pulls the rug out from under the agency’s ability to run that regulatory program.”

Appliance manufacturers seem almost as concerned. “This is not a positive development,” said Josh Greene, vice president for government affairs at A.O. Smith, the largest manufacturer of water heaters in the U.S. Terminating the Guidehouse contract, he said, would create “a wild Wild West” where “upstart manufacturers” are free to import poor-quality products because “they know there’s no one to enforce the rules. That’s not good for American manufacturing and it’s not good for consumers.”

The Department of Energy has made no public attempts to clarify the matter. An agency spokesperson did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. Emails to DOGE and the White House brought no reply. And Guidehouse officials, reportedly eager to lay low, also offered no response to multiple requests for comment.

The government’s efficiency requirements originated with the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, signed into law in 1975, when the concern was an energy shortage, not global warming. Today, the Department of Energy is required to set rules for energy and water use by more than 70 appliances and commercial products sold in the U.S. The agency must consider imposing stricter standards for each product every eight years, based on what is “technologically feasible and economically justified.” Manufacturers then have three to five years to make their products measure up.

The Energy Department typically stiffens a requirement only after years of study, comment, negotiation and testing (and sometimes litigation) among industry, consumer and environmental groups. The law also includes an “anti-backsliding” provision that bars relaxation of standards that have been finalized. Guidehouse and its subcontractors have for years performed virtually all the necessary technical work; they also maintain a certification database that U.S. authorities use to keep illegal products from being imported.

Republican lawmakers, anti-regulation advocates and right-wing media have long decried the efficiency rules as an impingement on personal freedom, limiting product choice. The early rollout of water-throttling products produced some of the issues Trump complains about, lampooned in a 1996 “Seinfeld” episode titled “The Shower Head.”

But in the decades since, the standards have been widely embraced, dramatically cutting energy and water consumption, reducing emissions and providing plenty of attractive consumer choices. In 2023, Consumer Reports found that “even the simplest and least expensive showerheads can provide a satisfying shower.” Dishwashers and clothes washers clean better while using less than half as much water and energy as they once did. The transition to LED light bulbs, nearly complete, is estimated to have cut energy bills by $3 billion a year and eliminated the need for about 30 large power plants.

In January, days before Trump returned to office, a Department of Energy report estimated that the efficiency standards are now saving the average American household about $576 a year on their utility bills, while cutting the nation’s energy consumption by 6.5% and water consumption by 12%. A 2022 survey by the Consumer Federation of America found that 76% of Americans support the government setting efficiency standards for appliances.

None of that has slowed Trump’s attacks. During his first term, the Department of Energy ignored legal deadlines for considering efficiency updates on 28 products, blocked the long-planned rollout of new lightbulb rules and sought to bypass finalized appliance standards through byzantine legal maneuvers. Among other things, the Energy Department announced special new “product classes” for dishwashers, clothes washers and dryers that completed their “normal” cycle in an hour or less. This would exempt any such “short-cycle” devices that were introduced from the existing limits on water and energy use.

Manufacturers never brought those models to market. Most existing appliances already had a “short cycle” option that did their job well; those short on time simply had to push that button. And by mid-2022, Biden’s Energy Department had reversed Trump’s regulatory moves. The department went on to issue an array of tightened home appliance rules jointly recommended by industry and consumer groups; most were finalized early enough to be immune from congressional rollback.

This didn’t stop Trump from boasting on the 2024 campaign trail that he had changed everything during his first term. He vowed to fix it all again when he returned to the White House. “Eliminate energy efficiency standards for appliances” was on Project 2025’s list of “needed reforms.”

Sure enough, on his first day back in the White House, Trump issued two executive orders targeting the efficiency rules. On Feb. 11, he posted on Truth Social: “I am hereby instructing Secretary Lee Zeldin to immediately go back to my Environmental Orders, which were terminated by Crooked Joe Biden, on Water Standard and Flow pertaining to SINKS, SHOWERS, TOLIETS, WASHING MACHINES, DISHWASHERS, etc., and to likewise go back to the common sense standards on LIGHTBULBS, that were put in place by the Trump Administration, but terminated by Crooked Joe. I look forward to signing these orders.” (In fact, the rules Trump cited were issued and enforced by the Department of Energy, not the Environmental Protection Agency, where Administrator Zeldin presides.)

None of the standards Trump listed were subject to an executive order, or any other kind of rapid rollback. In simple terms, Trump did not have the legal authority to change these rules.

No matter. Energy Secretary Chris Wright — who had listed “affordability and consumer choice in home appliances” among his top nine priorities — took up the cause. Three days after Trump’s Truth Social post, Wright announced that the Department of Energy was postponing “seven of the Biden-Harris administration’s restrictive mandates on home appliances,” which “have driven up costs, reduced choice and diminished the quality of Americans’ home appliances.” Wright’s list of seven affected “home appliances” actually included three types of commercial equipment and three other regulations long past the point where they could be undone.

That left only one household-product regulation that could be challenged. It involved an item that seemed like an improbable symbol of “freedom” and “consumer choice”: the tankless, gas-fueled hot water heater.

The vast majority of U.S. homes have traditional water heaters with 40- to 50-gallon tanks. By contrast, tankless gas products represent 10% of sales. They are about the size of a carry-on suitcase and heat a stream of water on demand. They’re energy-efficient and roughly twice as expensive as standard heaters.

But the rules governing tankless gas water heaters were vulnerable because they were issued in the final weeks of Biden’s term. That meant lawmakers could reverse them under the Congressional Review Act, which allows lawmakers to block a recently enacted agency rule, if a resolution to do so passes both houses and is signed by the president.

Appearing at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 20, Wright drew cheers as he offered a Trumpian litany — “My dishwasher has to run for two hours now, and at the end I got to clean the dishes” — before turning to hot water heaters. “We have a factory in the southeastern part of the United States that employs hundreds of people to build a particularly popular product these days,” Wright said. “It is a tankless water heater powered by natural gas,” which he described as “selling like hotcakes.” So, what did the Biden administration do, he asked. “They passed a regulation that would make that product illegal, and that company would be dead.” But under Trump, declared Wright, waving his arms, “we are fixing that problem. That factory is staying open. … America is back, baby!”

Wright returned to “the hot-water thing” in a FoxBusiness interview a month later. Assailing “nanny-state, crazy, top-down mandates that makes it more expensive for American consumers and businesses to buy what they want,” he said the new rule was going to shut down a factory “just built in the southeast United States.” Wright acknowledged that U.S. law bars elimination of other efficiency updates that he and Trump have targeted because they’ve already been finalized. “We can’t officially get rid of them,” he commented. “So we just pushed back the enforcement date, hopefully, to never.”

Wright’s portrayal omitted significant details. The administration’s actions involve a single beneficiary: Rinnai, a Japanese appliance company with $3.3 billion in revenues last year. In 2022, Rinnai opened a $70 million factory south of Atlanta, where about 250 U.S. workers build “non-condensing” tankless gas water heaters, a major moneymaker for the company.

“Non-condensing” tankless heaters are less efficient and less expensive than “condensing” tankless heaters, which reuse heat from their exhaust gases. As a result, Rinnai wouldn’t be able to continue selling them when the new standards went into effect in December 2029.

That, however, wasn’t going to put the company out of business; it wasn’t likely to shut down its U.S. factory, either, though Rinnai raised that specter in government filings where its U.S. president warned the new standards would make the Georgia plant “largely obsolete … eliminating” all its jobs.

Rinnai sells a broad array of products across the world. It also already sold condensing tankless heaters in the U.S. that met the new standard and were imported from Japan. And Rinnai had plans to make them in Georgia, according to the company’s most recent annual report. (Rinnai agreed to make its U.S. chief, Frank Windsor, available for an interview with ProPublica, then canceled twice at the last minute. The company ultimately declined to respond to questions about its public representations.)

Nonetheless, the company, now backed by the Trump administration, has pursued a multitrack campaign to roll back the new standards. Its efforts appear to be on the point of success. A resolution has passed the House and won Senate approval on Thursday. Rinnai has spent $375,000 on Washington lobbyists since 2023, according to disclosure reports. The company also joined with Republican attorneys general in a court challenge to the energy rule.

Three major Rinnai competitors supported the Biden-era regulations. Wisconsin-based A.O. Smith has actively lobbied against Rinnai’s effort to win a congressional rollback. Greene said blocking the standard will “disadvantage” U.S. companies, which have already invested in more efficient condensing technology, by allowing continued sale of Rinnai’s less expensive competing products. “In this time of ‘America First,’ it just seems to us a shame that where we’re heading is rewarding foreign manufacturers,” Greene said. “There should be a level playing field.”

Meanwhile the administration’s campaign has expanded to multiple fronts. On Wednesday, the Department of Energy announced a review of its procedures for energy standards, which one expert described as a reprise of the first Trump administration’s attempts to create procedural hurdles to updating efficiency standards.

Then there was the executive order on showerheads that same day. It, too, seeks to revive a move by the first Trump administration: to circumvent the limits on waterflow by redefining “showerheads” to include multiple nozzles, each of which could emit as much water as the entire showerhead was previously allowed. The Biden-era Energy Department killed that regulation, and Trump is attempting to bring it back while proclaiming that “notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal.”

That order will have virtually no effect because manufacturers have little interest in making showerheads that exceed the current limits, according to Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a nonprofit coalition of groups that support the efficiency rules. “The president is asserting king-like authority,” he added, about Trump’s claim that he does not have to follow administrative procedures.

In the end, DOGE could have more of an impact than a would-be monarch, if it’s able to kill the Guidehouse contract. Then, deLaski said, “it would be next to impossible for DOE to enforce its efficiency standards.”

Doris Burke, Mark Olalde and Pratheek Rebala contributed research.

by Duaa Eldeib and Patricia Callahan, and photography by Sarahbeth Maney

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 past six months, two babies in Louisiana have died of pertussis, the disease commonly known as whooping cough.

Washington state recently announced its first confirmed death from pertussis in more than a decade.

Idaho and South Dakota each reported a death this year, and Oregon last year reported two as well as its highest number of cases since 1950.

While much of the country is focused on the spiraling measles outbreak concentrated in the small, dusty towns of West Texas, cases of pertussis have skyrocketed by more than 1,500% nationwide since hitting a recent low in 2021 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Deaths tied to the disease are also up, hitting 10 last year, compared with about two to four in previous years. Cases are on track to exceed that total this year.

Pertussis Cases Surged in 2024

Cases had been decreasing in the years before the COVID-19 outbreak and dropped further when schools were closed in response to the pandemic.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Doctors, researchers and public health experts warn that the measles outbreak, which has grown to more than 600 cases, may just be the beginning. They say outbreaks of preventable diseases could get much worse with falling vaccination rates and the Trump administration slashing spending on the country’s public health infrastructure.

National rates for four major vaccines, which had held relatively steady in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic, have fallen significantly since, according to a ProPublica analysis of the most recent federal kindergarten vaccination data. Not only have vaccination rates for measles, mumps and rubella fallen, but federal data shows that so have those for pertussis, diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis B and polio.

In addition, public health experts say that growing pockets of unvaccinated populations across the country place babies and young children in danger should there be a resurgence of these diseases.

Many medical authorities view measles, which is especially contagious, as the canary in the coal mine, but pertussis cases may also be a warning, albeit one that has attracted far less attention.

“This is not just measles,” said Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious diseases doctor in New York City and author of the book “Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children’s Health.” “It’s a bright-red warning light.”

At least 36 states have witnessed a drop in rates for at least one key vaccine from the 2013-14 to the 2023-24 school years. And half of states have seen an across-the-board decline in all four vaccination rates. Wisconsin, Utah and Alaska have experienced some of the most precipitous drops during that time, with declines of more than 10 percentage points in some cases.

“There is a direct correlation between vaccination rates and vaccine-preventable disease outbreak rates,” said a spokesperson for the Utah Department of Health and Human Services. “Decreases in vaccination rates will likely lead to more outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in Utah.”

Measles Vaccination Rates in Most States Were Below Herd Immunity in 2023 Data is for school year 2013-14 through 2023-24. The CDC recommends a vaccination rate of at least 95% to achieve herd immunity, to help prevent outbreaks and to protect communities. Montana is not categorized as "below herd immunity in 2023" because the state did not report data for school year 2023-24. Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Vaccination Coverage and Exemptions among Kindergartners. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica) Pertussis Vaccination Rates Decreased in Most States Between 2013 and 2023 Note: Decrease means that the rate in school year 2013-14 was higher than the rate in school year 2023-24. If no data was reported for 2013-14, data from the next earliest year was used. Montana is not categorized as a state where the vaccination rate decreased because the state did not report data for school year 2023-24. Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Vaccination Coverage and Exemptions among Kindergartners. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

But statewide figures alone don’t provide a full picture. Tucked inside each state are counties and communities with far lower vaccination rates that drive outbreaks.

For example, the whooping cough vaccination rate for kindergartners in Washington state in 2023-24 was 90.2%, slightly below the U.S. rate of 92.3%, federal data shows. But the statewide rate for children 19 to 35 months last year was 65.4%, according to state data. In four counties, that rate was in the 30% range. In one county, it was below 12%.

“My concern is that there is going to be a large outbreak of not just measles, but other vaccine-preventable diseases as well, that’s going to end up causing a lot of harm, and possibly deaths in children and young adults,” said Dr. Anna Durbin, a professor in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has spent her career studying vaccines. “And it’s completely preventable.”

The dramatic cuts to public health funding and staffing could heighten the risk. And the elevation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine critic, to the secretary of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, several experts said, has only compounded matters.

The Trump administration has eliminated 20,000 jobs at agencies within HHS, which includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s public health agency. And late last month, the administration also cut $11 billion from state and local public health agencies on the front lines of protecting Americans from outbreaks; the administration said the money was no longer necessary after the end of the pandemic.

Several city and county public health officials had to move quickly to lay off nurses, epidemiologists and disease inspectors. Some ceased vaccination clinics, halted wastewater surveillance programs and even terminated a contract with the courier service that transports specimens to state labs to test for infectious diseases. One Minnesota public health agency, which had provided 1,400 shots for children at clinics last year, immediately stopped those clinics when the directive arrived, court records show.

A federal judge temporarily barred HHS from enacting the cuts, but the ruling, which came more than a week after the grants were terminated, was too late for programs that had already been canceled and employees who had already been laid off. Lawyers for HHS have asked the judge to reconsider her decision in light of a recent Supreme Court ruling that allowed the Department of Education to terminate grants for teacher training while that case is being argued in lower courts. The judge in the HHS case has not yet ruled on the motion.

But in tiny storefronts and cozy homes, at school fairs and gas stations, many residents in West Texas, near where the measles outbreak has taken hold, appear unfazed.

“I don’t need a vaccine,” one man sitting on his porch said recently. “I don’t get sick.”

“It’s measles. It’s been around forever,” said a woman making her way to her car. “I don’t think it’s a big deal.”

When asked why they weren’t planning on vaccinating their baby, a husband walking alongside his wife who was 27 weeks pregnant simply said, “It’s God’s will.”

Seminole last month. Many residents in West Texas appear unfazed by the measles outbreak.

In word and deed, Kennedy has sown doubt about immunizations.

In response to the measles outbreak, Kennedy initially said in a column he wrote for Fox News that the decision to vaccinate is a “personal one.” HHS sent doses of vitamin A alongside vaccines to Texas, and Kennedy praised the use of cod liver oil. Only the vaccine prevents measles.

About a week later, in an interview on Fox News, while Kennedy encouraged vaccines, he said he was a “freedom of choice person.” At the same time, he emphasized the risks of the vaccine.

Only after the second measles death in Texas did Kennedy post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the “most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.”

But even that is not the unequivocal message that the head of HHS should be sending, said Ratner, the infectious diseases doctor in New York. It is, he said, a tepid recommendation at best.

“It gives the impression that these things are equivalent, that you can choose one or the other, and that is disingenuous,” he said. “We don’t have a treatment for measles. We have vitamin A, which we can give to kids with measles, that decreases but doesn’t eliminate the risk of severe outcomes. It doesn’t do anything for prevention of measles.”

In the past, Kennedy has been a fierce critic of the vaccine. In a foreword to a 2021 book on measles released by the nonprofit that he founded, Kennedy wrote, “Measles outbreaks have been fabricated to create fear that in turn forces government officials to ‘do something.’ They then inflict unnecessary and risky vaccines on millions of children for the sole purpose of fattening industry profits.”

A spokesperson for HHS said, “Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine — he is pro-safety, pro-transparency and pro-accountability.” Kennedy, the spokesperson said, responded to the measles outbreak with “clear guidance that vaccines are the most effective way to prevent measles” and under his leadership, the CDC updated its pediatric patient management protocol for measles to include physician-administered vitamin A.

Kennedy, the spokesperson added, “is uniquely qualified to lead HHS at this pivotal moment.”

Late last month, leaders at the CDC ordered staff to bury a risk assessment that emphasized the need for vaccines in response to the measles outbreak — in spite of the fact the CDC has long promoted vaccinations as a cornerstone of public health. While a CDC spokesperson acknowledged that vaccines offer the best protection from measles, she also repeated a line Kennedy had used: “The decision to vaccinate is a personal one.”

Among the approximately 2,400 jobs eliminated at the CDC was a team in the Immunization Services Division that partnered with organizations to promote access to and confidence in vaccines in communities where coverage lagged.

The National Institutes of Health, which is also under HHS, recently ended funding for studies that examine vaccine hesitancy. In early April, researchers, the American Public Health Association and one of the largest unions in the country sued the NIH and its director, Jay Bhattacharya, along with HHS and Kennedy, alleging they terminated grants “without scientifically-valid explanation or cause.” The government hasn’t filed a response in the case.

The NIH cancellation notices stated that the agency’s policy was not to prioritize research that focuses on “gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment.”

“These grants are being canceled in the midst of an outbreak, a vaccine-preventable outbreak,” said Rupali Limaye, an associate professor at George Mason University who has spent the past decade studying vaccine hesitancy. “We need to better understand why people are not accepting vaccines now more than ever. This outbreak is still spreading.”

That vaccines prevent diseases is settled science. For decades, there was a societal understanding that getting vaccinated benefited not only the person who got the shot, but also the broader community, especially babies or people with weakened immune systems, like those in chemotherapy.

An investment in public health and a sustained, large-scale approach to vaccines is what helped the country declare the elimination of the measles in 2000, said Lori Tremmel Freeman, the CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

But she has watched both deteriorate over the last few months. Nearly every morning since notices of the federal funding cuts began going out to local public health agencies, she has woken up to texts from panicked public health workers. She has led daily calls with local health departments and sat in on multiple emergency board meetings.

Freeman has compiled a list of more than 100 direct consequences of the cuts, including one rural health department in the Midwest that can no longer carry out immunization services. That’s vital because there are no hospitals in the county and all public health duties fall to the health department.

“It’s relentless,” she said. “It feels like a barrage and assault on public health.”

Vaccines were available at the health department in Lubbock, Texas, last month.

More than 1,600 miles away from Washington, D.C., in Lubbock, Texas, the director of the city’s health department, Katherine Wells, sighed last week when she saw the most recent measles numbers. She would have to alert her staff to work late again.

“There’s a lot of cases,” she said, “and we continue to see more and more cases.”

She didn’t know it at the time, but that night would mark the state’s second measles death this year. An earlier death in February was the country’s first in a decade. Both children were not vaccinated.

Kennedy said he traveled to Gaines County to comfort the family who lost their 8-year-old daughter and while there met with the family of the 6-year-old girl who died in February.

He also visited with two local doctors he described as “extraordinary healers,” he said in his post on X. The men, he claimed, have “treated and healed some 300 measles-stricken Mennonite children” using aerosolized budesonide — typically used to prevent symptoms of asthma — and clarithromycin — an antibiotic. Medical experts said neither is an effective measles treatment.

State health officials have traced about two-thirds of the measles cases in Texas to Gaines County, which sits on the western edge of the state.

Seminole, one of the county’s only two incorporated towns, has emerged as the epicenter of the outbreak, with Tina Siemens acting as a community ambassador of sorts.

Seminole has become the center of the measles outbreak.

Siemens, a tall woman with glasses and a short blonde bob, runs a museum that combines the area’s Native American history and Mennonite community with traditional skills like calligraphy and canning fruit.

On a recent Tuesday, atop the museum’s dark coffee table, notes scrawled onto white paper listed the latest shipments of vitamin C and Alaskan cod liver oil.

The supplies, Siemens said, were for one of the local doctors who met with Kennedy.

As measles tears through the community, Siemens said families have to decide whether to get vaccinated.

“In America, we have a choice,” she said, echoing Kennedy’s messaging. “The cod liver oil that was flown in, the vitamin C that was flown in, was a great help.”

Tina Siemens

Dr. Philip Huang, director and health authority for the Dallas County Health and Human Services Department, is working to keep the measles outbreak from reaching his community, just five hours east of Seminole. He wrote letters to the public school superintendents and leaders of private schools that had large numbers of unvaccinated or undervaccinated students offering to set up mobile vaccine clinics for them.

“Overall, the rates can look OK,” he said, “but when you’ve got these pockets of unvaccinated, that’s where the vulnerability lies.”

Huang has had to lay off 11 full-time employees, 10 temporary workers and cancel more than 50 vaccine clinics following the HHS cuts. The systemic dismantling of the CDC and other federal health agencies, he said, will have a grave and lasting impact.

“This is setting us back decades,” Huang said. “Everyone should be extremely concerned about what’s going on.”

Across the country, pediatricians are petrified, said Dr. Susan Kressly, who serves as president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the largest professional organization of pediatricians in the country.

“Many of us are losing sleep,” Kressly said. “If we lose that progress, children will pay the price.”

She’s carefully watching the spread of several vaccine-preventable diseases, including an increase in whooping cases that far outpace the typical peaks seen every few years. Although the whooping cough vaccine isn’t as effective as the ones for measles and protection wanes over time, the CDC says it remains the best way to prevent the disease.

Babies under the age of 1 are among the most at risk of severe complications from whooping cough, including slowed or stopped breathing and pneumonia, according to the CDC. About one-third of infants who get whooping cough end up in the hospital. Newborns are especially vulnerable because the CDC doesn’t recommend the first shot until two months. That’s why experts recommend pregnant mothers and anyone who will be around the baby to get vaccinated.

The number of whooping cough cases dropped significantly during the pandemic, but it exploded in recent years. In 2021, the CDC reported 2,116 cases; last year, there were 35,435.

The numbers this year appear set to eclipse 2024. So far in 2025, 7,111 cases have been reported, which is more than double this time last year. Cases tend to spike in the summer and fall, which adds to experts’ concern about high numbers so early in the year.

States on the Pacific Coast and in the Midwest have reported the most cases this year, with Washington leading the country with 742 cases so far, more than five times as many as at this time last year.

The Washington child who died of whooping cough had no underlying medical conditions, according to a spokesperson for the Spokane Regional Health District. The death was announced in February but occurred in November.

While Washington’s overall vaccination rate for whooping cough has remained relatively steady over the last decade at around 90%, pockets of low vaccination rates have allowed the disease to take root and put the wider community at risk, said Dr. Tao Sheng Kwan-Gett, a pediatrician and chief health officer of the Washington State Department of Health.

This is the time to strengthen the public health system, he said, to build trust in those areas and make it easier for children to get their routine vaccines.

“But instead, we’re seeing the exact opposite happen,” he said. “We’re weakening our public health system, and that will put us on a path towards more illness and shorter lives.”

Washington was one of 23 states and the District of Columbia that sued HHS and Kennedy following the $11 billion cuts, which rescinded approximately $118 million from the state. Doing so, the state said in court records, would impact 150 full-time employees and cause an immediate reduction in the agency’s ability to respond to outbreaks.

Washington’s Care-A-Van, a mobile health clinic that travels across the state to provide vaccinations, conduct blood pressure screenings and distribute opioid overdose kits, was a key element in the department’s vaccination efforts.

But that, too, has been diminished.

An alert on the department’s website cataloged the impact.

“Attention,” it began.

As a result of the unexpected decision to terminate grant funding, “all Care-A-Van operations have been paused indefinitely, including the cancellation of more than 104 upcoming clinics across the state.”

The department had anticipated providing approximately 2,000 childhood vaccines as part of that effort.

The frustration came through in Kwan-Gett’s voice. Many people think that federal cuts to public health mean shrinking the federal workforce, he said, but those clawbacks also get passed down to states and cities and counties. The less federal support that trickles down to the local level, the less protected communities will be.

“It really breaks my heart,” he said, “when I see children suffering from preventable diseases like whooping cough and measles when we have the tools to prevent them.”

Agnel Philip contributed data analysis.

by Jeff Ernsthausen, Mica Rosenberg and Avi Asher-Schapiro

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

Update, April 11, 2025: After this story was prepared for publication, Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted on a federal procurement website that it had awarded a new contract worth up to $3.8 billion to Deployed Resources to operate a migrant detention camp on Fort Bliss. It is the largest contract the company has received and the first time ICE is moving ahead with plans to detain thousands of people arrested in the U.S. on military bases in tents before they are deported.

In June 2005, a former employee from the Federal Emergency Management Agency toured the grounds of the Bonnaroo music festival in rural Tennessee. He wasn’t there to see the headliners, which included Dave Matthews Band and the lead singer of the popular jam band Phish. He was there to meet the guys setting up the toilets for the throng of psychedelics-infused campers in attendance: Richard Stapleton, a construction industry veteran, and his business partner Robert Napior, a onetime convicted pot grower, who specialized in setting up music festivals.

The meeting, described in court documents, offered the pair’s fledgling company, Deployed Resources, a key introduction to players doing government contract work for the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that oversees not only the nation’s disaster responses but also its immigration system. Over the next two decades, Stapleton and Napior hired more than a dozen former agency insiders as they turned their small-time logistics business, which had helped support outdoor festivals like Lollapalooza, into a contracting giant by building camps for a completely different use: detaining immigrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Now, as the government races to carry out President Donald Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations, Deployed is shifting its business once more — from holding people who are trying to enter the country to detaining those the government is seeking to ship out.

In Trump’s second term in office, the government is poised to spend tens of billions of dollars on immigration detention, including unprecedented plans to hold immigrants arrested in the U.S. in massive tent camps on military bases. One recently published request for contract proposals said the Department of Homeland Security could spend up to $45 billion over the next several years on immigrant detention. The plans have set off a gold rush among contractors. All this spending is unfolding at the same time the government has made sweeping cuts to federal agencies and shed other contracts.

Among those seeking a windfall is Deployed Resources, which, along with its sister company, Deployed Services, has adapted to shifting government policies and priorities in immigration enforcement.

Starting in 2016, to help respond to spikes in immigrant crossings that had periodically overwhelmed border stations, Deployed began setting up tent encampments to ease the overcrowding. These temporary structures served as short-term emergency waystations, which several former officials said provided flexibility that the U.S. needed. Many of those arriving — including families and unaccompanied children — were turning themselves in, hoping to be released into the U.S. to apply for asylum. In all, the company has been awarded more than $4 billion in government contracts building and operating border tents, according to an analysis of contracting data by ProPublica.

Since taking office in January, Trump has cracked down on asylum, pushing border crossings to record lows. Last month, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it no longer needed the tent facilities run by Deployed.

Instead, ProPublica found, the military will now be contracting with Deployed to use one of those border facilities to house people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In March, one of the company’s tent complexes in El Paso, Texas, was handed over to ICE, CBP and ICE spokespeople said. In an unusual move, the Trump administration tapped funds from the Department of Defense to pay Deployed for the facility, citing the president’s declaration of an emergency at the southern border, a DOD spokesperson said. The nearly $140 million contract wasn’t posted publicly and was given to Deployed as the “incumbent contractor,” the spokesperson said, without further explaining why ICE would use military funds. ICE said it started transferring detainees to the site — which currently has the capacity to house 1,000 adults — on March 10.

As immigration raids escalate, detention space in the country’s existing network of permanent ICE prisons is filling up. There are currently around 48,000 immigrants locked up across the country, levels not seen since 2019. Deportations are happening at a slower pace than ICE arrests, according to data shared with ProPublica, so the administration is turning to companies that can quickly set up facilities.

As it looks to expand its capacity, the agency “is exploring all options to meet its current and future detention requirements,” said ICE spokesman Miguel Alvarez.

Yet using tents to house thousands of people arrested by ICE is fundamentally different from using them to house recent border crossers, many of whom weren’t supposed to be held for more than a few days, seven current and former DHS officials who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations told ProPublica.

They said it would be the first time these tent camps would be used for ICE detainees in the U.S. and that it was unclear how they could be constructed to meet the agency’s basic health and safety requirements. These include separate areas for men and women and dedicated zones for families, as well as space to segregate those who are potentially violent, and private meeting areas for lawyers and their clients. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not directly involved in the contracts.

“People that you’ve ripped out of the community, people you’ve arrested, people who want to get back to their children, people who are scared, are going to behave differently than the border crossing population,” said one former ICE official. “You have a lot more fear in the population.”

“It would take a remarkable degree of innovation from a contractor,” said another former DHS official, adding, “It would also be incredibly expensive.”

At a border security conference this week, ICE Acting Assistant Director for Operations Support Ralph Ferguson said that Deployed Resources was modifying the CBP tents in El Paso by adding more rigid structures inside, which he said would make them more secure. Deployed got an additional contract for up to $5 million to provide unarmed guards at the El Paso facility, according to a public notice posted in late March.

The company did not respond to requests for comment. On its website, Deployed says it is “dedicated to safely and efficiently providing transparent facility support and logistical services, anytime, anywhere” and describes itself as “the first-choice provider” for government contracts.

Deployed was also one of the companies interested in operating an immigrant detention camp on the nearby Fort Bliss military base, according to government documents obtained by ProPublica and interviews with people familiar with the contracting process. ICE was seeking proposals from vendors last month for a 1,000-bed camp that could grow to 5,000 beds, housing women and men, including those deemed high security risks, as well as families with small children. The contractor would be responsible for separating those groups and preventing escapes, documents reviewed by ProPublica show.

The plans are “a recipe for disaster,” said Eunice Hyunhye Cho, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project.

“All of the problems that we see with ICE detention writ large, like the abuse of force, the sexual assault, medical neglect, the lack of food, lack of access to counsel, lack of due process rights, lack of access to telephones — the list goes on — all of those things are going to be vastly more complicated in a system where you are literally setting up people in tents that are surrounded by barbed wire and armed military personnel,” Cho said.

Connections and Contracts

Since 2016, Deployed Resources has enjoyed a virtual monopoly on providing CBP with immigration tent structures to help with sudden influxes of immigrants. During the first Trump administration, the contractor set up temporary tent courts for people forced to wait in Mexico for their asylum hearings under a policy known as the Migrant Protection Protocols. The company also earned hundreds of millions of dollars during the Biden years operating emergency detention facilities for unaccompanied minors that were funded by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Though the value of Deployed Resources isn’t publicly known, county real estate records attest to the wealth its owners, Stapleton and Napior, have amassed in the detention business.

In the spring of 2019, shortly after the company landed what was then its biggest immigration contract — a $92 million no-bid award to run two tent facilities in Texas — Stapleton purchased a $5.7 million condo in Naples, Florida. Nearly three years and more than $1 billion in contracts later, he upgraded to a $15 million home a block away from the shore. Napior snapped up a $9 million beachside property near Sarasota, Florida, in 2023. Stapleton did not respond to requests for comment. Reached by phone, Napior said he did not comment to the press and then hung up.

After the meeting at Bonnaroo in 2005, Deployed later hired the former FEMA employee who had checked out its facilities there and to win emergency management contracting work at the agency before moving into immigration detention. In court filings, Deployed said that the meeting did not lead to its FEMA work.

Deployed went on to hire additional former DHS officials over the years, expanding its connections to the federal agencies with which it does business. With a second Trump administration poised to crack down further on the flow of immigrants to the southern border — a potential threat to Deployed’s core business — the company hired several former ICE leaders, according to online searches and current and former officials.

A month after Trump’s victory, former ICE field office director Sean Ervin announced he was joining Deployed as a senior adviser for strategic initiatives. He had previously overseen removal operations across Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. The head of field operations for ICE Miami, Michael Meade — an 18-year agency veteran — also joined Deployed that month, according to their profiles on LinkedIn. Meade and Ervin did not respond to requests for comment.

Deployed has continued to win federal business even after the spending on the company’s contracts was criticized by government watchdogs and a whistleblower.

A review by Congress’ Government Accountability Office of one no-bid CBP contract that the first Trump administration awarded to Deployed found that the company’s 2,500-person facility in Tornillo, Texas, averaged just 30 detainees a night in the fall of 2019 and never held more than 68 during the five-month period it was open. It also found that CBP paid Deployed millions for meals it didn’t need to feed people it wasn’t holding. Deployed agreed to reimburse $250,000 for meals not delivered, the GAO said.

A separate whistleblower lawsuit in New Hampshire brought by a former DHS official who worked for Deployed accuses the company of cutting corners on training its staff to detect and report sexual abuse of children in facilities it set up to house unaccompanied minors during the Biden administration. In court filings, Deployed said it “vigorously disputes the allegations” and has moved to dismiss the suit.

Construction crews work on an immigrant holding facility in Tornillo, Texas, in 2019. Deployed Resources was contracted to build and provide support services for the 2,500-person detention center, but it closed in 2020 after months of low occupancy. (Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters)

Last year, Dan Bishop, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina, held up a Deployed Services contract in Greensboro, North Carolina, as an example of waste during a hearing on unaccompanied migrant children. The company was paid nearly $40 million to help operate a facility for immigrant children, Bishop said, but it stood empty for over two years.

Deployed nonetheless had workers there full time, according to interviews with three former employees familiar with the facility, tasking them with playacting as if they were providing care. Case managers invented case details and Deployed workers would role-play as students in classrooms, even asking for permission to go to the bathroom, according to the former Deployed workers and social media posts of former workers describing the surreal situation.

“I have no idea why they were doing that with government money,” said one former case manager, who recalled inventing elaborate backstories for fictional children, filling out make-believe statements and other paperwork for hours each day. The case manager spent about a year in Greensboro, living in housing paid for by Deployed from its government contract. Deployed did not respond to requests for comment about its Greensboro contract.

Now, with even more money to be spent on immigration detention, Deployed is just one of the companies hoping to benefit. In addition to Fort Bliss more than 10 military sites around the country are being considered for ICE detention facilities, according to a DHS document shared with ProPublica. The New York Times previously reported on elements of the plan.

The Fort Bliss contracting process has proceeded mostly out of public view, and it’s not clear if the project would go forward or fall under the larger $45 billion plan to expand immigration detention. In March, representatives from at least 10 companies, including Deployed Resources, toured Fort Bliss with DHS officials to survey the site, said two people familiar with the visit. Also there were private prison giants The GEO Group and CoreCivic, the sources said.

The GEO Group’s leadership and allied political action groups donated more than $1 million to Trump’s reelection effort, according to a review by the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan Washington watchdog group. On its most recent earnings call, GEO’s CEO said Trump’s immigration agenda was an “unprecedented opportunity” for the firm. CoreCivic — which donated $500,000 to Trump’s inauguration committee — has also spoken about the business opportunities. After Trump’s election, stock prices for both companies jumped.

CoreCivic said it is in “regular contact” with government agencies “to understand their changing needs” but said that it does not comment on contracts it is seeking. Its contribution to inauguration events was “consistent with our past practice of civic participation” supporting both parties. The GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment.

Deployed Services has largely eschewed political donations, sticking to its strategy — also used by GEO and CoreCivic — of hiring former high-ranking government officials.

A few weeks ago Deployed scored another high-profile ICE hire: Marlen Pineiro joined Deployed after 40 years in government, including more than a decade in ICE’s Senior Executive Service, according to her LinkedIn profile. At a border security conference this week, where several former high-ranking DHS employees hired by Deployed were gathered among industry vets and Trump immigration officials, Pineiro declined an interview request from a ProPublica reporter.

But on LinkedIn, the congratulations rolled in. The acting head of ICE under Trump, Todd Lyons, posted: “Great news.” Two other senior ICE officials who had also recently joined Deployed commented: “Welcome aboard.”

“Let’s sail away,” Pineiro replied. “Woohooo see you soon.”

Note: ProPublica analyzed transaction-level contract data from usaspending.gov for this story. Contract amounts reported are federal obligations over the life of a contract or group of contracts. In the case of the recently announced Department of Defense award to Deployed Resources, the contract is new and worth up to $140 million.

Perla Trevizo contributed reporting and Kirsten Berg contributed research.

by Doug Bock Clark

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

Prompted by ProPublica’s reporting on efforts by right-wing activists to disallow ballots, North Carolina Democrats have introduced a bill designed to prevent votes from being tossed out based on postelection rule changes.

The Voter Protection and Reliance Act, filed last week in the North Carolina House, says that ballots cast in state elections will be counted based on the laws and procedures in place on Election Day. It also forbids votes from being discarded because of technical or clerical errors in voter registrations.

ProPublica reported that before the 2024 election, North Carolina activists and members of the Election Integrity Network — a national group led by a lawyer integral to President Donald Trump’s unsuccessful campaign to overturn the 2020 election — discussed whether filing protests aimed at voters whose registration information was incomplete could help candidates overturn losses in close elections.

The strategy debated on that call, which ProPublica obtained a recording of, subsequently was used by Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin to challenge his 734-vote loss to Democrat Allison Riggs for a seat on the state’s Supreme Court.

“ProPublica’s reporting showed people were hunting for pretexts to challenge the election ahead of time,” said Phil Rubin, a Democratic House member who was the primary author of the bill. “Rather than trying to proactively fix those problems before the election, Judge Griffin has retroactively tried to exploit them to overturn his loss. This law would prevent similar abuses in the future and force candidates to act for the good of the voters and not themselves.”

A spokesperson for Griffin, Paul Shumaker, said he couldn’t respond to Rubin’s comments, his bill or questions from ProPublica because North Carolina’s Code of Judicial Conduct prohibits judges and judicial candidates from stating a position on issues that could come before the court.

“It would be a violation to comment on legislation since legislation is subject to judicial review if enacted into law,” Shumaker said.

Last week, the Republican-majority North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled that election officials should discount around 60,000 ballots in the Supreme Court race cast by voters whose Social Security and driver’s license information is missing in the state election database unless the voters provided that information within 15 working days. (That ruling has subsequently been stayed while the state’s Supreme Court considers the matter.)

At the time of the election, state election rules allowed people to vote without that information and allowed members of the military to submit absentee ballots without providing photo ID. Often, the election database was missing Social Security and driver’s license information not because of voters’ errors, but because of administrative mistakes, including a registration form that did not require these forms of identification.

Nonetheless, the appeals court ruled that the state election board — the body that issues election rules — should have required the information.

Griffin’s ballot challenges have been shown by data analyses to disproportionately affect Democrats and minorities, making it possible that their exclusion may upend the election results.

Rubin’s bill also mandates that litigation involving election-related issues must be dealt with on an expedited basis by North Carolina courts so that candidates can resolve issues before elections rather than afterward.

Though some North Carolina and national Republicans have criticized Griffin’s challenges, the Democratic-sponsored bill faces uncertain prospects in the GOP-controlled legislature.

“The bill is going nowhere,” said Mitch Kokai, a senior political analyst for the conservative John Locke Foundation. “It’s more of a statement of the Democratic caucus’ approach to the Griffin-Riggs election and how they think it should have played out.”

North Carolina’s governor and its legislative leadership did not respond to requests for comment.

Rubin said that while the bill reflects issues playing out in North Carolina, it also could serve as a model for other states.

“There is no reason to think that these tactics will be limited to North Carolina,” he said at a press conference on Thursday hosted by the Democratic National Committee and North Carolina Democratic Party about the Supreme Court case litigation, at which he presented the bill.

The Election Integrity Network has chapters in swing states, plus many others, and partners with numerous national conservative organizations.

The leader of the North Carolina chapter did not respond to a request for comment or emailed questions.

by Sharon Lerner

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

The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to eliminate long-standing requirements for polluters to collect and report their emissions of the heat-trapping gases that cause climate change. The move, ordered by a Trump appointee, would affect thousands of industrial facilities across the country, including oil refineries, power plants and coal mines as well as those that make petrochemicals, cement, glass, iron and steel, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica.

The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program documents the amount of carbon dioxide, methane and other climate-warming gases emitted by individual facilities. The data, which is publicly available, guides policy decisions and constitutes a significant portion of the information the government submits to the international body that tallies global greenhouse gas pollution. Losing the data will make it harder to know how much climate-warming gas an economic sector or factory is emitting and to track those emissions over time. This granularity allows for accountability, experts say; the government can’t curb the country’s emissions without knowing where they are coming from.

“This would reduce the detail and accuracy of U.S. reporting of greenhouse gas emissions, when most countries are trying to improve their reporting,” said Michael Gillenwater, executive director of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. “This would also make it harder for climate policy to happen down the road.”

The program has been collecting emissions data since at least 2010. Roughly 8,000 facilities a year now report their emissions to the program. EPA officials have asked program staff to draft a rule that will drastically reduce data collection. Under the new rule, its reporting requirements would only apply to about 2,300 facilities in certain sectors of the oil and gas industry.

Climate experts expressed shock and dismay about the apparent decision to stop collecting most information on our country’s greenhouse gas emissions. “It would be a bit like unplugging the equipment that monitors the vital signs of a patient that is critically ill,” said Edward Maibach, a professor at George Mason University. “How in the world can we possibly manage this incredible threat to America’s well-being and humanity’s well-being if we’re not actually monitoring what we’re doing to exacerbate the problem?”

The EPA did not address questions from ProPublica about the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. Instead, the agency provided an emailed statement affirming the Trump administration’s commitment to “clean air, land, and water for EVERY American.”

The agency announced last month that it was “reconsidering” the greenhouse gas reporting program. In a little-noticed press release issued on March 12, when the EPA sent out 24 bulletins as it celebrated the “most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin described the reporting program as “burdensome.” Zeldin also claimed that the program “costs American businesses and manufacturing millions of dollars, hurting small businesses and the ability to achieve the American Dream.”

Project 2025, the far-right blueprint for Trump’s presidency, suggested severely scaling back the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program and also described it as imposing burdens on small businesses.

In contrast, climate experts say the EPA reporting program, which tallies between 85% and 90% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., is in many ways a boon to businesses. “A lot of companies rely on the data and use it in their annual sustainability reports,” said Edwin LaMair, an attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund. Companies also use the data to demonstrate environmental progress to shareholders and to meet international reporting requirements. “If the program stops, all that valuable data will stop being generated,” LaMair said.

The loss of that data could have a devastating effect on the world’s ability to rein in the disastrous effects of the warming climate, according to Andrew Light, who served as assistant secretary of energy for international affairs in the Biden administration. Light noted that addressing the dangerous and costly extreme weather events requires international collaboration — and that our failure to collect data could give other countries an excuse to abandon their own reporting.

“We will not get to the kinds of temperature stabilization needed to protect Americans against the worst climate impacts unless we get the cooperation of developing countries,” Light said. “If the United States won’t even measure and report our own emissions, how in the world can we expect China, India, Indonesia and other major growing developing countries to do the same?”

In its first months, the Trump administration has shown waning support for the reporting program. The EPA left the portal through which companies share data closed for several weeks and, in March, pushed back the emissions reporting deadline. Then last Friday, a meeting held with several program staff members raised further questions about the fate of future data collection, according to sources who were briefed on the meeting and asked not to be named for fear of retribution.

At the meeting, political appointee Abigale Tardif, who is principal deputy assistant administrator of the EPA’s office of air and radiation, instructed staff to draft a rule that would eliminate reporting requirements for 40 of the 41 sectors that are now required to submit data to the program. Tardif did not respond to inquiries from ProPublica about this story. Political appointee Aaron Szabo, who was present at the meeting and is awaiting confirmation as assistant administrator to the office, declined to answer questions, directing a reporter to EPA communications staff.

Before joining the EPA, Tardif and Szabo worked as lobbyists. Szabo represented the American Chemistry Council and Duke Energy among other companies and trade groups and Tardif worked for Marathon Petroleum and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers Association.

Some climate advocates noted that industry stands to benefit from the elimination of greenhouse gas reporting requirements. “T​he bottom line is this is a giveaway to emitters, just letting them off the hook entirely,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Cleetus derided the choice to stop documenting emissions as ostrich-like. “Not tracking the data doesn’t make the climate crisis any less real,” she said. “This is just putting our heads in the sand.”

by Richard A. Webster, Verite News

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

Calvin Alexander thought he had done everything the Louisiana parole board asked of him to earn an early release from prison.

He had taken anger management classes, learned a trade and enrolled in drug treatment. And as his September hearing before the board approached, his disciplinary record was clean.

Alexander, more than midway through a 20-year prison sentence on drug charges, was making preparations for what he hoped would be his new life. His daughter, with whom he had only recently become acquainted, had even made up a room for him in her New Orleans home.

Then, two months before the hearing date, prison officials sent Alexander a letter informing him he was no longer eligible for parole.

A computerized scoring system adopted by the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections had deemed the nearly blind 70-year-old, who uses a wheelchair, a moderate risk of reoffending, should he be released. And under a new law, that meant he and thousands of other prisoners with moderate or high risk ratings cannot plead their cases before the board. According to the department of corrections, about 13,000 people — nearly half the state’s prison population — have such risk ratings, although not all of them are eligible for parole.

Alexander said he felt “betrayed” upon learning his hearing had been canceled. “People in jail have … lost hope in being able to do anything to reduce their time,” he said.

Calvin Alexander’s daughter, Sabrina Brown, left, and his sister, Jerry Hart. Alexander was planning for his new life with Brown when he found out he was no longer eligible for parole. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)

The law that changed Alexander’s prospects is part of a series of legislation passed by Louisiana Republicans last year reflecting Gov. Jeff Landry’s tough-on-crime agenda to make it more difficult for prisoners to be released.

While campaigning for governor, Landry, a former police officer and sheriff’s deputy who served as Louisiana attorney general until 2024, championed a crackdown on rewarding well-behaved prisoners with parole. Landry said early release, which until now has been typically assumed when judges hand down sentences, is a slap in the face to crime victims.

“The revolving door is insulting,” Landry told state lawmakers last year as he kicked off a special legislative session on crime during which he blamed the state’s high violent crime rate on lenient sentences and “misguided post-conviction programs” that fail to rehabilitate prisoners. (In fact, Louisiana’s recidivism rate has declined over the past decade, according to a 2024 department of corrections report.)

The Legislature eliminated parole for nearly everyone imprisoned for crimes committed after Aug. 1, making Louisiana the 17th state in a half-century to abolish parole altogether and the first in 24 years to do so. For the vast majority of prisoners who were already behind bars, like Alexander, another law put an algorithm in charge of determining whether they have a shot at early release; only prisoners rated low risk qualify for parole.

That decision makes Louisiana the only state to use risk scores to automatically rule out large portions of a prison population from being considered for parole, according to seven national criminal justice experts.

Alexander can’t read or write, so he dictated answers to mailed questions from Verite News and ProPublica to a fellow prisoner. (Obtained by Verite News and ProPublica)

That was not how the tool, known as TIGER, an acronym for Targeted Interventions to Greater Enhance Re-entry, was intended to be used. Developed as a rehabilitative measure about a decade ago, it was supposed to help prison officials determine what types of classes or counseling someone might need to prevent them from landing back behind bars — not be used as a punitive tool to keep them there, said one of its creators.

Criminal justice advocates and civil rights attorneys say the new law could disproportionately harm Black people like Alexander in part because the algorithm measures factors such as criminal history where racial disparities already exist. The law’s opponents also contend that the unique step Louisiana has taken to curtail parole is deeply problematic — and potentially unconstitutional — because it does not take into account the efforts of prisoners to better themselves while incarcerated.

“They deserve that opportunity to show they’ve changed,” said Pearl Wise, who was appointed to the parole board by Landry’s Democratic predecessor and served from 2016 until 2023. “You demonstrate over time the changes that you made and that you are not the person that was sentenced on that day.”

An Immutable Risk Score

Alexander is like thousands of prisoners who have previously appeared before the board — repeat offenders accused of nonviolent crimes, often mired in addiction with limited education or learning disabilities. Alexander can’t read or write, having dropped out of school as a fourth grader in the early 1960s. He needed to help support his family in deeply segregated Mississippi and turned to selling crack cocaine as a child. That period was also the start of his own lifelong struggle with narcotics that resulted in multiple arrests and extended stints in prison.

The department of corrections would not allow an in-person or phone interview with Alexander. Instead, Verite News and ProPublica mailed Alexander written questions, which a fellow inmate read to him and then wrote down his responses. Alexander admitted he was reckless in his youth and that he had violated his parole — related to a 1994 drug possession conviction — by drinking and staying out after curfew. That mistake would prove devastating three decades later because a prisoner’s history of parole violations plays a significant role in their TIGER risk score.

Louisiana’s TIGER scoring system was born out of a 2014 federal initiative to help states reduce their prison populations. The risk assessment tool, developed by the state department of corrections and Louisiana State University researchers using a $1.75 million federal grant, was meant to “treat criminal thinking,” said Keith Nordyke, one of the creators of TIGER. For populations with the highest risk of reoffending, he said, the prison would flood them with services — addiction counseling, therapy, job training — to help keep them out of trouble once they were freed.

“The whole purpose of this was to slow down the revolving door,” Nordyke said.

Louisiana corrections officials started using the TIGER scores as part of the parole determination process in 2018, but it was only in 2024 that they became the sole measure of parole eligibility.

Similar algorithms are used throughout the country in the parole decision-making process, but legal scholars say the way such risk tools calculate a person’s odds of reoffending is among the reasons why no other state exclusively uses them to bar individuals from parole. While algorithms like TIGER can predict on a group level that 40 out of 100 people will reoffend upon their release, they can’t pinpoint exactly who those 40 people will be, according to experts.

The Louisiana department of corrections declined multiple interview requests and did not respond to questions about the state’s use of the risk tool.

The reliance on a TIGER score to potentially block a prisoner’s bid for freedom is especially concerning, experts on risk assessment tools say, because most of the factors considered by the algorithm — the crimes they committed, work history, age at first arrest, whether they had any marijuana-related convictions, prior parole revocations — are from a prisoner’s past, which cannot be changed; they do not include anything related to what people have done in prison to rehabilitate themselves.

Criminal justice scholars say that when scores based on immutable facts are weighted so heavily in parole decisions, prisoners from impoverished, racially segregated communities are more likely to be hurt.

A fellow inmate wrote down Alexander’s answers to Verite and ProPublica’s questions on what he misses and what he would have done had he been granted parole. (Obtained by ProPublica and Verite News)

Take the algorithm’s use of prior employment data: People raised in low-income communities do not have the same work opportunities as those brought up in more affluent neighborhoods, said Megan Stevenson, an economist and criminal justice professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Using such an algorithm to determine someone’s chances of parole, she said, “suggests that poor people should be less eligible for parole than wealthier people.”

Factoring in prior drug convictions, too, is more likely to impact Black prisoners, Stevenson said. Black people use illegal drugs at roughly the same rate as white people, but are arrested and convicted for it in greater numbers because their neighborhoods are more heavily policed, she said.

In using these data points to produce a risk score, “you’re going to create a biased algorithm to make biased decisions,” Stevenson said.

Already, Black people account for nearly two-thirds of Louisiana’s prison population, more than double their share of the state population.

The Landry administration did not respond to requests for comment regarding potential racial biases in the way the TIGER scores are used for parole.

Louisiana’s legislation might also violate the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits laws that retroactively increase the severity of a person’s criminal sentence, according to several legal scholars. Tying parole eligibility to a computerized risk score that can’t be lowered by an inmate through good behavior or other actions appears to do just that since the opportunity for parole has traditionally been considered part of a sentence, said Sonja Starr, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

Some former Louisiana parole board members also bristled at the idea of an algorithm superseding human judgment.

“It doesn’t make much sense to me that a score generated by a process that the inmate has no control over takes away the authority and the power of the parole board,” said Keith Jones, who was appointed by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards and served on the board from 2018 to 2020. “Why have a parole board?”

Jones and two other former parole board members said the introduction of the TIGER tool as part of parole determination wasn’t in itself a bad thing, as long as it remained just one factor to be considered among many.

Although some board members did refuse to parole anyone with a moderate or high risk score before the law took effect, the state’s parole board had much more discretion in determining when a prisoner was released, former board members said.

Tony Marabella, a former East Baton Rouge criminal court judge who served on the parole board until last year, said he had placed greater emphasis on a prisoner’s disciplinary record and completion of self-improvement programs. He also took into account whether the warden or victims supported their release when deciding whether to grant parole.

“If someone was a moderate risk, I wasn’t going to throw them out,” said Marabella, who served on the board for four years under Edwards. “I was more concerned about what they had accomplished.”

That’s exactly what Alonzo Allen was able to show.

Alonzo Allen, outside of his home in Mansfield, Louisiana, was paroled nearly four years ago. He had a moderate risk assessment score, which, after the passage of a 2024 law, would now prohibit him from appearing before the board. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)

In 2021, three years before the new law went into effect, Allen succeeded in convincing the parole board that he was worthy of release — despite having the same TIGER score and a similar criminal history as Alexander.

Allen had been sentenced to 40 years behind bars in 2012 on multiple drug charges and carrying a gun. While in prison, he was written up for possessing contraband, including a pencil sharpener and $2 worth of sugar, and he previously had his parole revoked twice, according to Allen and the parole board.

As a result, he was marked a moderate risk.

During Allen’s parole hearing, Jerry Goodwin, then warden at the David Wade Correctional Center in Homer, where Allen was being held, lauded Allen for his tireless work overcoming his drug addictions and improving his communication skills. Goodwin noted that Allen took classes even when he knew he had reached his limit for “good time” credits, time shaved off a sentence for good behavior.

“He’s worked hard for this opportunity,” Goodwin told the parole board, “and I think he’s really got his best foot forward.”

Allen works full time as a truck driver. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)

Alvin Roche’ Jr., then a member of the parole board, questioned the accuracy of Allen’s TIGER score. “Is it possible that this instrument might be wrong?” Roche’ asked during Allen’s hearing. “You think you are rehabilitated to the point where you can prove that assessment wrong?”

“Yes, sir, very much, sir,” Allen responded. “I do think that is wrong.”

The board unanimously voted to parole Allen.

Speaking by telephone from his home in Mansfield, just south of Shreveport, Allen, 61, said he was grateful for the second chance. He’s stayed sober, works full time as a truck driver and has not violated the terms of his parole in the nearly four years since his release.

“God has been good,” he said.

Allen at home. Since his parole almost four years ago, he’s stayed sober and has held a steady job. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica) Steeply Declining Parole Hearings

Lawmakers who supported Louisiana’s push to place strict limits on parole have maintained that relying on the algorithm over human judgment was the most efficient way to clear a backlog of parole applications.

State Sen. Patrick McMath, R-Covington, the bill’s author, claimed during a Senate committee hearing in February 2024 that so many unrealistic parole petitions were coming before the board that prisoners most deserving of early release were not being prioritized.

“What I’m really trying to do here is make the system run more efficiently and effectively,” McMath said.

But data from the parole board doesn’t support his assertion. According to the parole board’s annual reports, the number of cases heard by the board actually dropped by 40% between 2016 and 2023.

Prison reform advocates and civil rights attorneys say McMath’s bill was never anything more than a Trojan horse designed to kill parole, given the law’s other requirements that make parole substantially harder to achieve, including a unanimous board vote before parole is granted and an increase in the number of years prisoners must maintain clean disciplinary records.

McMath declined to be interviewed and did not answer questions concerning the impact of his legislation.

Landry, who signed the legislation into law in March 2024, appointed five new people to the seven-member board. None of the seven were permitted to comment about the use of TIGER to deny prisoners parole, according to Francis M. Abbott, executive director of the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole, citing board policy. Instead, he provided a statement from board chair Sheryl Ranatza: “We believe Governor Landry’s reforms passed in the special crime session will enhance public safety.”

The average number of people paroled in Louisiana has already dropped from 32 per month in 2023 to six per month since the law went into effect in August, according to Department of Corrections data. And at least 70 parole hearings, including Alexander’s, were canceled between Aug. 1 and Dec. 13 because of the prisoner’s risk score, according to the parole board.

Opponents of the bill predict the new restrictions on parole will swell the state’s prison population, costing taxpayers billions of dollars to build new corrections facilities and leading to more violence behind bars as inmates have fewer incentives to behave.

For Alexander, that means he will not have the same opportunity Allen did to show the parole board that he had heeded their advice to improve himself.

Brown, right, shows a photo on her phone taken when she visited Alexander, center, at Rayburn Correctional Center last year. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)

With his health rapidly deteriorating, his family fears he will not live to see the end of his sentence in five years. “He’s got one eye. He’s diabetic. He’s got poor circulation,” said Alexander’s daughter, Sabrina Brown. “I don’t want to have to go to a funeral for him.”

Instead of moving into Brown’s New Orleans home as planned, Alexander will be able to see his daughter only when she makes the 85-mile trek north to the Rayburn Correctional Center.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, he said.

“They told me once I received my risk score there is nothing I can do to change it,” Alexander said. “It’s like walking into a brick wall.”