ProPublica

by Corey G. Johnson

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Two major law firms accused the National Shooting Sports Foundation this week of violating the privacy rights of millions of gun owners by running a decades-long program that sent their information to political operatives without consent.

The allegations in a lawsuit filed Monday in federal court by Keller Rohrback of Seattle and Motley Rice of Connecticut closely mirror the findings of a ProPublica investigation that detailed the secret program operated by the gun industry’s largest trade group.

The 24-page complaint asks the court for approval of class-action status and requests financial damages against the NSSF, claiming the gun industry lobbyist enriched itself by exploiting valuable gun buyer information for political gain. It features the accounts of two gun owners, Daniel Cocanour and Dale Rimkus, both of whom assert they purchased rifles, pistols and handguns from the 1990s through the mid-2010s.

ProPublica identified at least 10 gun industry businesses, including Glock, Smith & Wesson and Remington, that handed over hundreds of thousands of names and addresses, along with other private data, to the NSSF. The lobbying group then entered the details into what would become a massive database, which was used to rally gun owners’ electoral support for the industry’s preferred candidates running for the White House and Congress.

The data initially came from decades of warranty cards filled out by customers and returned to gun manufacturers for rebates and repair or replacement programs. A ProPublica review of dozens of warranty cards from the 1970s through today found that some promised customers their information would be kept strictly confidential. Others said some information could be shared with third parties for marketing and sales. None of the cards informed buyers their details would be used by lobbyists and consultants to help win elections.

Cocanour and Rimkus claimed to have regularly shared personal information when filling out warranty cards for Glock, Remington, Smith & Wesson and other manufacturers thinking it was in their best interest. They say they weren’t told of the companies’ participation in the NSSF program, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in Connecticut.

“Through the complaint, two brave plaintiffs have stepped forward to vindicate the rights of millions of their fellow firearms purchasers,” lead attorney Benjamin Gould of Keller Rohrback wrote in a statement to ProPublica. “We look forward to gathering evidence to prove the truth of our allegations and holding NSSF accountable for its actions.”

Keller Rohrback has a specialty in cybersecurity and data breach cases. The firm recently won a landmark $725 million class-action settlement from Facebook after accusing the company of allowing political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to obtain user information without consent. Motley Rice is one of the nation’s largest consumer protection law firms; its founder, Ron Motley, garnered fame for leading lawsuits against big tobacco companies during the 1990s.

Representatives from gun violence prevention groups called the lawsuit a major development in trying to hold the gun industry responsible for the data sharing.

“This is a hideous breach of privacy by the gun industry,” said Justin Wagner, senior director of investigations at Everytown for Gun Safety. “The NSSF must come clean and face accountability.”

Founded in 1961 and currently based in Shelton, Connecticut, the NSSF represents thousands of firearms and ammunition manufacturers, distributors, retailers, publishers and shooting ranges. The trade group didn’t respond to ProPublica’s request for comment. The organization previously defended its data collection, saying its “activities are, and always have been, entirely legal and within the terms and conditions of any individual manufacturer, company, data broker, or other entity.”

The NSSF has faced criticism in the aftermath of ProPublica’s reporting. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, slammed the data sharing. And a prominent gun owner rights organization, Gun Owners for Safety, asked the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to investigate the NSSF. Gun Owners for Safety is operated by Giffords, which was co-founded by Gabby Giffords, the Arizona lawmaker who survived an attempted assassination in 2011, and it advocates for improved background checks and other measures aimed at reducing gun-related deaths. Chris Harris, a spokesperson for Giffords, said the FBI and ATF have not responded to the request for an inquiry into the NSSF.

Privacy experts previously told ProPublica that companies that shared information with the NSSF may have violated federal and state prohibitions against deceptive and unfair business practices. Under federal law, companies must comply with their own privacy policies and be clear about how they will use consumers’ information, privacy experts said.

Shani Henry, a member of Gun Owners for Safety, said ProPublica’s reporting showed the industry’s hypocrisy on the issue of privacy.

“They don’t care about our families’ safety or the rights of everyday gun owners, they’re more than happy to betray their own customers for political power and money,” Henry said. “Gun owners’ privacy was violated and we deserve a full accounting of what happened and who profited from it.”

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

Most of the companies named in the NSSF documents, including Glock and Smith & Wesson, previously declined to comment or did not respond to ProPublica. Remington has since been split into two companies and sold. RemArms, which owns the old firearms division, previously said it was unaware of the company’s workings at the time. The other portion of the company is now owned by Remington Ammunition, which said it had “not provided personal information to the NSSF or any of its vendors.”

In 2016, as part of a push to get Donald Trump elected president for the first time and to help Republicans keep control of the Senate, the NSSF worked with Cambridge Analytica to turbocharge the information it had on potential voters. Cambridge matched up the people in the database with 5,000 additional facts about them that it drew from other sources. Along with the potential voters’ income, debts and religious affiliation, analysts collected information like whether they enjoyed the work of the painter Thomas Kinkade and whether the underwear women had purchased was plus size or petite.

by ProPublica

ProPublica has hired Nick McMillan as a computational journalist on our data and news apps team. In this role, McMillan will use technology and data in innovative ways to find and report stories that would otherwise be out of reach.

“Nick has an impressive track record of using cutting-edge technology to unlock reporting paths,” said Ken Schwencke, senior editor for data and news applications. “I’m excited for him to use those skills to hold power to account at ProPublica.”

McMillan comes to ProPublica from NPR, where he was a data journalist on the investigations team. At NPR, he combined reporting with data analysis, building tools that transformed raw records into evidence for investigations. His work included developing a custom optical character recognition program to parse more than 7,000 government work task files, which helped to reveal how a federal program was killing thousands of wild animals with little accountability. He also co-reported a story revealing how power lines operated by Southern California Edison sparked new fires as crews battled existing ones, creating a tool that processed and transcribed more than 2,000 hours of first responder radio into searchable, time-stamped timelines. Before NPR, he worked on investigative documentaries at Newsy, contributing to reporting on white supremacists in the U.S. military and on the long-term effects of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rican schoolchildren.

Stories that McMillan has worked on have been recognized nationwide with honors including the National Press Award and an Edward R. Murrow Award.

“ProPublica has led the way for applying data and computational methodologies to uncover abuses of power,” McMillan said. “I am excited to join the team and grateful for the opportunity to contribute to investigations that serve the public.”

by Margaret Coker, The Current

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

Update, Sept. 24, 2025: This story has been updated to reflect that on Sept. 23, 2025, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services extended the Georgia Pathways program through 2026.

Most of the tax dollars used to launch and implement the nation’s only Medicaid work requirement program have gone toward paying administrative costs rather than covering health care for Georgians, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan agency that monitors federal programs and spending.

The government report examined administrative expenses for Georgia Pathways to Coverage, the state’s experiment with work requirements. It follows previous reporting by The Current and ProPublica showing that the program has cost federal and state taxpayers more than $86.9 million while enrolling a tiny fraction of those eligible for free health care.

The GAO analysis, which does not include all the Pathways administrative expenses detailed by the news outlets, shows that as of April the Georgia program had spent $54.2 million on administrative costs since 2021, compared to $26.1 million spent on health care costs. Nearly 90% of administrative expenditures came from the federal budget, the report concluded, meaning that Georgia’s experiment is being funded by taxpayers around the country. Federal spending will likely increase given that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has approved $6 million more in administrative costs not reflected in this report because it was published before the state submitted invoices.

The spending watchdog agency echoed its 2019 criticism of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for a lack of oversight of administrative costs associated with state initiatives approved in the name of Medicaid reform.

The September GAO report said the Medicaid agency never required Georgia to detail the costs of building and implementing the program. The federal approval process for states that want to experiment with their Medicaid systems “does not take into account the extent to which demonstrations will increase administrative costs,” the report said.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, promoted Pathways as an example of how fellow conservatives around the country could overhaul federal safety net benefits and end reliance on what critics deride as handouts to low-income Americans. Congressional Republicans cited Pathways as a model for the federal Medicaid work requirement law passed in July that will take effect in 2027. The Georgia Pathways program was slated to expire Oct. 1, but the Trump administration on Tuesday approved an extension of the experiment through Dec. 31, 2026.

The Georgia program was supposed to expand free health care to a group the state had previously deemed ineligible for Medicaid: adults under 65 years old who earn less than the federal poverty line of $15,650 a year. To qualify, Georgians had to prove that they work, study or volunteer at least 80 hours a month.

But enrollment in Georgia Pathways has remained low. The most recent state data shows that 9,175 of the nearly quarter-million low-income Georgians eligible for the program were enrolled as of Aug. 31. Previous reporting by The Current and ProPublica revealed that was due to glitches in the digital platform people must use to enroll, chronic understaffing in the state agency charged with enrollment help and a maze of bureaucratic red tape.

Georgia officials previously told The Current and ProPublica that Pathways was never designed to maximize enrollment. Carter Chapman, Kemp’s spokesperson, said Monday that the Kemp administration remains committed to Pathways and making refinements to meet the health care needs of Georgians.

In December Democratic senators critical of Medicaid work requirements, including Georgia’s Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, had asked the GAO to report on the administrative costs of implementing Pathways and verifying that recipients are working, studying or volunteering.

“Administrative spending has outpaced spending for medical assistance (e.g., health care services)” for Georgia Pathways, the report said. “This was likely driven by the up-front administrative changes needed to implement the demonstration, the delayed start date for enrollment, and any duplication in administrative spending due to the delay.”

Georgia officials told the GAO that the administrative costs associated with Pathways increased by 20% to 30% because of a two-year delay caused by legal battles with the Biden administration, which tried to end all Medicaid work requirement programs that had been approved before the Democratic president took office in 2021. State officials said the delay resulted in having to duplicate some spending, including IT system changes, staff training and other implementation costs, the report said. The report did not provide evidence to support the state’s assertion.

“This report was requested by the same individuals who have no new or good ideas for addressing healthcare needs in Georgia,” Chapman said in a statement. “Now, as other states prepare to adopt our model and reject one-size-fits-none big government healthcare, Democrats like Senators Ossoff and Warnock are trying to rewrite history after four years of inaction and blame the State for costs associated with their own stonewalling.”

Warnock said the GAO’s findings reinforce his opposition to the Trump administration’s push to nationalize work requirements because of the amount of tax dollars going to expenses other than health care.

“Now the entire country can see what we in Georgia already know: Georgia’s Medicaid work reporting requirement program is the real waste, fraud, and abuse,” Warnock said in a statement. “This report shows that Pathways is incredibly effective at barring working people from health coverage and making corporate consultants richer.”

Ossoff called Georgia Pathways “a boondoggle that’s wasted tens of millions on pricey consultants while Georgia hospitals struggle and Georgians get sick without health insurance.”

The GAO report does not include the $27 million that Deloitte Consulting earned to market Pathways or the approximately $10 million that went toward additional consulting, including by other firms, and legal fees related to the state’s two-year court battle with the Biden administration.

Deloitte did not respond to a request for comment. The firm previously declined to answer questions about its Georgia Pathways work, referring requests for information to the state’s Department of Community Health. The agency did not respond to requests for comment but previously described Deloitte’s marketing and outreach work as “robust” and “comprehensive.”

by Jeremy Kohler

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

After a fight with a Black student in a St. Louis suburb left a white student badly injured in March 2024, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey blamed their school district for unsafe conditions, even though the incident occurred after classes and more than a half-mile from campus.

Bailey seized on the fight as evidence of what he called the Hazelwood School District’s misplaced priorities. He sent a letter to the superintendent demanding documents on the district’s diversity policies and accused leaders of “prioritizing race-based policies over basic student safety.” Bailey argued that the district’s dispute with local police departments over its requirement that officers participate in diversity training — an impasse that resulted in some departments leaving schools without resource officers — had left students vulnerable.

In response, the school board’s attorney said Bailey had misrepresented basic facts: The district employed dozens of security guards at schools where it could not assign resource officers, and even if it did have police officers stationed at the school, those officers would not have handled an after-hours, off-campus fight. Finally, police found no evidence that race played a role in the fight.

The attorney general’s office took no further action.

“He was just trying to get attention,” said school board President Sylvester Taylor II.

The legal skirmish was the kind of publicity-getting move that defined Bailey’s two years and eight months as Missouri’s attorney general before his surprise selection last month by President Donald Trump as a co-deputy director of the FBI, according to experts who study the work of attorneys general.

As Missouri’s top law enforcement officer, Bailey repeatedly waded into fights over diversity, gender, abortion and other hot-button issues, while casting conservatives and Christians as under siege by the “woke” left.

Bailey had pledged at the start of his tenure in early 2023 not to use the state’s open public records law “as an offensive tool” to demand bulk records from school districts in broad investigations — a tactic used by his predecessor, Eric Schmitt, now a U.S. senator. Still, he made frequent use of cease-and-desist letters, warning school districts that their diversity initiatives or handling of gender and sex-education issues violated the law.

Some efforts, like his letter to the Hazelwood School District, amounted to little more than a press release. Others ended in defeat, with judges calling his arguments unpersuasive or “absurd” or, in one case, dismissing them without comment. One lawsuit, against China, ended in a judgment against the country that experts said will likely never be enforced.

Bailey, who was sworn in to the FBI position on Sept. 15, did not respond to messages left with the FBI’s press office and with James Lawson, a longtime friend who managed his attorney general campaign and served in various roles on his staff.

Bailey’s actions as attorney general, according to legal observers, stood apart from the office’s core, nonpolitical duties: defending the state against lawsuits and handling felony criminal appeals. That work, by most accounts, continued as usual.

His Republican predecessors, Schmitt and, before him, Josh Hawley, also used the position to advance conservative causes, wage fights against progressive ones and raise their national profiles.

During his stint as attorney general, Hawley — like Schmitt now in the U.S. Senate — delivered a speech in which he claimed the elimination of social stigmas to premarital sex and contraception during the 1960s had degraded the treatment of women and promoted sex trafficking. And he fought to uphold state restrictions that threatened to shut down Planned Parenthood clinics four years before Missouri’s near-total abortion ban took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (Galen Bacharier/Springfield News-Leader/Imagn)

Schmitt was named to succeed Hawley in November 2018. During his four years in office, he defended Christian prayer in public schools and sued several local school districts that had enforced mask requirements during the pandemic.

In 2022, he joined a small group of conservative attorneys general in withdrawing from the National Association of Attorneys General, a bipartisan group that had long coordinated multistate investigations in cases against industries ranging from tobacco to opioids. In a letter posted to the social media platform now known as X, Schmitt joined Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen in arguing that NAAG had taken a sharp “leftward shift” and that continued membership was intolerable. Neither Hawley nor Schmitt, through their spokespeople, responded to requests for comment.

Chris Toth, the executive director of NAAG who retired from the organization weeks after the letter became public, said in an interview that the claims in the letter were “completely unsupported by facts.” Republicans, he added, were involved “in every facet of the organization.”

The move reflected a broader shift in how many attorneys general now use their offices — not only to defend their states in court, but to score political points on the national stage. Few have embodied that strategy more than Paxton, who has often been described as focusing on culture war issues as attorney general.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have reported how Paxton has transformed the attorney general’s office into an agency that seems less focused on traditional duties like representing other state offices in court to one preoccupied with fighting culture wars. His office has increasingly used the state’s powerful consumer protection laws to investigate organizations whose work conflicts with his political views. At the same, he's started increasingly outsourcing major cases to private law firms.

Paxton’s office has said most of the instances when it declined to represent a state agency were due to practical or legal limits — some agencies chose their own attorneys; others were barred by statute. He’s also argued that certain cases would have required reversing earlier positions or advancing claims he viewed as unconstitutional. He’s defended hiring outside law firms, saying his office lacks the resources to take on powerful industries like tech and pharmaceuticals. Paxton did not respond to a request for comment.

Bailey, though far less prominent nationally, fit squarely within this mold. Before leaving for the FBI, he spoke openly about protecting Missourians from what he called “woke” ideology and lawlessness from the left.

A former U.S. Army officer, he has often framed his mission in combat terms. In a podcast interview this year, he said that while conservative states generally try to limit the power of their attorneys general to “maximize freedom,” blue states have weaponized their offices.

“I mean, Letitia James in New York has every weapon in her arsenal that her general assembly can give her,” he said in the podcast interview. He said she uses them “to mess with people’s lives, to prosecute President Trump, take him to court in civil law to try to seize his assets and undervalue those assets.”

“Missouri is uniquely positioned because we were so recently a blue state,” he said, “so it’s like a retreating army has left the battlefield and dropped their weapons and we’re picking them up and learning how to use them against them.”

A spokesperson for James’ office said that “any weaponization of the justice system should disturb every American” and that it stood behind its litigation against Trump’s business and would continue to stand up for New Yorkers’ rights.

Bailey said in the podcast interview that he supported all efforts to investigate President Joe Biden, his family and his administration, and to uncover what Bailey called the truth behind the COVID-19 vaccine, which he said “seems to not be a vaccine at all.”

Bailey used his office to investigate the nonprofit media watchdog Media Matters for America after it reported that corporate ads were appearing next to extremist content on the social media platform X.

Stephen Miller, a top aide to Trump in his first administration, posted that conservative state attorneys general should investigate; Bailey quickly responded that his team was “looking into the matter.” Weeks later, he issued a “notice of pending investigation” to Media Matters and ordered it to preserve records. He later accused the group of using fraud to solicit donations from Missourians to bully advertisers out of pulling out of X, and demanded internal records and donor information under Missouri’s consumer protection law. In a June 2024 interview with Donald Trump Jr., Bailey described the probe as “a new front in the war against the First Amendment” and tied it directly to the 2024 election, accusing Media Matters of trying to silence conservative voices.

Media Matters sued and a federal judge blocked the investigation as likely retaliatory. In early 2025, Bailey dropped the case in a settlement and said he had not found evidence of financial or other misconduct by Media Matters. The organization did not respond to a request for comment.

When Trump was awaiting sentencing after being convicted in a New York court of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to a porn star, Bailey asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift a gag order on the former president and delay his sentencing until after the 2024 election, arguing the restrictions kept Missouri voters from hearing Trump’s message. The Supreme Court rejected his request in an unsigned one-page order without explanation. A New York judge later postponed the sentencing until after the election, writing that he wanted to avoid the appearance, however unwarranted, of political influence.

Trump could have faced up to four years in prison, but a judge issued an unconditional discharge, leaving his conviction in place but sparing him any penalty or fine. Trump said the conviction was a “very terrible experience” and an embarrassment to New York. He is appealing.

Bailey also fought to keep a woman in prison even after a state court judge declared her innocent. Even after the state Supreme Court ordered her release, Bailey’s office told the prison warden to ignore the court’s order. A state court overseeing the case scolded Bailey’s office in a hearing, saying, “I would suggest you never do that.”

Legal experts and other observers of the office said state attorneys general traditionally didn’t act primarily as partisan warriors. Most were focused on defending the state in court and protecting consumers.

Scott Holste, who served as a spokesperson for Jay Nixon, a moderate Democrat who served as the Missouri attorney general from 1993 to 2009, recalls a starkly different approach from Bailey’s. For example, in late September 2008, the top headlines on Nixon’s website focused on robocall rules, lawsuits over mortgage fraud and consumer tips for students.

“We were stridently apolitical in our news releases and in the way we operated,” Holste said. “Our job was to serve all Missourians, not to make political points.”

In the days before the August 2024 Republican primary, two of the three stories featured on Bailey’s homepage targeted the Biden administration over immigration and protections for LGBTQ+ students. The third highlighted a consumer-fraud prosecution.

To his supporters, Bailey is fulfilling campaign promises — a conservative acting like a conservative, said state Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Branson.

Voters see a leader defending their freedoms by fighting policies such as diversity and equity, which they often equate with racism, and mask mandates, which they view as government overreach, Seitz said. “And,” he added, “we have a populist president who appreciates that.”

Toth, the retired head of the national AGs association, traced the shift in how state attorneys general act to the 1998 multistate settlement with the tobacco industry, when nearly every state joined a landmark deal that required cigarette makers to pay more than $200 billion, curb advertising aimed at children and fund anti-smoking campaigns. It also showed attorneys general how much power they could wield.

Over time, the newfound power has raised the profile of attorney general offices across the country, turning them into a springboard for higher office. That higher profile has fueled politicization.

Democratic attorneys general are no strangers to using their offices to fight political battles. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, for example, has filed numerous lawsuits challenging policies of the Trump administration on immigration, environmental regulations and federal funding. While Bonta maintained these suits were based on the law, critics characterized the coordinated legal action as politically motivated resistance.

Dan Ponder, a political science professor at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, said that as the state has shifted to the right, the GOP primary, rather than the general election, is now the real contest for statewide office.

He pointed to actions such as Schmitt opposing critical race theory and reviewing public school textbooks. “That would have been unheard of 20 years ago,” Ponder said, “but now you can’t lose because you’re fighting the quote-unquote good fight.”

Peverill Squire, a political science professor at the University of Missouri, said that from the time of Bailey’s appointment to the position in January 2023, he probably had only two audiences. The first were voters he needed to defeat Will Scharf, a candidate already in Trump’s orbit, in the 2024 Republican primary for attorney general.

“And then once he secured his election, then I think his audience was really Trump,” Squire said.

Former Missouri Republican Party Chair John Hancock said voters seemed to reward Bailey’s approach. Bailey got nearly as many votes as Trump and Gov. Mike Kehoe in the 2024 general election — and more than Hawley or any of the Republicans who won the offices of lieutenant governor, treasurer or secretary of state.

“So obviously the work he was doing in that office was supported,” Hancock said. “I don’t take terrible shock when politicians do political things.”

Kehoe has appointed Catherine Hanaway, a former Missouri House speaker and U.S. attorney, to succeed Bailey as attorney general. Hanaway has said she intends to run the office in a different style. She told the Missouri Independent she had more interest in Medicaid fraud, consumer protection and violent crimes.

Her office said she was not available for an interview with ProPublica.

by Eli Cahan for ProPublica

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As the share of U.S. adults receiving mental health care treatment steadily grows, for-profit companies are playing an increasingly important role.

More than 40% of inpatient mental health beds were operated by for-profit entities as of 2021, according to unpublished data from Morgan Shields, an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies quality in behavioral health care. That’s up from about 13% in 2010. (The number of mental health beds held relatively constant during that time.)

Experts tie this growth to provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which made mental health care an essential health benefit that all insurance plans are required to cover.

Before the law, millions of Americans lacked meaningful mental health care coverage by their insurers — if they had any coverage at all. That changed with the law’s passage in 2010. Three years later, the Obama administration went further, issuing rules that require plans to pay more for mental health care, and to pay for it as long as patients need it. (Some plans had previously imposed hard caps on the number of days they would cover.)

Wider access to and increased reimbursement of mental health services piqued the interest of for-profit corporations, said Eileen O’Grady, who until recently served as program director at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a nonprofit organization that researches the industry.

“Investors in for-profit entities see that as an opportunity to make money,” she said, “in a space that had not historically been seen as super profitable.”

Shields and other researchers have repeatedly flagged concerns about lower quality of care at mental health facilities owned by for-profit corporations, in part due to efforts to cut staff and reduce costs. Companies have defended the quality of care they provide.

ProPublica reported Monday that over 90 psychiatric hospitals across the country have violated the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act in the past 15 years. The vast majority of them — around 80% — are owned by for-profit corporations.

Yet only a handful have faced any consequences from either the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services or the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, both of which are responsible for regulating the law. In the rare cases when hospitals have faced fines, the penalties have been trivial compared to the earnings of each for-profit hospital chain, the investigation found.

According to ProPublica’s analysis of CMS data, about half of all the hospitals cited were owned by just two corporations — Universal Health Services and Acadia Healthcare — which together operate hundreds of inpatient and outpatient behavioral health facilities, in addition to psychiatric hospitals. (UHS made nearly $16 billion in revenue last year, and Acadia collected more than $3 billion.)

From 2010 through the second quarter of this year, 34 of UHS’ psychiatric hospitals had been cited with EMTALA violations. Two, Brentwood Behavioral Healthcare of Mississippi and Three Rivers Behavioral Health in South Carolina, settled with the HHS inspector general for a total of $375,000.

In its May 9 enforcement action against Brentwood, the inspector general of HHS found that, in June 2021, the hospital’s interim CEO directed staff to refuse to accept seven patients from other facilities under the pretense that the facility “did not have the capacity” to treat them. “In each instance, however, Brentwood had the capacity,” an inspector general press release accompanying the enforcement action said, “but refused the transfer because the individual needing treatment was uninsured.”

UHS spokesperson Jane Crawford said the company has 134 facilities that are subject to EMTALA. “While there have been isolated citations associated with technical EMTALA compliance over the 15-year time period in question at some of our facilities, over 75% of UHS Behavioral Health (BH) facilities did not have any EMTALA citations during this time period,” Crawford said. “As such, the narrative or belief that UHS’ facilities as a whole do not comply with EMTALA or attempts to circumvent its requirements is inaccurate and incorrect.”

In a separate statement, she said the company’s psychiatric hospitals “do not select patients based upon insurance status or ability to pay. All UHS facilities are committed to complying with their EMTALA obligations as applicable and provide the requisite care and treatment to all patients who present to the facility regardless of ability to pay.”

As for what happened at Brentwood, Crawford said that the hospital “inadvertently violated rules and regulations” due to “poor internal communication and process failure in a one-month period of time.” Brentwood “promptly revised its practices to address any such future concerns and has not had any EMTALA related issues since that time,” she added.

On the events at Three Rivers, Crawford said that of the 11 patients that CMS said it denied to accept for transfer, citations related to 10 of them were ultimately “rescinded as it was determined that EMTALA did not apply to those patients.” She added that “at no time did Three Rivers fail to respond or accept a fax request based upon any prospective patient’s insurance status or ability to pay.” CMS did not respond to requests to clarify whether the citations were rescinded, but they remain on its website.

Inspectors have cited 12 Acadia hospitals for EMTALA violations since 2010. However, only one — Park Royal Hospital in Florida — has been fined by the inspector general; in 2019, the agency fined the hospital just over $52,000.

“Our goal is always to provide the best quality care to anyone seeking treatment at one of our facilities, and we take our compliance obligations very seriously,” Acadia spokesperson Tim Blair said in an email. He did not respond to subsequent questions about quality of care at Park Royal.

Dr. Jane Zhu, an associate professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University, said decisions made by for-profit psychiatric hospitals may be driven by financial interests. Denying care to patients without insurance or with lower-paying forms of insurance can help increase profits, Zhu said.

Those same financial incentives may drive for-profit hospitals to turn away more complicated patients — such as those who are aggressive or violent while in the throes of a mental health crisis, Zhu added. In these situations, hospitals can save on staffing and other costs if they admit healthier patients and avoid patients with the most severe psychiatric needs — a tactic she called “cream-skimming.”

Both CMS and the HHS inspector general declined to comment on why psychiatric hospitals owned by for-profit corporations have so infrequently faced consequences for EMTALA violations.

Federal law caps the amount that the HHS inspector general can fine for EMTALA violations, an agency spokesperson said. In 2024, that amount was about $66,000 per violation for hospitals with fewer than 100 beds, and $133,000 per violation for hospitals with more than 100 beds. (The figure increases annually for inflation.)

Since 2010, in four of the five cases in which the agency settled with psychiatric hospitals for EMTALA violations, the amounts were well below the maximum allowable. The inspector general’s office declined to comment why.

Former staffers from both CMS and the inspector general’s office said that the lack of consequences for EMTALA violations may be emboldening hospitals to turn away patients that could hurt their bottom line.

“There are a lot of CEOs who will take that risk — they say, ‘Yeah, we know we dumped that patient,’ or, ‘They’re not going to fine us anyhow,’” said a former CMS official focused on EMTALA who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of ongoing work in the industry.

And even in the cases when facilities do face fines, the sums have been minimal compared to chains’ bottom lines.

“Hospitals may see those small-dollar figures as just the cost of doing business,” said a former senior official in the HHS inspector general’s office who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of affecting future job opportunities. “They weren’t seen as a particular deterrent.”

U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said ProPublica’s findings are cause for concern.

“In the face of a large mental health crisis, we should be doing more, not less, to ensure people have access to the care and treatment they need,” he said in a statement.

“Medicate Him and Ship Him Out”

Perimeter Healthcare is one such company whose growth came years after passage of the ACA. In September 2016, Perimeter — backed by $8 billion private equity firm Ridgemont Equity Partners — acquired another company and, with it, five residential treatment facilities and three psychiatric hospitals.

By May 2019, Perimeter acquired its six and seventh hospitals. The hospitals’ former parent company, SAS Healthcare, was indicted months earlier for violating the Texas mental health code. It later pleaded guilty to one count and paid a $200,000 fine; the county dropped the other charges.

The hospitals in Dallas and Arlington aimed to “serve as the gold standard for inpatient psychiatric care,” Rod Laughlin, Perimeter’s founder, said in a press release announcing the acquisition.

But within years of Perimeter taking over, the Dallas hospital again was in the spotlight.

In August 2023, CMS found that Perimeter Behavioral Hospital of Dallas violated EMTALA in four ways when staff refused to examine a patient who had tried to kill himself. (“If that is the patient I am thinking of, he can’t be here,” a hospital staff member told a police officer at the time, according to CMS records. “All we can do is medicate him and ship him out.”) Under the law, hospitals are required to screen and stabilize all emergency patients before discharging them.

And less than a year later, at the same hospital, staff pushed for another patient to be transferred elsewhere after he started flipping chairs.

That led to a standoff between staff and police as the patient slammed against the walls, trying to escape.

“Legally we can’t touch him because he is not our patient,” a hospital staff member told an officer during the exchange, according to CMS records.

With that, the officer called another officer, who asked hospital staff if there was “a particular reason” they were refusing to admit the patient.

“This individual here is beyond our ability to treat” due to his “extreme aggression,” a staff member responded. “We can’t manage him.”

“Under EMTALA since he is on your grounds EMTALA says you guys are responsible — so we are having a disagreement here,” the second officer responded. “I guess,” the officer added, “my next call is to CMS.”

“It is not even necessary to call CMS,” the hospital staff member said, “but feel free to do that.”

Eventually, CMS was called. And some two weeks after the incident, the agency found that the hospital had violated EMTALA in three ways, including failing to provide even the most basic care through a medical examination of the patient — beyond just eyeballing him.

When hospitals breach the law, they are required to send plans to CMS detailing how they will avoid violating EMTALA in the future. Plans of correction filed by Perimeter Behavioral Hospital of Dallas said the hospital would revise some of its materials, including training slides, a test, a self-attestation form used in staff training and a medical screening form for patients. Officials also said they would monitor compliance with the law by reviewing patient logs daily. But the hospital also noted multiple instances in which officials believed “no changes were needed” to its policies.

Beyond responding to CMS with these plans, the hospital did not face consequences from the agency, or from the HHS inspector general for either set of findings. The agencies have not responded to questions about the lack of follow-up in the Perimeter Dallas cases.

Perimeter Healthcare and Ridgemont Equity Partners did not respond to requests for comment.

Lately, lawmakers and regulators have expressed particular alarm about health facilities owned by private-equity companies — like Ridgemont Equity Partners — which typically take control of a business for a relatively short time, restructure it, and resell it at a profit.

Data on for-profit health facilities, in general, shows worse results for both hospitals and nursing homes after they are acquired by private equity firms. A January report by HHS, before the end of the Biden administration, attributed quality differences in part to private-equity firms’ tendency to “dramatically reduce the operational costs” of health care facilities.

Recent research demonstrates that private equity is playing an increasing role in psychiatric hospitals, and that has some federal officials worried. In January, the Senate Budget Committee released a bipartisan congressional staff report investigating private equity’s growing presence in health care.

Officials from the Healthcare Private Equity Association, the trade group that represents medical facilities owned by over 100 investment firms, did not respond to requests for comment.

“Instead of helping families, billionaire corporations are denying sick patients legally protected emergency care to turn healthy profits,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, said in a statement to ProPublica.

“This unchecked corporate greed is leading to worse outcomes for patients,” Merkley added, “particularly those who struggle with mental health crises.”

This reporting was supported by the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation.

by Eli Cahan for ProPublica

This article describes attempted suicide.

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

Late one Saturday night in May 2023, Melissa Keele’s phone rang. Her son had been found alone in the desert of Colorado’s Grand Valley. He was naked; his clothes, phone, keys and car were nowhere to be found.

Keele rushed out to her own vehicle and floored it, her headlights piercing through the pitch black. For years, her son had been dealing with severe mental illness. At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, he hit a breaking point and attempted suicide by driving off a cliff on the highway. “God told him he needed to die,” Keele recalled him telling her.

Eventually, she picked him up — and he didn’t look good. Fearing for his safety, Keele immediately took her then-21-year-old son to West Springs Hospital in Grand Junction.

If you or someone you know needs help, here are a few resources:

• Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
• Text the Crisis Text Line from anywhere in the U.S. to reach a crisis counselor: 741741

The facility, which called itself “Colorado’s Best Psychiatric Hospital,” touted “exceptional psychiatric care in a world-class environment,” including a “state-of-the-art” 63,000-square-foot facility decked out with crafts areas, light therapy rooms and “cozy nooks.”

During the intake process, Keele said she told a nurse about her son’s yearslong battle with mental illness, how he had struggled to keep up with his treatments, hold down a job and keep a roof over his head. How he had stopped taking his psychiatric medications. How just before he left that night he had told his fiancee that he wanted “some alone time” in the valley’s rolling hills.

But 102 minutes after he arrived at West Springs, a nurse discharged him.

Back at home, he slipped out a few hours later while his fiancee was at work. Police found him and quickly called his mother. He again was naked; this time, he was also sunburned and dehydrated. He couldn’t explain what had happened, and he didn’t understand why he was there. Police took him to another emergency room, which deemed him “gravely disabled.”

That determination was critical. It meant that the doctors believed sending Keele’s son home could put him in imminent danger. And it meant, legally, that they could keep him against his will until he was safe. Ultimately, he was transferred to a psychiatric hospital 240 miles east in Denver, where he stayed for more than a week.

The speed with which West Springs released him prompted federal officials to investigate the hospital for failing to properly screen and stabilize him before his discharge. Within days, regulators determined the hospital had violated federal law.

The hospital had failed to comply with the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, better known as EMTALA. The law, enacted in 1986, requires hospitals to screen and stabilize all emergency patients regardless of whether they have insurance. West Springs, the inspectors found, had missed key red flags related to Keele’s son’s grave disability, which could have left him seriously harmed.

It was the second time in a year that West Springs had violated EMTALA. In October 2022, inspectors declared that patients were in “immediate jeopardy” of harm or death because the hospital had failed to properly screen and treat 21 patients who showed up to its emergency room.

Two other times, it was cited for providing deficient emergency care in violation of other rules, according to federal regulators. Just one day after the October 2022 inspection report, regulators found that the hospital did not ensure that some low-level staff were “trained” or “qualified” to monitor patients being assessed for a crisis. And in February 2023, the hospital was hit with another violation for discharging suicidal patients without “evidence of being stabilized and deemed safe.”

In each instance, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency primarily responsible for enforcing EMTALA, asked West Springs to come up with a plan for how it would ensure the problems didn’t happen again. (ProPublica requested the plans of correction in May 2025 from CMS but has not yet received the records.) CMS could have terminated the hospital’s Medicare funding. Another arm of the federal government, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, could have imposed monetary penalties for the EMTALA violations.

But neither of those things happened, though the state of Colorado increased its own oversight of the hospital, mandating that it hire an outside management company in order to keep treating patients.

First image: A road near where Melissa Keele’s son attempted suicide during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Second image: West Springs Hospital in Grand Junction, Colorado, violated a federal law guaranteeing emergency treatment on two separate occasions in one year. (Rachel Woolf for ProPublica)

West Springs Hospital did not respond to repeated inquiries from ProPublica over a year of reporting about what actions it took to prevent future EMTALA violations. In public statements, it said it was committed to providing quality care and subsequently noted that the state restored its full unconditional license at the end of 2024. Keele’s son did not respond to multiple requests for comment and we are not publishing his name; this account is based on documents and interviews with his mother.

Over 90 psychiatric hospitals across the country have violated EMTALA in the past 15 years and almost all have faced the same lack of consequences, a ProPublica investigation has found.

Since 2019, the HHS inspector general has only issued three penalties involving EMTALA violations by psychiatric hospitals. Taken together, these penalties totalled $427,000. (The inspector general has levied additional fines against medical hospitals for inadequate care of patients with mental illness.)

CMS has pulled Medicare certification, and funding, from a handful of psychiatric hospitals, and a number of others have shut down after officials threatened to stop paying. But those cases have been the exception.

“Facilities are not facing consequences for providing poor quality of care,” said Morgan Shields, an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies the quality of care that behavioral health patients receive.

“The market isn’t punishing them and regulators are not punishing them,” Shields added. “That’s an excellent environment to make money.”

The HHS inspector general declined to comment.

For its part, CMS said that West Springs “was given the opportunity to correct their deficiencies” and subsequently “was able to demonstrate compliance.” (CMS has an online portal to report suspected EMTALA violations.)

The widespread violations of EMTALA by psychiatric hospitals — and the lack of enforcement — come even as America’s mental health crisis is reaching a fever pitch, with suicide rates near record highs.

Democrats in Congress say they are concerned that budget cuts under the Trump administration may impair oversight further. In March, the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency announced that it was shuttering half of HHS’ 10 regional offices and purging 25% of the agency’s staff.

In recent months, Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat, and other members of the House and Senate have requested details on how cuts made by President Donald Trump may impact the core functions of HHS, such as ensuring compliance with regulations like EMTALA.

“The abrupt firing of so many dedicated public servants weakens the ability of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to conduct important oversight and enforcement work,” Doggett said in a statement responding to inquiries from ProPublica, meaning that “those who violate EMTALA and other federal health and safety laws will be able to continue avoiding accountability.”

As of yet, those requests for information have gone unanswered. “CMS will continue to enforce EMTALA,” an agency spokesperson said in response to inquiries from ProPublica. The White House did not respond to requests for comment about the impact of the DOGE cuts.

Numerous Psychiatric Hospitals Have Repeatedly Violated Emergency Care Regulations

Psychiatric hospitals that have been cited for violating the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act since 2019.

View the full table on ProPublica's site. “More and More Cracks”

Nearly four decades ago, a group of doctors noticed a pattern among the patients transferred into Chicago’s largest public hospital from private facilities.

Of 467 patients transferred in, 87% were brought to Cook County Hospital “because they lacked adequate medical insurance.” Some 89% of these patients were Black or Hispanic; 81% were unemployed. Almost one-quarter of these patients were medically unstable at time of transfer, and they were more than twice as likely to die as patients who weren’t transferred.

The research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, described that “strong economic incentives” raised serious questions about for-profit hospitals’ ability to “consider the condition and well being of patients objectively.”

Within months, Congress took action.

In April 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed a law to prevent what became known as “patient dumping.” EMTALA is the only law that requires universal care for “emergency medical conditions” regardless of a person’s insurance status.

In the decades since, authorities have documented thousands of EMTALA violations by hospitals across the country.

In a number of cases, patients died just hours after failing to receive the care to which they were legally entitled.

Patients with mental health conditions have also been regularly denied emergency care, according to federal agencies. Since 2010, CMS has found more than 300 EMTALA violations by psychiatric hospitals specifically.

These include sending home gravely disabled patients like Keele’s son, turning away actively suicidal patients, screening out uninsured patients, and rejecting “frequent flyers,” those who return repeatedly, due to how they’ve interacted with staff in the past — among other issues. That’s despite the fact that, in some of these cases, patients met criteria for imminent risk of harm to themselves or others

“Most Americans take it as a given that they can get emergency health care when they go to a hospital, but that promise, enshrined in EMTALA, is showing more and more cracks,” Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said in a statement responding to inquiries from ProPublica.

“I Want Peace Again”

When hospitals release patients experiencing mental health crises prematurely or turn them away entirely, the consequences can be even more severe than what happened to Keele’s son in 2023.

Six years earlier and 1,500 miles to the southeast, Tom Swearengen was discharged from Lakeside Behavioral Health System in Memphis, Tennessee. Less than a week later, a neighbor in their leafy cul-de-sac noticed that “something seemed off” — Swearengen’s blinds had been open, for days, at all hours.

Upon entering the home, the neighbor found Tom’s body — and that of his wife, Margaret — on the living room floor. Margaret had sustained multiple gunshot wounds; Tom had suffered just one, in what police later classifed a murder-suicide.

It was a brutal end to a relationship that, in some ways, had seemed magical at the outset: A conversation kicked off at a Kroger butcher counter had blossomed, and Tom’s easygoing demeanor “put us at ease,” said Bret Boscaccy, Margaret’s son from a previous marriage, “because he seemed harmless.”

That perception changed when, one day, Margaret told Boscaccy and his brother that Tom was “losing his fight with alcoholism.” The news came as a surprise, Boscaccy recalled. “We didn’t see any of it,” he said.

A family photo album shows images from early in Tom Swearengen’s marriage to Margaret. (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)

On Valentine’s Day in 2017 — eight days after Tom cracked a couple ribs, split his right clavicle and bruised his lung amid a spate of drinking — he reached out for help. That’s when he and Margaret found themselves at Lakeside Behavioral.

In the ER that day, Tom’s pain was overwhelming.

“I don’t want to be here,” Tom told the Lakeside Behavioral clinician, according to a government inspection report. “I just wish something would take me. … I want peace again.” At one point in the interview, he said he wanted to hurt himself. At another, Tom described a desire to “die right now.” At a third, he shared that they had guns at home.

Under the “Suicide and Homicide/Violence Risk Factors” section of the assessment, Lakeside Behavioral’s intake clinician noted 10 distinct concerns. Tom also scored three times the threshold for hospitalization based on his recent drinking habits.

But Tom’s insurance wouldn’t cover psychiatric hospitalization, the inspection report said.

So the intake clinician called a psychiatrist, who was home, and got permission to discharge him. She characterized him as “low to no risk” of suicide or homicide. Make an appointment with your old psychiatrist, she told him. And go to Alcoholics Anonymous.

After the murder-suicide, inspectors visited the hospital and determined that the care Swearengen received violated EMTALA: There was no evidence that Lakeside Behavioral helped him in a meaningful way or that he was safe to go home.

Since August 2000, Lakeside has been owned by Universal Health Services, a for-profit corporation that operates hundreds of inpatient and outpatient behavioral health facilities, in addition to psychiatric hospitals, and made $16 billion in revenues last year. In response to inquiries about decisions made by Lakeside staff in Swearengen’s case, Universal Health Services spokesperson Jane Crawford said the company “was not going to get into details” but that it “contested the findings from CMS,” maintaining that Swearengen’s insurance status was reviewed after the medical screening exam was performed and that all EMTALA obligations were satisfied. CMS did not respond to Lakeside’s contention that its report was inaccurate, though the findings remain on the agency’s website.

The hospital did not face financial penalties after the incident and has not violated EMTALA since, according to federal inspection records. Both CMS and the HHS inspector general declined to comment on why no further action was taken against Lakeside.

Lakeside Behavioral Health (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)

About six years ago, in the effort to resolve confusion about the scope of EMTALA, federal regulators sought to make explicit that the law applies to psychiatric hospitals, even if they don’t have ERs.

“The hospital is expected to … address any immediate needs,” the July 2019 guidance from CMS read, and to “keep the patient safe and as stable as possible.”

But since the clarification, violations have continued.

The inspector general declined to comment on why so few enforcement actions have been taken since the clarification, even though CMS has cited 37 psychiatric hospitals for EMTALA violations since then. (Federal watchdogs have long said the law receives only limited enforcement. In a 2001 report, the Government Accountability Office described that “the numbers of EMTALA violations and fines have been relatively small,” and highlighted the need for “effective enforcement.”)

“The law is clear: if you want to accept taxpayer money, you must see any patient who shows up to the emergency room — regardless of their ability to pay,” said Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, in a statement to ProPublica. “CMS should investigate these troubling allegations and hold accountable any hospitals that have violated the law.”

Boscaccy still remembers how he learned about his mother’s death. Five days after his stepfather was discharged by Lakeside, two unmarked police cars pulled up at Boscaccy’s home. The detectives knocked and asked if he knew who Margaret Swearengen was.

“As soon as they said that,” Boscaccy said, “I knew something bad happened.”

And when he learned from a reporter years later that Lakeside Behavioral never faced any consequences from the government, Boscaccy was at a loss.

“I’m kind of shocked that nothing happened,” he said. “You would think at least something — some kind of, something, would happen.”

Bret Boscaccy at his home. Boscaccy’s stepfather murdered his mother before killing himself, according to police. (Andrea Morales for ProPublica) “A Totally Different Place”

In December 2023, six months after he was found naked in the desert, Keele’s son hit another rough patch.

During a mental health crisis that brought him to a different emergency room, he became physically aggressive toward staffers. (After their experiences with West Springs the preceding May, Keele and her son had avoided going back.)

In June 2024, her son was arrested on a warrant for assaulting the staff and brought to jail. Since then, he’s been in and out of jail. Then the hospital. Then jail again.

“‘Spiral’ is a great word for it,” Keele said. “All this stuff ripples.”

On May 16, Keele’s son was sentenced on felony charges to three years in community corrections. Keele worries that his tumble into the criminal-legal system has “just kind of compounded” his mental illness — “It’s been a long, frustrating decline,” she said.

After the incident, West Springs experienced a period of instability.

The same month as her son was discharged prematurely, the state of Colorado put West Springs under a conditional license for a series of problematic inspections, according to reporting from the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. Amid the scrutiny, the hospital’s parent company was required to contract with another health provider to help run it for a year. Then, in November 2024, the company’s board of directors announced a “significant new chapter”: the hospital and the organization that owns it was ceding control to Larkin Health System — a for-profit that owns three hospitals in South Florida. A month later, the state restored the hospital’s full license.

In February, however, West Springs announced that it was closing. The hospital’s parent organization cited low patient volume as one key driver of financial pressures. In March, the hospital officially shut its doors. “It is with a heavy heart that we announce the upcoming closure of West Springs Hospital,” the hospital’s parent organization wrote in a press release. “This decision was not made lightly, and we understand the profound impact it will have on our patients, staff, and community.”

Hospital officials did not respond to multiple inquiries from ProPublica for further details about the decision. Officials from Larkin Health System also declined to comment.

Keele, for her part, wonders how her son’s life might be different had he gotten the care he needed before things turned for the worse.

“I just wish I could have gotten people to work with me when this all started,” she said “We’d be in a totally different place if we had a plan — before it got so out of control.”

Keele had hoped that West Springs, under Larkin, could “turn things around.” Given that suicide rates in the Western Slope of Colorado remain well above those in the rest of the state and the U.S., their community needed to hang on to the only psychiatric facility in the region, she said. The alternative — nothing — would certainly be worse.

Now, with West Springs’ closure, that’s their reality, Keele said. And she isn’t sure what comes next. But she does know one thing.

“For those who need care,” she said, “Denver is pretty far away.”

This reporting was supported by the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the City University of New York’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, and the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation.

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.

An Egyptian chaplain whose detention sparked a community uproar and became a test of counterterrorism powers in immigration court was released from an Ohio jail on Friday as the Department of Homeland Security abruptly withdrew its case against him.

The outcome is a victory for 51-year-old Ayman Soliman, a popular Muslim cleric whose hundreds of supporters include families he counseled at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. The DHS move to restore his asylum status and drop deportation efforts comes after court filings documented errors and inconsistencies in the government’s evidence portraying him as a terrorist.

Just before 1 p.m., Soliman walked out of Butler County Jail with a broad smile and a plastic bag containing his belongings, a moment filmed by his friends and advocates. He had been scheduled for an immigration trial next week and faced deportation to Egypt, which he fled in 2014 because of political persecution.

“This is beyond my dreams,” Soliman told ProPublica in a call minutes after he was freed. “I’m still overwhelmed by the surprise.”

Soliman’s asylum status was reinstated and his application for a green card has been revived, said Robert Ratliff, one of his attorneys. Early Friday, Ratliff had filed documents showing wording discrepancies in what should have been identical asylum termination notices to Soliman. One version called him a “member” of a terrorist group and the other accused him of providing illegal aid to a terrorist group. Soliman has denied both contentions.

The filing on Friday documented the latest in a series of inconsistencies in the government’s evidence, which ProPublica reported this month.

“From the beginning, everything was flawed,” Ratliff said. “This is certainly a victory for him, and it’s huge. Unfortunately, he had to spend approximately 70 days in jail to get to this point.”

A DHS official said immigration authorities “cannot discuss the details of individual immigration cases and adjudication decisions.” But the official added, “An alien — even with a pending application or lawful status — is not shielded from immigration enforcement action.” The agency is “responsible for administering America’s lawful immigration system, ensuring the integrity of the immigration process.”

After leaving the jail, Soliman joined Friday communal prayers at a local mosque, where an imam welcomed his release as a godsend and celebrated his friend as “a free man, as he always should be.”

Flanked by supporters at a news conference Friday evening, Soliman said he was still in disbelief that his day had begun in custody. He’d just come from a restaurant where he enjoyed “salad and fruit and meat” after weeks of jail food. He said he was “out of words” for the support system that sprang to his defense. He said he received 760 letters while in jail from people he’d never met.

“I’m free today because of this advocacy,” Soliman said. “Don’t underestimate your voice.”

Ayman Soliman Is Free Soliman is greeted as he exits Butler County Jail in Ohio. (Courtesy of Ahmed Elkady)

Watch video ➜

Soliman’s ordeal, which spanned two administrations, is more complex than most targets of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

After fleeing persecution over his journalistic and protest activities in Egypt, Soliman had been granted asylum in 2018 under the first Trump administration. Then, in the last month of the presidency of Joe Biden, immigration authorities moved to revoke the status based on sharply disputed claims of fraud and aid to a terrorist group. Once Trump returned to office weeks later, court records show, immigration officials bumped up the terrorism claims and formalized the asylum termination on June 3.

DHS had built the case on allegations that Soliman’s involvement with an Islamic charity provided illegal aid, or “material support,” to the Muslim Brotherhood. But neither the charity nor the Brotherhood is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, and an Egyptian court found no official ties between the groups.

Material support laws ban almost any type of aid to U.S.-designated foreign terrorist groups. Prosecutors describe the laws as an invaluable tool against would-be attackers, but civil liberties groups have long complained of overreach.

The Biden-era DHS, which first flagged the charity issue, said it would revoke Soliman’s asylum if “a preponderance of the evidence supports termination” after a hearing, according to the December 2024 notice. At the time, court records show, the material support allegation was listed as a secondary concern after more common asylum questions about the veracity of official documents and Soliman’s claims of persecution in Egypt.

Once Trump came to power weeks later, Soliman’s attorneys said, the material support claims metastasized, with U.S. authorities declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a Tier III, or undesignated, terrorist group and adding new arguments about ties to Hamas. The Brotherhood, a nearly century-old Islamist political movement, renounced violence in the 1970s, though Hamas and other spinoffs are on the U.S. blacklist.

Court filings show DHS attorneys introducing, then withdrawing or amending, materials to build a case linking Soliman to the Brotherhood through the charity. Almost immediately, the evidence began unraveling.

Among the supporting documents filed by the government were three academic reports by scholars with deep knowledge of Islamic charities in Egypt. Soliman’s legal team filed statements from all three balking at how DHS had cherry-picked their research. The scholars described “important mistakes of fact and interpretation,” “a mischaracterization” and “a dishonest manipulation of my text.”

Separate from U.S. attempts to tie Soliman to the Brotherhood was a puzzling footnote in which DHS attorneys alluded to warrants for “murder and terrorism” in Iraq, a country Soliman has never visited. DHS acknowledged in court that the line had been an error — after it had been included in the government’s successful argument for keeping him in custody.

Legal scholars specializing in national security were monitoring the case as a gauge of how much power the Trump administration could wield at the intersection of counterterrorism and immigration.

Ratliff said that the win was important but that he didn’t think the outcome would deter DHS from invoking similar arguments in other immigration cases, especially involving cartels, which the Trump administration designated as terrorist organizations, unlocking material support powers.

“The connections in this case were always going to be too tenuous to withstand scrutiny,” Ratliff said. “I think, though, that this format is still the format we’re going to see DHS take.”

Soliman’s supporters — from religious leaders to university students to parents he met at the hospital — welcomed his release.

“I know tomorrow he’ll get right back to the work he does, of caring for his community,” said Lynn Tramonte, executive director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, one of the advocacy groups that pushed for his release.

by Debbie Cenziper and Megan Rose, ProPublica, and Katherine Dailey, Medill Investigative Lab

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

Two prominent U.S. senators are demanding the Food and Drug Administration provide an immediate accounting of the foreign generic drugmakers allowed to skirt bans meant to keep dangerous medication out of the United States.

The top members of the Senate Special Committee on Aging cited a recent ProPublica investigation that exposed how the FDA quietly awarded special passes to troubled manufacturers so they could continue shipping medication to Americans even after the agency barred their factories because of serious quality concerns.

“These exemptions undermine the goals of U.S. policy, threaten the safety of drugs, and place Americans’ health at risk,” the senators wrote in a bipartisan letter to FDA Commissioner Marty Makary.

Committee Chair Rick Scott, R-Fla., and ranking member Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., described “urgent concerns” about the FDA’s oversight of foreign drugmakers and whether medication coming into the United States was safe.

ProPublica found the agency granted exemptions from import bans to more than 20 foreign factories since 2013, including a Sun Pharma plant in India where quality breaches repeatedly risked the contamination of sterile injectable drugs. All told, ProPublica found, the FDA allowed more than 150 drugs or their ingredients into the United States from banned factories, including antibiotics, anti-seizure drugs and chemotherapy treatments.

The FDA said the exemptions were used to prevent shortages of essential medication. The practice, however, was largely kept hidden from doctors, pharmacists, consumers and lawmakers. Despite a 2012 law requiring the FDA to describe all the ways it was dealing with drug shortages, the agency didn’t mention the practice to Congress until 2024 — and even then, only in a single footnote of a 25-page report.

Scott said he fears for patient safety.

“We’ve seen the FDA impose import bans on foreign drug manufacturing facilities for violating basic quality and safety standards, only to later issue exemptions … that allow drugs from those same facilities to still be imported simply because they’re on a shortage list,” he said in a statement to ProPublica. “That means the FDA may be allowing potentially unsafe, low-quality drugs into American homes, and our seniors are especially at risk. That’s unacceptable.”

Sun Pharma has said it maintains “a relentless focus on quality” and is working with the FDA to resolve regulatory issues. The FDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The agency previously said that companies receiving exemptions from import bans were required to conduct extra drug quality testing with third-party oversight to “help assure consumer safety.”

Makary is new at the FDA: He took the helm of the agency earlier this year after he was appointed by President Donald Trump and has called for “radical transparency” in agency decision-making.

The letter from Scott and Gillibrand comes on the heels of a Senate hearing on drug safety, where a former FDA inspector who spent years in India and China said he repeatedly found “shortcuts and fraud” at substandard factories and feared bad medicine was being shipped en masse to the United States.

“What we found was terrifying,” said Peter Baker, who reported a series of failures overseas from 2012 to 2018.

Baker said his findings and those of other inspectors were undermined by the exemptions from import bans.

Inspectors over the years have uncovered filthy water, vials of medication that were “blackish” from contamination and raw materials tainted with unknown “extraneous matter” at foreign factories, government records show. Documents on drug quality testing have been destroyed, and in one case, workers poured acid on some that had been stuffed in a trash bag.

ProPublica found the decisions to override those findings and exempt drugs from import bans were made by a small, secretive group of agency insiders who reported to the longtime head of drug safety, Janet Woodcock.

In an interview, Woodcock told ProPublica that the FDA believed the exempted drugs were safe. “We felt we didn’t have to make it a public thing,” she said.

Woodcock retired in 2024 after nearly four decades at the agency.

In their letter to Makary, the senators asked the FDA to explain how it defines a drug shortage and provide market share data for all drugs exempted from import bans since 2020. They also asked for a complete list of those drugs.

The FDA has never released such a list. ProPublica published one in August after a yearlong investigation. Reporters harnessed artificial intelligence and wrote code that used keyword search and pattern matching to pull exempted drug names and manufacturing locations from hundreds of old reports that were put out by the FDA and are no longer on the agency’s website. The reports identified factories barred from shipping drugs to the United States and at times referenced the exemptions with almost no explanation.

ProPublica found the FDA did not regularly test the exempted drugs to ensure they were safe or use its massive repository of drug-related complaints to proactively track whether they were harming unsuspecting patients.

“I am deeply concerned by the FDA’s pattern of allowing foreign generic drugmakers to export drugs to America even when their facilities have been found to fall below our standards,” Gillibrand said. “This is a threat to our seniors and our national security.”

Several House members have also raised concerns.

“The FDA should never have allowed corporations with unsafe foreign factories to import risky drugs or ingredients,” Rep. Chris Deluzio, D-Pa., said in a statement. “We need stronger and better domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing, and we need a government that refuses to roll the dice on our health.”

The senators asked the FDA to provide more information about the exemptions by mid-October. The committee is planning to hold a second hearing.

by Renee Dudley

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What Happened

The Defense Department has tightened cybersecurity requirements for tech companies that sell cloud computing services to the Pentagon.

The updates, issued this month, ban IT vendors from using China-based personnel to work on department computer systems and require companies to maintain a digital paper trail of maintenance performed by their foreign engineers.

Background

The changes follow a ProPublica investigation that exposed how Microsoft used China-based engineers to maintain government computer systems for nearly a decade — a practice that left some of the country’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary.

U.S.-based supervisors, known as “digital escorts,” were supposed to serve as a check on these foreign employees, but we found they often lacked the expertise needed to effectively supervise engineers with far more advanced technical skills.

What They Said

The Defense Department now says in its “Security Requirements Guide” that only “personnel from non-adversarial countries” may work on its cloud systems and that the escorts supervising those foreign workers “must be technically qualified in the code/system or technology they are providing access to.”

In addition, cloud providers must maintain detailed audit logs, a digital trail of actions in computer systems. The logs “must include identification of the escort and escorted,” including country of origin, as well as details of commands executed and settings changed.

Why It Matters

Until our reporting, top Pentagon officials said they had been unaware of Microsoft’s digital escort system, which the company developed as a work-around to a Defense Department requirement that people handling sensitive data be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

Cybersecurity and intelligence experts have told ProPublica that the arrangement poses major risks to national security, given that laws in China grant the country’s officials broad authority to collect data. Leading members of Congress, in turn, have called on the Defense Department to strengthen its security requirements while blasting Microsoft for what some Republicans called “a national betrayal.”

The Pentagon is now conducting an investigation into the digital escort program, with a focus on Microsoft’s China-based engineers.

Response

Following ProPublica’s reporting, Microsoft announced in July that it would stop using China-based engineers to service Defense Department cloud systems. In a statement for this article, a spokesperson said the company was committed to implementing the department’s new requirements.

“Our commitment to national security is foundational, and we remain focused on providing the most secure services possible to the US government,” the spokesperson said. “We recently implemented changes to our Department support model, and will continue to work with our national security partners to evaluate and adjust our security protocols in light of the new directives.”

Doris Burke contributed research.

by Anna Clark

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

Just 15 months after receiving an award from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for excellence in community water fluoridation, the city of Grayling, Michigan, changed course.

With little notice or fanfare, council members voted unanimously in May to end Grayling’s decadeslong treatment program. The city shut down the equipment used to deliver the drinking water additive less than two weeks later.

Although it already paid for them, the town returned six unopened barrels of the fluoride treatment to the supplier.

Personal choice was the issue, said City Manager Erich Podjaske. “Why are we forcing something on residents and business owners, some of which don’t want fluoride in their water?” he said. He saw arguments for and against treatment in his research, he said, and figured that those who want fluoride can still get it at the dentist or in their toothpaste.

Drinking water fluoridation is widely heralded as a public health triumph, but it’s had critics since it was pioneered 80 years ago in Grand Rapids, about 150 miles southwest of Grayling. While once largely on the fringes, fluoridation skeptics now hold sway in federal, state and local government, and their arguments have seeped into the mainstream.

Even in the state where the treatment began, communities are backpedaling. And because customer notice requirements are patchy, people may not even know about it when their fluoridation stops.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has called fluoride “industrial waste” and supports an end to community water fluoridation. The head of the Food and Drug Administration said on a newscast that the CDC’s online description of water fluoridation as one of the greatest public health achievements is “misinformation.”

The CDC, which is in the midst of a leadership exodus and staff revolt, and the Environmental Protection Agency are reviewing their respective approaches to fluoride in drinking water. At the same time, President Donald Trump’s administration dismantled the CDC’s Division of Oral Health, which, among other initiatives, provided research and technical assistance on fluoridation. That’s the office that helped present awards for well-run programs like the one in Grayling.

Since Kennedy was elevated to the nation’s top health post, Utah and Florida became the first states to ban communities from adding fluoride to public drinking water. The Utah ban included measures to make prescription fluoride supplements more accessible — but now, the FDA is moving to remove certain types of those supplements for children from the market.

Altogether, legislation was introduced this year in at least 21 states to prohibit or roll back provisions related to adding fluoride to public water systems, according to Abby Francl, policy analyst at the National Conference of State Legislatures. In addition, citing Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative, Oklahoma’s governor issued an executive order instructing state agencies to cease promotion of fluoridation in the public water supply while it reviews the practice.

Some local communities across the country opted to stop treatment this year, including at least four in Alabama, the state with the second-lowest number of dentists per resident. Others are debating it. On Michigan’s east side, the medical director of St. Clair County’s health department urged the agency to take steps to “prohibit the addition of fluoride” to public water systems. Two Upper Peninsula cities with a shared water system had special council meetings this summer on fluoridation. In Hillsdale, the acting mayor has said that ending fluoridation is a top priority.

“I want to reform the water system now that we have RFK in Health and Human Services,” Joshua Paladino told a local paper in November. Paladino added in an email to ProPublica that he sees public water fluoridation as an imprecise tool because it gives a standard dose across the population.

According to Michigan’s environmental agency, some communities had temporarily stopped fluoridation and were “hesitant to restart because of uncertainty.” That prompted it to issue a five-page statement with the state health department in March, stressing that the levels recommended for water suppliers — 0.7 milligrams per liter of water — have no adverse health effects and that fluoridation benefits everyone.

“Local anti-fluoride movements can be vocal and persistent, but do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of the greater community,” the statement said.

Communities that end fluoridation will see more decaying teeth, according to Margherita Fontana, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. Young children, older adults, people with disabilities and people who are poor are especially at risk, she said, but everyone will be vulnerable. Excessive tooth decay in children can require treatment in hospitals, under anesthesia. In rare but extreme cases, it can lead to death.

“It’s unfortunate, because we know how to prevent the disease,” Fontana said. “So it just seems like we’re going backwards in time rather than forward.”

A handful of states require customer notification when fluoridation ends. New York mandates such notice, yet fluoridation in Buffalo lapsed for years before it was widely known. Outside Detroit, the city of Wyandotte suspended treatment about a decade ago, despite saying on its website until early this summer that it used fluoride. The claim was removed only after a local reporter raised the issue.

Michigan doesn’t have a statewide protocol for notifying residents when fluoridation stops. The environmental agency’s spokesperson said in an email that while it strongly recommends that communities inform customers, it doesn’t have the authority to compel them.

Grayling’s water operator, Josh Carlson, said a district engineer at the agency told him he just needed to tell the state if the town decided to stop fluoridating the water.

“It was almost like she was caught off guard that we actually did it,” Carlson said.

From Fringe to Mainstream

Water fluoridation began in 1945 in Grand Rapids, Michigan’s second-largest city, as part of a planned trial intended to last 15 years. Muskegon, on the Lake Michigan shore, served as the control, meaning its water was not treated with a fluoride additive. An Illinois city with naturally occurring fluoride in its water was another point of comparison.

Six years in, Muskegon officials withdrew from the trial after determining that the health benefits were so significant, they couldn’t deny treatment any longer to Muskegon’s children. Similar studies elsewhere continued for years, showing positive outcomes.

“It was very usual to have dentures at a very young age” at the time, Fontana said. Fluoride treatment “was such a fantastic discovery, something so easy that nature already provided. It was already there. It was the greatest discovery, really, for oral health.”

Grand Rapids celebrates its role in public health history with plaques and a totemic sculpture. But the treatment has been criticized since the early days as, variously, a Communist plot, forced mass medication and an industrial byproduct that causes more harm than good. (Fluoride additives are commonly derived from the processing of phosphate fertilizer.)

Even as fluoridation became widespread, opposition persisted. Today’s critics note that fluoride is now available in toothpaste, as well as in ingestible drops and tablets like the ones for children that the FDA is working to remove from the marketplace. Dental care is also more accessible than it was in the 1940s. The need that fluoridated water was meant to address, critics say, isn’t as urgent.

While progress has made fluoridation’s effects less dramatic, they’re still significant. It was initially credited with a 65% reduction in tooth decay; now, it’s about 25%. No other fluoride source compares to the cost-effectiveness of drinking water, proponents say, especially for those least able to access dental care, either because of cost or because they live in areas with a shortage of dental providers.

“Steel Water,” a sculpture by artist Cyril Lixenberg, was erected in 2007 in Grand Rapids to celebrate the community’s role in advancing water fluoridation. (Joel Seewald, HMdb.org)

Community water fluoridation is supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Dental Association and the American Medical Association. The CDC, at least for the moment, still recommends it.

Advocates say that its benefits are so pervasive, they’ve become invisible to many.

“Known benefits that are not visible, they take it for granted, whereas unknown risks are what they are always worried about,” said Jayanth Kumar, lead researcher on a systematic review of community water fluoridation and IQ. “Florida didn’t ban alcohol. Florida didn’t ban cigarettes. But they banned fluoride.”

Critics say the National Toxicology Program’s “state of the science” report from last year shows an association between fluoridated drinking water and a lowered IQ in children. But that assessment — which is both contested and much-cited — involves fluoride levels that are more than twice what the federal government recommends for drinking water, and it’s based on limited studies conducted outside the U.S., with different water conditions.

A post made on Gov. Ron DeSantis’ X account, celebrating Florida’s ban on local governments adding fluoride to public drinking water, was sent to ProPublica in response to a query to the governor’s office about the state’s policy. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Even the report’s abstract says that “more studies are needed to fully understand the potential for lower fluoride exposure to affect children’s IQ.”

In a lawsuit brought against the EPA by groups opposed to water fluoridation, a district judge relied in part on the NTP analysis in ruling that fluoridation presents such an “unreasonable risk” that the agency must take action. Even as it appeals the decision, the EPA said its review of new science on fluoride in drinking water “is being done in coordination with Secretary Kennedy and HHS.”

The court ruling, the NTP report and the wavering stance of federal agencies have empowered a backlash to fluoridation in state and local governments.

Stuart Cooper, executive director of the Fluoride Action Network, said he’s seen momentum shift over the last two decades as his group sought to eliminate fluoride treatment, not least as a plaintiff in the EPA lawsuit. Kennedy has given a jolt to the movement, he said. Now, “we have allies at every level.”

“Legislators and city councilors are calling us instead of me having to do vice versa,” he said.

Tooth Decay and Regrets

In Grayling, questions about fluoridation were brewing for at least a year before the town changed course. Podjaske, the city manager, said he discussed it off and on with Carlson, the city’s water operator. When it came time to reorder the fluoride additive, Podjaske wondered: Is this really necessary?

Carlson asked the state’s environmental agency about the protocol for discontinuing treatment and was told to keep the state posted. In April, Podjaske suggested adding the fluoridation question to the City Council’s agenda. At the May meeting, the council voted 4-0 to end treatment.

“I figured the best option was don’t push it on people,’’ council member Jack Pettyjohn said about his vote. “Don’t force them to have it in their water.”

There wasn’t any outreach to the public or health experts ahead of the vote. Meeting minutes say that Podjaske and Carlson discussed the removal of the fluoride additive after the water operator received “additional education and training.”

But both men say that isn’t right. Fluoridation was already on the agenda when Carlson attended a training that wasn’t about the treatment, but where he had an informal conversation with an instructor that made him worry about fluoride’s safety.

The vote would’ve occurred even without Kennedy’s activism, Podjaske and Pettyjohn said. Carlson, though, noted how Grayling’s pivot played out in context of “some of the new narratives coming out of Washington.”

“There’s a lot of mixed feelings about RFK Jr., but he seems to be anti-fluoride,” Carlson said. “I don’t know if that’s driving people’s complaints about fluoride.” With the proliferation of social media, he said, “I could see that being a factor, in the fact there’s more people with an opinion now.”

At the same time, he said, locals are more tuned in to water issues following the Flint water crisis and the contamination of waterways with PFAS chemicals linked to a nearby military base. PFAS are a group of “forever chemicals” that can carry a cancer risk.

Carlson said that in the occasional feedback he’s gotten on fluoridation over the last couple of decades, “the negatives were more than the positives in recent years.”

Following input from the state environmental agency, Grayling posted a notice about the change online in August, 10 weeks after treatment stopped. Some people didn’t see it. Mary Bobenmoyer, owner and general manager of Our Town Coffee & Treats, didn’t know until a reporter asked her about it in late August. “They did it?” she said.

Bobenmoyer spent seven years as a dental assistant. She encourages children especially to get fluoride treatment at the dentist. But, she said, “I personally don’t think it should be filtered in our water. We should have free and clear water.”

Over in Grand Rapids, there’s sporadic pushback on fluoridation, said water system manager Wayne Jernberg. But he hasn’t noticed any recent escalation. And he doesn’t see why there would be.

“We rely on the science of us,” Jernberg said. “We’ve been adding it for 80 years, OK? And we don’t see any issues in our community.”

Meanwhile, reports on dental health have caused some communities that dropped fluoridation to reconsider.

In Canada, just across the river from Detroit, the City Council of Windsor, Ontario, voted to stop fluoridation in 2013 after lengthy public debate. Less than six years later, the county health agency reported troubling outcomes from oral health screenings at area schools. It found that the percentage of children with decay or requiring urgent care increased 51% in five years, while the percentage of children that didn’t require any care decreased by 43%. The Windsor council soon decided to reintroduce water fluoridation, citing it as “a key prevention strategy.”

In the province of Alberta, Calgary’s council voted in 2011 to stop fluoridation in part because of community skepticism and because expensive repairs to the equipment were needed, according to Councillor Gian-Carlo Carrà. But in time, researchers found that local children developed significantly more cavities than their peers in Edmonton, where water is fluoridated.

“We saved ourselves some money,” said Carrà. “Fast-forward 10 years, and the results are clear that dental outcomes for Calgarians are worse after 10 years of not having fluoride in the water.”

When fluoridation was put on the ballot in 2021, 62% of voters supported its reintroduction. It took more than 28 million Canadian dollars and several years to start treatment again.

But, Carrà said, those costs — and the money to run the system — seem worthwhile. “I’m just much more interested in doing as much good as I possibly can,” Carrà said.

In Grayling, speaking more than two months after voting to end the treatment, Pettyjohn said he has an open mind about the future of fluoridation. “I would totally look at readdressing it, especially if the people of Grayling really wanted us to,” he said.

For now, though, he said he’s heard nothing negative from residents.

by Lauren McGaughy, The Texas Newsroom

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

This article is co-published with The Texas Newsroom and The Texas Tribune.

A group of state and national media organizations, including The Texas Newsroom, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, are arguing in court that records in Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s divorce case should be made available to the public.

The organizations filed their plea to intervene with the Collin County district court handling the Paxtons’ case on Tuesday. The filing requests that the court reverse a July decision to seal the case records, arguing that both the attorney general and his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, are elected officials subject to public scrutiny. The documents should be available for “review and inspection” with limited exceptions, the media organizations said.

“The grounds alleged for divorce and the disposition of property are of substantial public interest because they bear on integrity in public office, potential use of public resources, and transparency in judicial proceedings,” the media organizations argued.

The organizations noted that family law cases across the country, including divorce proceedings, are presumed public and that the couple’s political positions in Texas and Paxton’s decision in April to run for U.S. Senate add to the public interest.

Paxton served more than a decade in the Texas House of Representatives and Texas Senate before his election as state attorney general in 2014. Angela Paxton was first elected to the state Senate in 2018.

“Where, as here, the parties are not private citizens but elected constitutional officers, the need for transparency is heightened, not diminished,” the filing read. “Allegations that might suggest abuse of marital assets, concealment of financial information, or personal conduct inconsistent with public responsibility are not merely private — they are of public consequence.”

The eight organizations that signed on to the filing are Dow Jones & Co. (publisher of The Wall Street Journal), The Washington Post, Hearst Newspapers (which owns the Austin American-Statesman, Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News), ProPublica, The Texas Lawbook, the Texas Observer, The Texas Tribune and The Texas Newsroom.

Angela Paxton filed for divorce in July, accusing her husband of adultery. Soon after, she requested all records in the case be placed under seal, arguing that doing so would “not have an adverse affect on the public health or safety.”

Judge Ray Wheless granted her request in mid-July. He then recused himself. It’s not clear why, but Wheless and his wife, also a district court judge in Collin County, have donated to the Paxtons’ campaigns in the past.

The current judge listed online as presiding over the case is Lindsey Wynne.

After news of the divorce went public, Ken Paxton posted on the social media site X that he and his wife “decided to start a new chapter in our lives.” He attributed the divorce to the work of political enemies. In court, his attorney filed a brief general denial of Angela Paxton’s divorce petition.

In their filing calling for the records to be unsealed, the media organizations note that Paxton has been accused of impropriety at least six times while in elected office, including fraud, abuse of office and self-dealing.

In one of the most serious cases, he was charged with multiple felonies in 2015 for allegedly encouraging investors to buy into a McKinney, Texas, tech firm without telling them that he had a financial interest in the company and also failing to register with the state before soliciting clients for a friend’s investment firm. After years in court, Paxton cut a deal to do community service in lieu of facing trial. He did not admit guilt in this case and has not been convicted of a crime.

Then in 2023, the Texas House impeached him for alleged official misconduct, some of it related to accusations that he swapped political favors with a campaign donor in exchange for a job for the woman with whom he was allegedly having an affair. Paxton called it a political witch hunt and denied that he broke the law.

After a trial, the Texas Senate acquitted him and he was reinstated to office.

“These sustained, serious, and high-profile matters raise questions about AG Paxton’s conduct in public office and his fidelity to the law,” the organizations argued.

The couple’s assets, which were scrutinized during the impeachment process, will be a subject of the divorce case.

The Paxtons have purchased multiple homes and parcels of land in several states but failed for years to disclose them on state ethics filings.

This summer, after The Texas Newsroom revealed the lack of disclosure, the couple listed more information about the property acquisitions on their annual financial statements. In a note on the documents, Paxton said he believes the disclosure rules are murky and contradictory and that he was only disclosing properties “that continue to have bank notes serviced by the filer and/or the filer’s spouse.”

Angela Paxton has asked for a “disproportionate share” of the couple’s assets in her initial divorce filing, which The Texas Newsroom obtained prior to the records being sealed. She wanted sole use of their McKinney home while the case is pending as well exclusive access to her business account.

She also wants Ken Paxton to admit fault in the breakup of the marriage.

A lawyer for Ken Paxton did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the media organizations’ request. A spokesperson for Angela Paxton declined to comment.

Update, Sept. 17, 2025: This story has been updated to add a response from Angela Paxton’s spokesperson.

Lauren McGaughy is a journalist with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org.

by ProPublica

ProPublica has selected Dana Chiueh and Aaron Brezel as AI engineering fellows as part of its participation in the Lenfest Institute’s AI Collaborative and Fellowship program, a nationwide news industry effort supported by Microsoft and OpenAI to explore how artificial intelligence technologies can responsibly contribute to the work of mission-driven newsrooms. The Lenfest AI program selected ProPublica among 10 regional and national news organizations for the two-year fellowships.

The ProPublica fellowships are made possible through funding from both the Lenfest Institute and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Dana and Aaron as our first AI engineering fellows,” said Ben Werdmuller, ProPublica’s senior director of technology. “Their unique combination of technical expertise and journalism experience positions them perfectly to help us explore how AI can safely enhance investigative reporting while maintaining the rigorous standards, ethical principles and human expertise that define ProPublica’s work.”

Chiueh was most recently a news innovation engineer at the Minnesota Star Tribune, participating in the Lenfest program on the newsroom’s behalf. She was a recipient of a Brown Institute Magic Grant for developing Tipbot, a tool that automates the gathering of missing information from submitted tips, and previously reported for The Dallas Morning News and Los Angeles Times, among others.

Brezel joins ProPublica from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, where he was lead software engineer. Before that, he was a software engineer at The Washington Post, where, as a founding member of the reporting tools team, he built software for journalists across the newsroom.

About ProPublica ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. With a team of more than 150 dedicated journalists, ProPublica covers a range of topics, focusing on stories with the potential to spur real-world impact. Its reporting has contributed to the passage of new laws; reversals of harmful policies and practices; and accountability for leaders at local, state and national levels. Since it began publishing in 2008, ProPublica has received eight Pulitzer Prizes, five Peabody Awards, eight Emmy Awards and 16 George Polk Awards.

About the Lenfest Institute for Journalism  The Lenfest Institute creates solutions for the next era of local news by investing in sustainable business models at the intersection of local journalism, responsible use of technology and service to community in Philadelphia and nationwide. 

About the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation is a philanthropic organization dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence and data science solutions to create a thriving, equitable and sustainable future for all. PJMF works in partnership with public, private and social institutions to drive progress on our most pressing challenges, including digital health, climate change, broad digital access and data maturity in the social sector.

by Taylor Kate Brown for ProPublica

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

Before and after the 2024 election, Elon Musk made it clear he disliked environmental regulations and considered them a barrier to innovation, especially given the quick timelines his companies prefer to operate on.

The billionaire spent more than $250 million to help elect President Donald Trump and, in the first months of Trump’s second term, Musk led the Department of Government Efficiency, making cuts to the federal bureaucracy and regulatory staff, including environmental agencies, before a dramatic falling out with the president.

Musk-controlled companies have also developed influence in Texas, a state already known for a lighter touch on environmental regulation. In addition to his lobbyists’ successful track record in the Texas Legislature, Gov. Greg Abbott cited Musk as inspiration for the state creating its own DOGE-style office.

A new investigation from ProPublica, the Texas Newsroom, the Houston Chronicle and the Texas Tribune has found Musk and a Houston-area member of Congress have pushed Texas and local officials to hire Musk’s Boring Co. for a $760 million flood control project in the city.

Reporters Lauren McGaughy and Yilun Cheng found that Rep. Wesley Hunt helped pitch Boring’s involvement even though the company builds tunnels narrower than the ones extensively studied by flood control experts for the project. An engineering expert warned that the volume of the tunnels the company is proposing may not be sufficient during a flood emergency. Another said that the proposed tunnels, which would be built at shallow depths, could interfere with existing utility lines and bridge foundations.

Boring has described its project in pitches to lawmakers as an “innovative and cost-effective solution.” But experts and some local officials question whether Boring should be awarded the contract. One Democratic county commissioner told the newsrooms that Musk shouldn’t be involved in the Houston project, arguing he has shown “blatant disregard for democratic institutions and environmental protections.”

Hunt, Musk and representatives from Boring did not respond to the newsrooms’ request for comment before publication of the Aug. 28 story. After publication, Hunt and Musk defended the project on X, the social media platform that Musk owns. Musk claimed that the tunnels would cost less than alternatives and that additional tunnels could increase flow, but he provided no further details.

Officials in Houston haven’t decided on a contractor for the tunneling project yet, and it remains to be seen which environmental regulations will come into play.

In the past, Boring has found ways to navigate around environmental rules. A Boring tunnel project in Las Vegas has skirted environmental, building and labor regulations, a previous ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas investigation found.

Other Musk-owned companies have faced similar criticism. Over the past year, environmental groups have also raised concerns about an xAI supercomputing facility in Memphis, Tennessee. Musk did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

Adam Kron, a senior attorney at the environmental advocacy group Earthjustice, said any company ignoring or avoiding regulations entirely reminds him of the fracking boom in the early 2010s, when companies moved quickly to drill, poisoning some local communities’ groundwater in the process. “There is a gold rush mentality of getting out there [first] and paying the fine later, once you can prove it,” Kron said. “When you have that kind of culture, you do see more of the notorious attempts to not seek the correct permits or not comply with the standards.”

Here’s what to know about Boring and other Musk-affiliated companies’ history of bumping up against environmental regulations.

Boring Co.’s Las Vegas Convention Center Loop Station, where visitors can ride electric vehicles through a 1.7-mile tunnel system connecting the convention center to nearby areas of the city. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images) Boring Co.

In Las Vegas, a previous ProPublica investigation found Boring was able to skirt building, environmental and labor regulations by structuring a transportation project as a completely private venture and leaning on its local connections.

Boring is constructing a planned 68-mile tunnel system beneath Las Vegas where Teslas ferry passengers underneath the city’s urban core. The project avoided lengthy reviews by building its first section near the convention center under the auspices of the tourism authority. Since then, Boring has received county approval for dozens of more miles of tunnels under obscure holding company names.

Since Boring’s Las Vegas project began, it has been cited or fined for wastewater violations. It also paid retroactive fees for permits after being caught tunneling without them, reporters Daniel Rothberg and Dayvid Figler found. Workers for the company have filed complaints with the state Occupational Safety and Health Administration about “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and severe chemical burns. Nevada OSHA fined the company more than $112,000, after an investigation in 2023, but Boring has disputed the regulator’s allegations and contested the violations.

Boring had already been hit with multiple violations over its management of industrial wastewater at its headquarters in Bastrop, Texas, by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The company, while generally denying the allegations, was eventually fined more than $9,000 and required to make changes at the site, according to a TCEQ spokesperson. In 2023, the company applied for a permit to dump more than 100,000 gallons per day of industrial wastewater from Boring and SpaceX into a nearby river, but it was met with local resistance. A year later, Boring agreed to transfer wastewater to a new city treatment plant, expected to open in early 2026.

Boring did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

xAI

In June 2024, the Memphis Chamber of Commerce announced xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, was setting up a data center at a former manufacturing site in the southern part of the city. That came as a surprise to some members of the City Council, one of whom told NPR she first heard about it on the local evening news.

Within a few months, Musk said the data center, dubbed Colossus, was online. The facility primarily powers the company’s chatbot and generative image maker, Grok, which is integrated into X.

The electricity needed for the computing power was double what the local utility could immediately provide, so xAI used methane gas generators to bring the data center online, burning fossil fuels without a permit or pollution control technologies for nearly a year.

“It’s an actual gas plant in the middle of a neighborhood, and you don’t need any permitting?” Democratic state Rep. Justin Pearson, who lives 3 miles from the data center, told CNN in May. “Something has failed drastically and significantly with our system of checks and balances.”

In January, amid wider community push back, xAI applied for a permit for 15 generators on site. Opponents have aerial imagery they say shows more than 30 generators appearing to be operational on site as late as April. Company officials have said they wouldn’t install pollution controls on any of the turbines until the permit was approved, which happened in early July.

The company maintained permits weren’t necessary to start because of an exemption for generators on site for less than a year, a rationale Shelby County’s Health Department agreed with. Wendi C. Thomas recently reported for ProPublica and MLK50: Justice Through Journalism on how the city’s Chamber of Commerce went to unusual lengths to promote xAI. Memphis’ mayor has backed and defended the project, saying the city will address pollution concerns with “independent environmental consultants” and “community benefit policies.” Tennessee’s governor has touted the opportunities the facility will bring to the city. The EPA was beginning to look into whether the exemption applied to xAI in October of last year; new EPA head Lee Zeldin recently met with the company.

Community members packed an April hearing on the permits, and state representatives for the area have questioned the mayor’s trust in xAI, especially as the company plans to set up a second data center in Memphis.

Environmental advocates have said that xAI needed permits because of the size of the generators and the scope of the pollution. In early April, the Southern Environmental Law Center estimated the turbines could produce, in a year, between 1,200 and 2,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, a smog-forming pollution associated with poor respiratory health in nearby areas, as well as the carcinogen formaldehyde.

The company’s generators are only a few miles from a historically Black neighborhood already considered a toxic air pollution hot spot because of more than a dozen polluting facilities nearby, including a steel plant, a refinery and power plant. The county has seen consistently low air quality and the highest rate of ER admission for asthma attacks in Tennessee. ProPublica’s air toxics map showed a cancer risk hot spot four times the national average nearby before xAI moved in.

Regulations and permitting are in place because unchecked pollution can have wide-ranging impacts on a nearby community, regardless of industry, said Jennifer Duggan, executive director at the Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog nonprofit. “The environmental laws on the books are designed to protect public health and our natural resources. If there is no enforcement, when there are violations of those laws, then there is no protection from industrial pollution for those communities.”

While the impact to a community depends on the industry in question, as well as length and seriousness of the pollution, Duggan said, it can mean increased risk of premature mortality, higher health care costs, lost school days, lost productivity for workers, birth defects and even psychological trauma.

Permits generally require facilities to operate safely and install pollution controls, Duggan said. If those controls are not installed — or turned off — “then you’ve got more pollution in the air than the law allows,” which puts people at risk.

The company did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

A SpaceX Starship is being prepared for a flight test on March 3, 2025. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images) SpaceX

While SpaceX regularly launches its Falcon rockets to deliver satellites and astronauts into orbit, Musk’s ultimate goal for the company is much further afield. Starship, SpaceX’s giant combined reusable rocket and launch vehicle, is supposed to eventually help deliver humans and cargo to Mars, and it’s currently part of NASA’s effort to return astronauts to the moon.

But the program has already run into issues here on Earth, including violations of clean water regulations during launch tests and a cross-border investigation into falling debris.

Starship’s launch pad is along the Texas coastline, less than 5 miles from the Mexico border, surrounded by a state park and a national wildlife refuge established to protect the biodiversity of the lower Rio Grande River. Among the animals in this refuge are fragile shorebird populations. When asked about Starship tests in 2018, Musk said at the Texas site “we’ve got a lot of land with nobody around, and so if it blows up, it’s cool,” a comment that angered the residents of a nearby village.

The first Starship launch vaporized part of the launch site and threw debris as far as 6 miles. Then the EPA and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said Starship launches in 2023 and 2024 violated the Clean Water Act for discharging untreated industrial wastewater. SpaceX applied for a wastewater permit in July 2024 and later said it “fundamentally” disagreed with the allegations from regulators but settled for about $150,000 to “focus our energy on completing the missions.” In February of this year, state regulators granted SpaceX a permit.

Starship’s fast-moving schedule has suffered setbacks this year, with explosions during three launches or tests so far. Mexico has threatened to sue over debris and potential environmental contamination crossing over the border. SpaceX said in response there were “no hazards to the surrounding area.”

But the Federal Aviation Administration recently approved SpaceX for up to 25 Starship launches a year, and the Trump administration has signed an executive order announcing attempts to “eliminate or expedite” environmental review of rocket launches by the FAA, ProPublica’s Heather Vogell and Topher Sanders reported.

SpaceX did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

Tesla

While the popularity of electric vehicles like Tesla in California has led to a notable decline in carbon pollution from cars there, the company’s factory in the state has been repeatedly admonished for releasing toxic air pollution and other toxic chemicals into the surrounding community. Tesla’s Bay Area facility has received more air quality warnings in the past five years than all other companies in California, save one: a Chevron refinery, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal.

By 2022, the company had been fined by both the local air quality district over health concerns and the EPA for breaking federal air quality laws. In June 2024, the district ordered Tesla to correct ongoing violations of toxic air pollution coming from the factory’s paint shops, allegations the company denied. The company is currently in the process of implementing an abatement plan, according to a spokesperson for the Bay Area Air District.

Separately, dozens of California counties sued Tesla in 2024 over claims of illegally dumping hazardous waste produced at its facility and local service centers. The company settled the lawsuit for $1.5 million, not admitting to wrongdoing but agreeing to five years of mandatory training and independent waste audits.

Musk had already moved Tesla’s headquarters to Texas in 2021, in part over complaints about California regulatory culture. But, as the Journal reported in November 2024, Texas regulators have also cited the company for actions at Tesla’s giant Gigafactory just outside of Austin, including for dumping untreated wastewater, releasing pollution in excess of its permit and then not reporting it.

A former Texas employee sent a whistleblower memo to the EPA in 2024 accusing the company of asking staff to lie to government regulators, the Journal reported, including creating an “elaborate ruse” during an inspection to make sure a troubled furnace passed an emissions test. Both the EPA and Texas environmental regulators opened a “preliminary inquiry” related to the memo in November 2024, according to the Journal. The EPA did not respond to ProPublica’s question about the status of the inquiry and pointed us to the TCEQ. A TCEQ spokesperson said it could not comment “to support the integrity of all criminal investigations conducted by TCEQ.”

Tesla did not respond to the Journal’s request for comment. But a day after the story was published, Musk reposted an X user who mentioned the Journal story, adding the message: “Legacy media is a sewage pipe of lies.”

Tesla did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

The people affected by environmental violations are not just the nearby community, Duggan said, but the workers at polluting facilities as well. “They are really on the front line in certain industries,” she said.

by Max Blau

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

The H-2A visa program has long been touted as a way to ensure that farmers can access enough workers without hiring people who are undocumented. But for some migrant farmworkers seeking better-paying jobs in America, their seasonal gigs have morphed into a nightmare.

As a recent ProPublica story revealed, the promises of the H-2A visa program can be undermined by extreme abuses the workers suffer, mostly by labor contractors. Some workers have had their wages stolen and been threatened with deportation if they complain about unsafe work conditions, a federal investigation found. In the worst instances, others have been assaulted or raped or have even died. It’s gotten so bad that, in one of the largest H-2A criminal cases ever, a federal judge described the abuse of these workers as a form of modern-day slavery. And without further changes to the H-2A program, experts told ProPublica, foreign farmworkers may continue to be harmed.

With the U.S. facing a drastic shortage of domestic farmworkers and as the Trump administration deports more undocumented immigrants, experts told ProPublica that H-2A visas are certain to remain in high demand. One agricultural economist forecasts that, by 2030, there could be a need for up to 500,000 H-2A workers — roughly triple the number requested in 2016, the year that President Donald Trump was first elected.

Experts, lawyers and advocates told ProPublica that, unless more is done to protect workers, the instances of abuse and exploitation are likely to increase as well. They suggested a variety of ways to make the H-2A program safer and more humane.

1. Enforce the current rules better

The H-2A program is supposed to provide fair wages, safe working conditions and free housing and transportation to workers. But experts said insufficient oversight has undermined the protections promised to visa holders.

“The expectations are very clear,” said Cesar Escalante, a University of Georgia professor of agricultural and applied economics. “Even if we’re very clear on the regulations, the government has failed on the enforcement.”

The U.S. Department of Labor each year investigates only a tiny fraction of farm employers. The number of investigations is scarce not because of a lack of potential violations. A report from the Government Accountability Office showed that 84% of the investigations conducted by federal regulators found at least one violation of rules designed to protect H-2A workers. Advocates see that high violation rate as an indication that regulators are missing even more abuses in the fields.

Labor experts believe that the limited enforcement is largely due to limited resources. One of the main enforcers of H-2A rules, the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, last year had one of the lowest levels of investigators since the H-2A program was launched in the 1980s, Rutgers University researchers found. Daniel Costa, an attorney and director of immigration with the think tank the Economic Policy Institute, has called on Congress to boost the division’s funding to allow its regulators to conduct more proactive investigations. Short of that, Costa warned, the H-2A program will continue to be a “breeding ground for abuses.”

If the Trump administration’s proposed budget gets approved, it will make even further cuts to the Wage and Hour Division. That could mean fewer H-2A investigations moving forward.

A Labor Department spokesperson did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment about its enforcement practices and the implications of the budget proposal.

2. Raise the stakes for farmers

There have been calls not just to hold farmers more accountable for H-2A violations, but also to reward the ones who comply with labor laws.

Advocacy groups like Centro de los Derechos del Migrante and United Farm Workers have called on farmers to be held liable for the illegal practices of the third-party recruiters they hire. Right now, there’s a bill proposed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers that would require farmers to stop working with recruiters who charged laborers an illegal fee to obtain an H-2A visa. And it would give regulators the ability to fine farmers for failing to do so.

Since only a tiny fraction of employers who hire H-2A workers face severe consequences, human rights organizations also have urged regulators to suspend or ban more employers from the H-2A program. They say that’s particularly important for employers with a track record of violating workers’ rights.

Philip Martin, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis, believes that farmers should be rewarded for following the rules. He said the largest employers of H-2A workers generally are not the ones responsible for the worst violations. He thinks that regulators should create a TSA PreCheck-style program that would let law-abiding employers move through the process of getting approved for H-2A workers more quickly with fewer bureaucratic hurdles. And it could allow overworked regulators to focus on the most pressing problems.

3. Get corporations on board with stopping abuse

There’s a growing movement centered on the idea that the power of consumers can be leveraged to end agricultural abuses.

After years of demanding better pay and protections from individual farmers and buyers, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers — the anti-trafficking organization that uncovered the first examples of abuse in the massive federal case — launched the Fair Food Program in 2010. Under the program, corporate buyers such as supermarkets and fast-food chains sign legally binding agreements to buy ethically sourced crops.

Participating buyers agree to purchase produce from farms that adhere to the program’s stringent set of protections for workers, let workers be informed about their rights by the CIW and allow independent auditors to investigate complaints from their fields. The buyers also agree to pay those growers a small premium that is passed down to their workers. If extreme abuses like forced labor are found on those farms, the buyers commit to suspending produce orders until the issues are addressed.

Some of America’s largest supermarkets (Walmart, Whole Foods) and fast-food chains (McDonald’s, Burger King) participate in the Fair Food Program. The corporations’ participation was originally limited to a select set of crops, such as tomatoes. Some of their commitments since have grown to include more crops. Other big buyers, like Kroger, Publix and Wendy’s, have not participated in the program. Spokespeople for the companies did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment. Buyers who have not participated in the program have stated that it is the responsibility of their suppliers to ensure that workers are treated fairly.

The Fair Food Program has protected the rights of thousands of H-2A workers each year, according to the independent auditors, but that’s still less than a tenth of the more than 300,000 H-2A workers in the U.S. According to the CIW, the more buyers and growers embrace the program, the more likely it is that abuses of H-2A workers can be prevented.

Susan Marquis, a professor with Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, said the other ideas proposed by experts can help reduce the harms faced in the fields. But they don’t go as far as the Fair Food Program in stopping the kinds of violations that routinely happen in the H-2A program.

“It’s very clear, supported by the data, that nothing works to end forced labor except the Fair Food Program or some other variation of worker-driven social responsibility,” Marquis said.

by Jacob Orledge, North Dakota Monitor

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the North Dakota Monitor. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

For years, North Dakota’s mineral owners have said state officials have ignored their pleas for help as companies deduct money from their share of income from oil and gas production.

Now, some state lawmakers agree they need to take action. Responding to a recent North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica investigation, more than a half-dozen said a committee should study the issue and propose solutions before the next legislative session in 2027. Others suggested changes to state law, including one proposal to prohibit deductions unless a lease specifically allows them and another that would require companies and royalty owners to renegotiate their contracts every few decades.

The Legislature meets every other year. North Dakota lawmakers rejected proposals to protect private mineral owners in 2021 and 2023, and did not address the issue during this year’s session.

“It will definitely come up in 2027,” said Sen. Chuck Walen, a Republican from New Town. “I don’t know what the outcome will be, but it will definitely be coming up.”

North Dakota officials have taken steps to safeguard state-owned royalties. Since 1979, all state leases with oil and gas companies prohibit deductions. But that protection does not extend to leases that are negotiated by North Dakota’s estimated 300,000 private mineral owners.

“I definitely think something has to be done, especially since the state has protected itself,” said Rep. Patrick Hatlestad, a Republican from Williston. “I think it needs to do something similar for its citizens.”

Some lawmakers also have suggested they may need to make changes to the state’s postproduction royalty oversight program, created in 2023 to address minerals owners’ mounting frustration about postproduction deductions — the money companies withhold to cover the costs of processing and transporting minerals after they are extracted and before they are sold. That program has not alleviated concerns over postproduction deductions and, as of August, had not resolved any cases about that issue, the news organizations found.

Why It Matters

Mineral owners have the rights to oil and gas found underground. They can lease those rights to companies in exchange for a cut of the revenue when oil is produced, called a royalty.

But while the leases have remained the same for decades, the industry has changed. Oil and gas are now sold farther from the well, and companies incur more transportation and other costs to get the products to the point of sale. The companies pass on a portion of those costs to mineral owners, which North Dakota courts have determined is usually legal unless a lease says otherwise.

Most leases signed decades ago don’t explicitly mention postproduction deductions, and leases don’t expire unless oil production lapses.

Deductions began surging in North Dakota about a decade ago. About 20% of royalties are deducted, on average, according to two estimates as well as interviews with royalty owners. That would have amounted to about $1 billion in 2023.

Estimates provided by the North Dakota Petroleum Council suggest companies withhold at least hundreds of millions of dollars in North Dakota every year.

Why Some Lawmakers Are Pushing for Change

Several lawmakers, including Republican Rep. Don Longmuir, said that because the state’s legislative season is a relatively short 80 days, it’s important to have an interim legislative committee conduct a study and propose a solution ahead of the 2027 session.

“We can’t wait until the session starts,” said Longmuir, of Stanley, in the oil-producing region of the state. “That’s something that you know really needs to happen before session starts, so that maybe they can come up with something.”

Assigning a new study to an interim committee would require a directive from Senate Majority Leader David Hogue, chair of the Legislative Management Committee. Hogue, a Republican from Minot, said he “would consider it” and will likely make a decision in the next month or two.

“I really need to do more self-education right now,” Hogue said. The recent series has raised “awareness that there is an issue out there,” he said.

Sen. Dale Patten, who has served as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and would likely have influence over any legislation, said he is open to a formal legislative study but said it should be initiated only with input from the full Legislature.

“I would be comfortable with taking a look at it and see if there’s a way to resolve it,” said Patten, a Republican from Watford City.

Some lawmakers are already thinking about ways to address the issue in the next session.

One lawmaker said he may introduce legislation that would limit the length of leases to 30 years. Republican Sen. Jeff Magrum, who represents Hazelton and has supported landowners on other issues, said he hopes limiting leases will give future generations of mineral owners the opportunity to renegotiate contracts and incentivize companies to be more mindful of how they treat North Dakotans.

“I don’t think that’s right for someone that’s not even born yet to have to honor a contract that I signed today. It’s just not fair to them,” Magrum said. “Look at how times have changed. Everything’s changed and they’re stuck in the contract that was written in the 1950s.”

Magrum has introduced 13 bills related to property rights issues in the past two legislative sessions. All but one failed.

Rep. David Richter, a Republican from Williston, said he thinks it would be difficult for the Legislature to modify existing leases in that way, but it could limit the length of future leases.

“Going forward, I think that might be an option worth taking a really hard look at,” Richter said. “But that doesn’t do anything to alleviate the situation of the leases that are already in place.”

For those existing leases, Richter said it is often “unclear” whether deductions are permitted, and some lawmakers said they should pass a state law to address the issue.

Richter said he prefers that companies and mineral owners renegotiate the contracts to specify whether deductions are permitted. But if that doesn’t happen, he said he is open to legislation that would “clarify” how leases that don’t mention deductions should be interpreted by the courts.

Senate Minority Leader Kathy Hogan, a Democrat from Fargo, said lawmakers should pass a law stating that companies can’t take postproduction deductions unless leases explicitly allow them to do so. Sen. Brad Bekkedahl, a Republican from Williston who supports oil development but who also has tried to help mineral owners, proposed such a measure in 2021.

“We could write legislation clarifying this easily,” Hogan said. “But we’ve never been able to get it done.”

Industry, State Officials Respond

Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, an organization that lobbies on behalf of more than 550 oil and gas companies, said many of the proposals would be a “substantial infringement” on mineral owners’ property rights.

“We believe direct state involvement/interference in the contractual agreements of hundreds of thousands of private mineral leases is the wrong approach,” Ness wrote in an email. “Suggested actions like this would have a detrimental impact on mineral development in North Dakota.”

Gov. Kelly Armstrong, a Republican who worked for his family’s privately owned oil company earlier in his career, did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

But during an Aug. 18 appearance on a KFGO radio program, the governor said he was open to making tweaks to the royalty oversight program. The program was created by legislators in 2023 and was envisioned as a way to mediate disputes about deductions between mineral owners and companies, but that hasn’t happened.

“If this one isn’t working, we should find out why not and figure out if we can tweak it and make it better,” Armstrong said.

Some lawmakers said they don’t see a need to take any action.

Sen. Kent Weston, a Republican from Sarles, said he’s discussed the issue with colleagues in the Legislature and North Dakota Petroleum Council staff in recent weeks. He said the status quo is “fair” and necessary to ensure the oil and gas industry continues to invest in the state.

House Majority Leader Mike Lefor and Rep. Todd Porter, the longtime chair of the committee overseeing the energy industry in the House, could not be reached for comment.

by Mario Ariza

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.

Last October, Peter and Linda Kilfoil returned from an overnight trip and found water pooling in the kitchen of their Fort Lauderdale, Florida, home. The pair couldn’t pinpoint the source of the leak and had a hard time getting a plumber. So Linda Kilfoil called their insurer, Citizens Property Insurance Corp.

The call was the beginning of the Kilfoils’ journey through an alternate legal universe set up by Citizens, a quasi-governmental insurer in Florida, to reduce its staggering legal costs. In this state-sanctioned world, the judges’ salaries are funded by Citizens, the rules followed in Florida’s circuit courts don’t all apply and the insurance company almost always triumphs.

It’s a legal landscape so fraught that a Tampa judge recently paused all its proceedings — twice. But that didn’t come soon enough to help the Kilfoils.

Citizens sent an adjuster to their home the day after they called. He couldn’t pinpoint the source of the leak either but suspected it was coming from a pipe that drained wastewater from the kitchen, he said later in a deposition. He snapped photos of the warped, soggy cabinets. A short while later, Citizens denied their claim, saying that the damage to their cabinets was consistent with a long-term leak, and that their insurance contract excluded coverage of such leaks — unless they were hidden.

Eleven days after the denial, the Kilfoils’ plumber found the leaking pipe in the home’s exterior wall. It had been spilling water into a recess between their kitchen cabinets and slab foundation, records show. The total cost of repair has come close to $40,000, according to Linda Kilfoil and construction estimates provided by her attorney.

The Kilfoils had permanently relocated to Florida from Long Island to enjoy retirement. But with Peter Kilfoil ill with prostate and skin cancer, his wife faced the prospect of handling repairs while tending to his health.

“I am a former physician,” Peter Kilfoil said in an interview from the hospital. “I’m not like some carjacker. They accuse me of letting that leak persist until it destroyed my kitchen.”

Just before Thanksgiving, the Kilfoils sued Citizens. Instead of going to circuit court, as most lawsuits against insurers would, Citizens routed their case to arbitration before the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings.

On the surface, the change of venue — made possible by a provision lawmakers empowered Citizens to insert at the end of most of its policies — didn’t seem like a big deal. Legislators and Citizens executives touted DOAH as advantageous for both consumers and the insurer. Cases in the forum tend to move faster, cost less and are decided by expert administrative law judges rather than juries.

But in practice, homeowners forced by Citizens into DOAH have trouble exercising key rights.

Judge Britney Horton kept the Kilfoils’ lawyer from deposing a Citizens adjuster, siding with the company after it argued it had already made another employee available and produced “all non-privileged facts.” The ruling deprived them of a fair opportunity to investigate the denial, according to their attorney. On at least 20 other occasions, DOAH judges have issued similar rulings during a dispute’s fact-finding phase.

Judge Britney Horton (State of Florida Division of Administrative Hearings)

In addition, some DOAH judges have denied motions requesting that they disclose any potential conflicts they might have as arbitrators. Some plaintiff’s attorneys say that has made it difficult to trust in the impartiality of their decisions.

And the forum’s rules make it impossible for homeowners to drop their lawsuit without Citizens’ approval, unless they withdraw their claim, a move that can lead to court costs and attorney’s fees if not filed early in the process. Some have felt forced to go to final hearings where they lost and ended up owing thousands to Citizens.

“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out something’s wrong,” said Chip Merlin, president of Merlin Law Group, a firm that represents insurance policyholders.

In a written response to questions about the homeowners’ experiences, Citizens spokesperson Michael Peltier defended the current process.

“We believe the statute authoring the resolution of claims by DOAH provides a well-established, impartial, and efficient process for policyholders, who no longer must wait nearly two years, on average, for a resolution of their claim,” he wrote.

When it comes to depositions, the forum is not “materially different” from Florida’s circuit courts, he added. And he explained that while homeowners are barred from dismissing their cases at DOAH — a move that might allow them to pursue the claim in circuit court — they aren’t blocked from withdrawing their claim, a more terminal maneuver. (Withdrawing, though, grants Citizens an automatic win and exposes homeowners to the risk of fees if it is not done soon after a case is sent to DOAH.) The company declined to comment on individual cases in litigation.

As of July 21, judges sided with Citizens in more than 90% of cases that made it to a final DOAH hearing where both sides presented their case, according to a ProPublica analysis of court records. (The steep odds were first highlighted by the South Florida Sun Sentinel.) In circuit court trials, Citizens has won about 55% of the time over the past five years, according to records released by the company.

Citing a procedural error in the request by the Kilfoils’ lawyers, Horton declined to push back the date of the final hearing after Peter Kilfoil had been hospitalized. She did not respond to a request for comment. Faced with long odds and failing health, the Kilfoils settled their case for the nominal sum of $500 that Citizens was offering, according to their attorney. “I was being a nurse to my husband daily,” Linda Kilfoil said, leaving little time to manage home repairs and fight the insurer. “I couldn’t leave him.”

Peter Kilfoil died at 77 on Aug. 22, 2025.

Of the Citizens cases resolved at DOAH between March 2024 and July 7, 2025, 78% ended in a settlement, according to data released by the insurer. Half of all cases settled for $500 or less to the policyholder, according to that data. An additional 28%, according to Peltier, were settled by Citizens for an average of $30,000.

Citizens’ customers cannot opt out of DOAH. Eventually, the insurer intends to send more than 3,800 cases a year there, according to a funding proposal approved by its governing board last year. Since February 2024, it’s sent over 1,500.

A multitude of public agencies in Florida contract with DOAH, relying on the administrative law judges to resolve disputes. As part of that process, they pay the agency for the salaries of judges who decide their cases, though they don’t play a role in the hiring of them.

But the program will have to survive stiff legal challenges. The most successful so far comes from Tampa, where a circuit court judge in August reaffirmed a statewide injunction pausing DOAH hearings after a Hurricane Milton victim argued the company was violating his rights.

“Specifically, enforcement of the arbitration clause at issue compels insureds into a forum that lacks neutrality, discovery, motion practice, and meaningful judicial review,” Judge Melissa Polo wrote in her order.

Citizens moved to disqualify Polo, arguing that she violated her impartiality as a judge by ruling the DOAH process unconstitutional before arguments could be heard in the case. Polo denied the motion.

“We look forward to making our case on appeal,” Peltier wrote of Polo’s decision to pause DOAH proceedings.

“Everybody in This Room, Everybody in the State of Florida Backstops Citizens”

As Florida’s insurer of last resort, Citizens must take all comers who can’t get affordable insurance through another carrier. It gained the ability to take disputes to DOAH in the spring of 2023, at a moment of great peril for the insurer. Successive hurricanes had gouged a hole in the Sunshine State, leaving several private carriers insolvent — and leaving hundreds of thousands of their customers with no choice but Citizens. By the end of that year, the not-for-profit insurer was serving more than 1.2 million homeowners as another hurricane season loomed. It also had more than 18,000 outstanding lawsuits filed against it.

The company successfully lobbied the Legislature to let it take cases to DOAH in order to buffer it against the crises. The verbiage granting Citizens this power was tucked into HB 799 — a broader Citizens bill that, among other things, allowed it to raise rates faster on some policies — just after its third reading in the Florida House of Representatives Commerce Committee in April 2023.

State Sen. Jonathan Martin, a Republican and one of the bill’s sponsors, said Citizens officials proposed the DOAH provision to him in a meeting in his Tallahassee offices. Former Florida State Supreme Court Justice Ricky Polston, who had just begun what would be a brief stint as the insurer’s general counsel, was present at the meeting, Martin said.

“He and Citizens expressed the risk that they were facing, just like all the other insurance companies out there,” Martin said.

Polston would leave Citizens that June to go into private practice. He now charges Citizens at least $500 an hour to defend it from legal and constitutional challenges, including ones to the DOAH proceedings, records show, and his firm has billed the insurer almost $430,000 this year. Polston did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.

That amount, according to Peltier, is minuscule compared with the $450 million the organization has spent on legal services under contracts signed in 2021 and 2022. “The figure you mention of $430,000 reflects less than one-tenth of 1%,” he wrote.

Former Florida State Supreme Court Justice Ricky Polston (Florida Supreme Court)

There was little discussion of the DOAH provision in committee or in the well of the house, where the legislation initially passed 115-0. It wasn’t until HB 799 reached the floor of the Florida Senate on May 1, 2023, that two senators started asking questions.

“This very broad language is bad for the Citizens policyholders,” said Republican Sen. Erin Grall as she rose to offer an amendment that would strike the language from the bill. Foremost among her concerns was that Citizens policyholders would be giving up valuable rights, like access to the courts, without getting anything in return (private policyholders get a premium reduction when they agree to arbitration in Florida).

After raising her concerns, she withdrew her amendment, curtailing discussion. A few minutes later, Democratic Sen. Tina Polsky asked Martin, the bill’s sponsor, to address Grall’s concerns.

“In my opinion, Citizens is specially situated,” Martin said. “Everybody in this room, everybody in the state of Florida backstops Citizens,” Martin said, referring to a provision in Florida law that allows Citizens to levy a fee on every insurance policyholder in the state, including those of competitors, should the company ever find itself short of funds.

The company’s finances have stabilized in the intervening two years. It’s aggressively shed more than half a million insurance policies, offloading them to private insurers, and is down to about 12,600 outstanding lawsuits as of this June. And its DOAH program is expanding.

Judicial Economy

Fort Lauderdale homeowners Yvonne Miller and Chaney Darric Keith wanted to stop pursuing their claim against Citizens this year.

Miller and Keith had intitially claimed that their shower pan failed, a leak they said damaged walls, baseboards and floors. Citizens had denied the claim. The pair had sued, but during the course of the litigation, it became clear that at least some of the damage had come from a long-term leak from their showerhead, which would not be eligible for insurance coverage. The pair’s lawyer tried to get the case dismissed. But at DOAH, that can’t happen unless both parties agree.

“I do not want to move forward with this,” said attorney Lourdes Bloomfield at a Feb. 17 DOAH hearing. Bloomfield had already tried two times to withdraw Miller and Keith’s plumbing claim against Citizens, filing motions to voluntarily dismiss the lawsuit and notifying the court of the withdrawal of her clients claim. Judge Terry Slusher had denied both of them, the second for being filed only one business day before the hearing.

“So just so that I can make it clear for myself, Citizens is not willing to permit Ms. Miller and Mr. Keith to withdraw their claim at this time?” the judge asked Citizens’ defense attorney, Holly Miller, a short time later.

“Those are my instructions, yes sir,” Miller replied, according to a transcript of the court proceedings.

Because the pair stated they wanted to withdraw the case and presented no evidence at their final hearing, the judge sided with Citizens and ended up ordering that the homeowners pay $10,677 in court costs.

Mary Ceron is another homeowner who attempted to quit but ended up at a final hearing against her will. As her hearing approached, her attorney said she requested a settlement where each side bore its own costs, but said Citizens did not agree. So Ceron withdrew her claim at her final hearing, and afterward she received a judgment against her for almost $45,000 in costs and fees. Citizens agreed to settle the case without collecting the money after the homeowner appealed, according to Ceron’s attorney.

The company, Peltier said, is looking for finality. Miller and Keith, he wrote, had initially attempted to quit their case in a way where it might be refiled, “and we don’t want that, we want finality.” Anyone who wants to stop their DOAH proceedings can do so, he said, by withdrawing their claim.

Citizens routinely pursues fees and costs against individuals who do not withdraw their claim early in the DOAH process. DOAH judges have granted more than 15 such requests, according to a ProPublica analysis of the agency’s docket. After being presented with a list of these cases, which included that of Ceron, Peltier wrote that the company pursues fees against some individuals who withdraw “to discourage lawyers from pursuing claims that lack merit.” Some 11% of DOAH claims through July 7 had ended in withdrawals or voluntary dismissals, according to data provided by the company.

Experts point out that Florida’s circuit courts allow for voluntary dismissals. “I’m not saying that what they’re doing is technically not in conformity with the rules, but it’s the only time I’ve heard it in a regular general civil case, such as an insurance dispute,” said Jack Tuter, former chief judge of Florida’s 17th Judicial Circuit, who independently reviewed DOAH cases for ProPublica and spoke generally of the forum’s practice of barring voluntary dismissals that aren’t agreed upon by parties.

A ProPublica review of the DOAH docket revealed at least 32 other cases in which homeowner attempts to drop their lawsuits were met with resistance from Citizens, forcing both parties to rack up legal costs.

“I think that’s one of the most vindictive things, in the 14 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve seen an insurance company do,” said Andres Correa, a plaintiff’s attorney who felt forced to go to a final hearing after Citizens refused to agree to a settlement in which each side bore its own costs.

Settling for Less

Jeffrey McShane is a former Navy pilot and nuclear engineer. This March, as a lunar lander carrying a payload he helped design was using X-rays to observe the dance between Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind, he was troubled by another concern: Was there any way to win against Citizens?

According to an architect’s report, in the course of two weeks in the spring of 2024, a pipe burst under the living room of McShane’s four-bedroom home, and then his roof — which had been replaced four and six years earlier — sprung a leak after a storm. The water shorted his air conditioning unit. Mold bloomed. An insurance adjuster he hired put the bill at just over $200,000.

Citizens said its policy didn’t cover some of the property damaged by the leak and said other damage was due to wear and tear and improper installation. It refused to cover the costs. “We found no evidence to support the homeowner’s claim of water intrusion through the roof’s surface on April 3, 2024,” an engineer hired by the company wrote after visiting the property.

Jeffrey McShane (Courtesy of Jeffrey McShane)

“I did not expect that the technical difficulty of navigating Citizens’ claims process would be far more difficult than getting a spacecraft to the Moon,” McShane wrote in an email to ProPublica.

As his final hearing approached, McShane’s learned that his chances of victory were almost nonexistent. No homeowner, up to that point, had won a DOAH case against Citizens. The insurance company was offering him $5,000 to settle. At the last moment, he decided a final hearing was too risky and took the money.

ProPublica heard from more than two dozen plaintiff’s attorneys who said their DOAH cases settled for less than what a homeowner would have gotten in state court.

Peltier, the Citizens spokesperson, offered a different perspective on settlements at DOAH. On average, cases there settle for about $18,000, compared with about $25,000 in state court. But some of that difference, according to Peltier, is due to older, pre-tort reform cases that carry more liability for the insurer.

Stainton Williams has been similarly befuddled by his interactions with Citizens.

According to his attorney, Michael Citron, a plastic tarp has covered the roof of Williams’ North Miami home for most of the past year. Williams, 92, is a Jamaican immigrant with end-stage kidney disease whose roof, parts of which are nine and 19 years old, began to leak after a period of heavy weather in late September that coincided with the passage of Hurricane Helene. On Oct. 11, 2024, Citizens denied Williams’ claim, writing that “we determined the damage sustained to your client’s property was caused by storm surge resulting from a hurricane.” (Citizens’ policies do not cover storm surge or floods.) Williams’ home is about 3 miles from the ocean, on the opposite side of the state from Hurricane Helene’s main impacts and where no storm surge or coastal flooding were reported by the National Weather Service.

Inconsistently, an engineer hired by Citizens to inspect the property disputed that the roof was damaged by Helene, writing “there was no damage to the roof covering system or exterior envelope from Hurricane Helene.” The insurer’s spokesperson declined an opportunity to clarify this seeming contradiction.

Stainton Williams (Courtesy of Stainton Williams’ daughter)

So Williams and his daughter, who has power of attorney, hired Citron and sued. When Williams’ case was sent to DOAH, Citron filed a motion requesting, among other things, that DOAH Judge Todd Resavage disclose any potential conflicts. The motion cites a state law that requires such disclosure from appointed arbitrators.

“The disclosures were requested in our case as they would be in any arbitration case,” Citron said. “Why that becomes important in this proceeding is because we didn’t choose the arbitrator. We didn’t even choose arbitration. It was all done by Citizens. So because of that, we at least want to know who these people are, who’s overseeing our case,” he added.

Resavage denied the motion for two reasons. First, he ruled the state law Citron cited did not apply because he had not been appointed but rather given his position by law. And even if that state law did apply, Resavage wrote, it wouldn’t require his disclosure unless there were “known facts that a reasonable person would consider likely to affect the arbitrator’s impartiality.” He did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica. At least two other judges have denied similar motions for disclosure, according to a ProPublica review of the docket.

Asked about his thinking and intentions in regards to conflict of interest disclosures by administrative law judges, Martin, the bill sponsor, responded via text with a question. “Do those judges have to file a Form 6? Like all other judges?” After being informed that DOAH judges file Form 1, a less detailed disclosure, Martin ceased responding to texts and did not answer phone calls.

Agnel Philip contributed data reporting.

by Max Blau, ProPublica, and Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica, illustrations by Dadu Shin for ProPublica

This story contains descriptions of sexual assaults.

In the darkness before dawn, Javier Sanchez Mendoza Jr. took the last drag of a cigarette and looked out from the staircase of a run-down motel. Underneath the stark floodlights streamed a procession of weary travelers in T-shirts and jeans, reaching into the bottom of a white coach bus for their oversize duffel bags. Mendoza had arranged for them to come on this 1,200-mile journey from northeastern Mexico to a rural stretch of Georgia’s blueberry country. Each of them had a work permit, which Mendoza had helped secure through a visa program called H-2A.

More foreigners than ever before were using the decades-old program, which lets them work for months or even several years on U.S. farms. Farmers and politicians have touted H-2A as an easy answer to a persistent labor problem: Americans are abandoning agriculture jobs and U.S. immigration policies are restricting access to undocumented workers. As recently as last month, President Donald Trump has floated the idea that if undocumented farmworkers returned home, they could come back to the U.S. “with a pass” to “legally” re-enter the country. But over the years, the promises of H-2A — such as humane working conditions, free housing and far better wages than back home — have been undermined by the relative ease of exploiting workers due to scant oversight of the program.

The busload of men and women who arrived that day in September 2018, like the others before and after, came with hopes of creating better lives for themselves and their families. Mendoza, through a network of recruiters in Mexico, had sold them on that hope. The recruiters touted the promises of a visa that, for many of them, would allow them to make more in a day than what they earned for a week of work in Mexico.

From his perch on the staircase, Mendoza was surveying a scene that held great promise for him, too. The arrival of this batch of workers marked the beginning of his first big job as a labor broker and the end of any lingering thoughts that he’d end up like his own mother and father, who’d brought him as a toddler from Mexico. They’d scraped together a living baling pine straw and packing blueberries. Mendoza, now 21, also had spent some time working in the fields. But he went on to attend college, dropping out so that he could focus on what he calculated to be a more lucrative prospect.

Around the time Mendoza was ramping up his business of bringing people over from Mexico, Georgia was more reliant on H-2A workers than any other state. He served as a gatekeeper, choosing which Mexican workers desperate for better pay would go to Georgia farms desperate for more laborers.

Beyond that, though, he had other ambitions related to this work. And he had plans for one worker in particular among this early batch.

Sofi was 24 and a single mother. She had experience working in the fields, having grown up in a close-knit farming family in a small town flanked by rows of corn and squash. But she came across more as a city girl, with her stylish clothes and penchant for pink lipstick. One of Mendoza’s recruiters in Mexico was a neighbor of Sofi’s family and assured him that she was a good worker. That part hardly mattered. The photo attached to her H-2A visa application drew him in.

Mendoza began sending her flirtatious text messages. She brushed them off. He pressed on, telling her he’d waive most of the fee he charged people to apply for the visa.

Sofi thought about it some more. Her father, who she trusted more than any man, had picked up seasonal farm work in the U.S. when she was a child, and she was aware of how much he appreciated the stable housing and steady pay. Though she worried about leaving her toddler son, she began to worry more about what would happen to him if she didn’t leave. The wages Mendoza offered could change her son’s future, or at the very least secure it the way her father had done for her. She owed her boy that much, she told herself. She would go.

About the Sourcing

The description of Sofi’s experience in the H-2A program is detailed in police records, court documents and testimony in federal court. Her name is redacted in federal filings to maintain her anonymity. We are identifying her by a first name she formerly used on social media. Mendoza declined multiple requests for an interview and did not provide comments in response to ProPublica’s letters detailing the case.

But not long after she and the other workers arrived in Monterrey, Mexico, to board one of the buses Mendoza sent for them, she began to have doubts. One of Mendoza’s associates was waiting for them. The associate handed each worker a stack of cash.

The way he explained it, the U.S. would question any large wire transfers from Mexico, so they would need to bring the money to their new boss. He told them not to put the money in their suitcases. U.S. officials were likely to check those. It would have to be on their bodies. He didn’t say much else, just that anyone who got caught would need to claim the cash as their own. So don’t get caught.

The closer her bus crept to the border, the more nervous Sofi grew. She started tallying just how much money was hidden on the people riding the bus. She figured it was almost a quarter of a million dollars.

The Deal With the Farmer

In some regards, the deal Mendoza had struck with a blueberry farmer named Charles King was typical. Mendoza would ensure a steady supply of workers, recruiting them from across Mexico and Guatemala, assisting with their H-2A applications and arranging for their journey to the U.S. The workers could be employed only by King and only for up to 10 months at a time. King would pay a fair wage — just under $11 an hour — and cover the costs of their housing and transportation to his farm.

There was another part of their agreement: Mendoza would oversee King’s workers himself. That meant Mendoza would actually find the housing and pay for it with King’s money. And he would be the one to see that the workers got to and from the fields and the one who handed out their wages. It was a common practice for farm owners to outsource those tasks to labor brokers. It freed farmers like King from the hassles of managing people who don’t speak much English. And it granted brokers like Mendoza immense power.

Like Mendoza, King was fairly new to this business. The longtime train engineer had decided only a few years earlier, in his mid 40s, that he wanted to start a farm on the nearly 40 acres passed down by his late grandfather. Around the time he met Mendoza, his blueberry bushes were about to yield their first fruit. He estimated he needed 150 people to work in his fields.

Mendoza advised King to request twice as many; Mendoza had a plan for the others. King, for his part, stood to get a cut. All King had to do was sign the paperwork. Mendoza would handle much of the rest.

King signed off. And Mendoza, who up until then had only brought over a few smaller batches of workers for other farmers, got to work on sourcing 300 of them for King.

Sofi was among the first groups of people recruited to work for Kings Berry Farm. She initially felt some relief when she stepped off the bus in the parking lot of the dingy motel, after making it past customs and having spent more than 20 hours on the road. But she was taken aback by how she and the others were treated by the people there to meet them: The workers were unloaded like prisoners, their heads bowed so they couldn’t see what was happening.

One of the people who received the workers separated Sofi from the rest. She recalled that she was taken to a motel room. She found another female worker waiting there. Guards were assigned to watch them.

It was in the motel room that she first saw Mendoza. Short and stout with a shaggy chinstrap beard, he spoke with a strong lisp because of a congenital disorder. It could be hard to understand what he was saying, but that day he had no problem making his message clear.

Sofi recalled that the other woman asked Mendoza if she could have her passport back. Mendoza said that if she had it in her mind to leave his operation, she’d have to do so without her passport. She wasn’t getting it back.

He already had Sofi’s.

The Threats

Sofi was not sent out to work in the fields like the others. Mendoza ignored what her contract said. He kept her by his side, and he gave her a different set of responsibilities. One was that she would accept wire transfers on his behalf from Mexico. Another was that she would write the checks to workers. She would not be paid for this work. She would not be paid at all.

Mendoza forced her to live at his house. While she was with him, he talked openly about his business and she paid attention. It was easy to begin piecing together how his operation worked. He was charging some applicants thousands of dollars for the chance to get an H-2A visa. She heard him speak with his contacts in Mexico, describing how he’d bring in more and more workers that the farmers didn’t actually need, just to get those up-front fees. He’d even bring her to meetings with King. It was an effort, she thought, to show off Mendoza’s power over her.

She recalled that Mendoza crammed a couple dozen people — workers and their children — into a trailer. She noticed that a few didn’t have enough money to eat. Sofi believed that the workers were being shorted. She remembered Mendoza occasionally picking up calls in the middle of the night, alerts that people were escaping.

Those calls reinforced for Sofi the feeling that she, on the other hand, couldn’t even try to flee. She didn’t have her passport. She didn’t know a single person she could turn to. She didn’t speak any English. And she was scared.

From the first time he touched her, on her very first day in the U.S., Mendoza made it clear she would have no say. Still, she told him no. It didn’t matter. Month after month, closed up in his house with him, he did what he wanted to her.

Within a few months, Mendoza took her on a drive to a nearby courthouse. By then, Sofi had come to believe that Mendoza considered her a prize — something he had bought. At the courthouse, he told her she needed to sign a piece of paper. If she didn’t, he repeated the thing he always said when he was mad, which was often: I’ll call immigration, she remembered him saying. I’ll have you deported.

Only after she signed did he explain what the document was: a marriage license.

He started introducing her as his wife and telling her that she should bring her son to Georgia. He’d help her. But she worried that he would treat her child no better than the children of the other workers.

One day, she saw a few young Guatemalan children at the field where their parents were picking fruit. They were hungry. Their parents hadn’t been paid.

Sofi took some of Mendoza’s money and the keys to his car and drove the children to a gas station to get them some food. Mendoza caught wind of it and tracked her there. He took the car and made her and the children walk back. And he beat her for what he saw as her defiance.

If he had no problem hitting her, she told herself, imagine what he’d do to her son.

After the first four months, she asked if she could go back to Mexico, just for a visit. Her father was sick with cancer. She recalled Mendoza saying that if he were to let her go and she didn’t come back to him, he’d see that she was never able to return to the U.S., that he’d have her blacklisted from the H-2A program.

With that warning, he let her go.

Once she was home, she thought about staying. Then she looked at her son, who had just turned 3, and realized what she’d be giving up: the chance to provide him with a better life. She believed what Mendoza said about blacklisting her was true. And she believed those months of suffering his abuses would be for nothing if she were kicked out of the program.

If she could just endure Mendoza for a few more months, until she reached the end of her 10-month contract, she would fulfill her obligations. And then she could apply for another H-2A visa. She would find another labor broker, someone honest and decent, and things would be right. The H-2A program would make good on its promise to her. And she would make good on her promise to lift up her son.

Back in Georgia, she knew better than to expect Mendoza to change. But the months ahead wore her down. That summer, after close to a year spent with him, she felt she couldn’t take any more. He climbed on top of her one night, smothering her with his weight, the tattoo on his chest — of La Santa Muerte, a grim reaper in a black hooded robe, known as the lady of death — bearing down on her. He tried to rip her clothes off. She was almost out of breath. She got away. She ran. She found a phone and called the police.

But even from jail, Mendoza figured out how to control her. She had found a place to hide, but he was able to reach her. He sent a peace offering — a bouquet of yellow flowers and a box of chocolates — and also, later, delivered a threat. It wasn’t the same old warning about calling immigration. She recalled him telling her over the phone that if she didn’t stay with him, he would kill her son. She feared that with all his connections in Mexico, it was possible he could. She arranged with her parents for the child to be hidden far away.

Two months after Mendoza’s arrest, he was released after a grand jury chose not to indict him. Around that time, Sofi reached out to someone she’d met only briefly but who she thought could help her. She typed a message into a translation app and texted it to the farmer who she was supposed to be working for. King responded, with concern, that she should go back to Mexico.

Before she could, Mendoza caught up with her.

The Cemetery

On a brisk and rainy Friday in November 2019, a police investigator named Jeremy Stagner picked up the phone to call a federal prosecutor about a scene he hadn’t stopped thinking about for the past four days.

Stagner described how he’d gotten home from a shift with the Glynn County Police Department when his phone buzzed with an emergency alert from work. A young woman had been watching children play outside the house in Brunswick where she had been staying when a silver truck skidded onto the lawn. A man got out, a purple bandana masking his face. She tried to fight him off, but he forced her into the truck at knifepoint.

A neighbor called 911 and helped a police officer find the woman’s backpack, which had her driver’s license inside. The officer’s colleague was able to track the location of her cellphone, so Stagner followed the lead, speeding 30 miles northwest of the city. After cruising down a dirt road, past some mobile homes, he and other officers spotted a stocky man on his cellphone, smoking a cigarette. As they shined flashlights at the face of the suspected kidnapper, one of them shouted his name: “Mendoza!”

When the man looked up, they knew it was him — the hearing aid in his ear matched one in a booking photo. Mendoza turned toward his truck. One of the officers cuffed him. Stagner moved past him and headed inside Mendoza’s trailer.

Stagner had seen a lot of messed-up things in his life, from explosives in Iraq wounding fellow Marines to the gruesome aftermath of shootings in Brunswick. This was one of the most haunting scenes he’d encountered. On a small wooden table, objects were arranged in an offering of sorts: fruit, cigarettes, a bottle of tequila, flickering prayer candles. In the middle was a photo, placed upside down, of the woman who’d been kidnapped. She was holding a bouquet of yellow roses and a box of chocolates. Looming over the photo was a statue of La Santa Muerte, known among law enforcement as a saint invoked to protect criminal acts. There was blood — what he later learned was the victim’s blood — smeared on the statue’s scythe.

First image: A makeshift altar to La Santa Muerte was adorned with prayer candles, cigarettes, alcohol, fruit and flowers. Second image: The white scythe of the La Santa Muerte statue was marked with Sofi’s blood. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Over the next few days, as the investigation continued, Stagner learned that Mendoza had driven the woman from the front yard of the house where she was staying to a remote cemetery. According to evidence police collected, on the way to the cemetery Mendoza sought advice from a colleague in Mexico on what to do, and the colleague said he should kill her, that it wasn’t convenient to leave her alive. Once he arrived, he climbed into the back seat of the truck and began beating her so badly that her blood splattered across the cab.

He then headed to a nearby trailer where he sometimes stayed. He took out a knife and grabbed Sofi’s hair, slicing off strands of it for the shrine. He took blood from her nose and wiped it on La Santa Muerte’s scythe. Then he stepped outside to make a call. That’s when the cops caught up with him. In the doorway, they found Sofi, bloodied but alive.

At a nearby hospital, after a doctor examined her wounds and tested her for a concussion, investigators snapped photos of the bruises on her face. Sitting in a bed under the room’s fluorescent lights, she explained through an interpreter that Mendoza had kidnapped her not only because she had left him. It was also because she knew too much about his business. “They don’t want me to be found,” she said. “They don’t want me to say that he does illegal things.” She told the officers exactly where to look for proof of all he was hoping to hide: One of his phones had extensive info about workers who had paid him illegal fees to get their H-2A visas.

The lead investigator interviewing her had never heard of H-2A before. But Stagner had, from reading the news. Labor trafficking fell outside Stagner’s lane as a county investigator. But he’d spent time on an FBI task force and had worked with a federal prosecutor on a gang case. So he called to ask if the prosecutor might be interested.

As it happened, the prosecutor was working with several federal agents looking to build a case that exposed the trafficking of H-2A workers in Georgia. The agents had been following leads from an anti-trafficking organization, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, that in 2015 had uncovered the abuses of harvesters at an onion farm near Vidalia. That collaboration enabled the agents to expand their investigation. They questioned farmers about their use of the H-2A program and surveilled labor contractors who seemed to have lied on visa applications.

Now the agents were poised to get data from phones that belonged to Mendoza. And they had a potential witness, one with firsthand knowledge of his alleged labor trafficking and one who could recount how she was held captive and brutalized for a year.

Sofi knew the perils of cooperating with the federal government. Mendoza had already warned her that he was going to have her family killed if she talked to anyone. She wanted to help the other farmworkers, but she was terrified — for her son and for herself.

Out of fear, she wanted to stay silent. But from that same fear came another realization: Only by exposing Mendoza’s operation did she have a shot at saving herself.

Modern-Day Slavery

Sofi sat calmly in the courtroom, trying to stay focused. More than two years had passed since she last saw Mendoza. She’d tried to start over, working at a restaurant. She’d met someone new. They had a baby.

Now, out of the corner of her eye, she saw him again. She thought about what prosecutors had told her as they’d prepared her for today. She’d be helping others, they assured her. Just tell the truth.

While Mendoza was out on bail, federal agents spent nearly a year building the case against him. In that time, according to their investigation, he picked up where he left off, charging workers for the chance to get a visa, holding some against their will and even kidnapping others. Mendoza was indicted in September 2020 for sex trafficking. It was the first big indictment of what was known as Operation Blooming Onion, which exposed widespread abuses of H-2A workers across Georgia.

His charge was followed by a flurry of others — including forced labor and money laundering — against two dozen other participants in what the federal government described as a sprawling, transnational criminal organization. It was one of the largest H-2A trafficking investigations ever.

Federal investigators claimed that Mendoza made more than $25,000 a month by charging workers unlawful fees before he would submit their H-2A applications. They also turned up evidence that he’d inflated the number of workers he needed so he could collect more of those up-front fees and that he’d sold the labor of some of the additional workers to farmers not authorized to participate in the program.

The defendants included crew leaders at the onion farm near Vidalia, a well-connected businesswoman who prepared applications for hundreds of visas, and two farmers — including King, who would plead guilty to the lesser charge of mail fraud and be sentenced to a year and a day. (King, who declined to comment for this story, apologized at his sentencing hearing, saying his “actions were not acceptable.”)

Altogether, prosecutors alleged that defendants filed petitions seeking more than 71,000 H-2A visas, leading to thousands of applicants getting approved when there was no legitimate job for them. They also estimated that the operation raked in more than $200 million in profits by illegally charging workers thousands of dollars to get a visa and by having them work for other, unauthorized employers, not all of them farms, which violates their H-2A contract. One of those workers died of heat stroke after working on a farm where he wasn’t supposed to be.

Federal prosecutors entered as evidence photos of the housing that defendants had provided to H-2A workers. (Obtained by ProPublica.) Federal investigators seized a trove of passports that they say had been confiscated from H-2A workers by the defendants. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Mendoza himself brought over 565 people, with pending visa applications for hundreds more. He wasn’t the biggest player of them all. But a lead investigator testified that he was, unquestionably, the most brutal. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to engage in forced labor in exchange for dropping the sex-trafficking charge. And he faced a longer sentence than any other defendant in the case.

Sofi had been surviving on the pay from her restaurant shifts, help from her coworkers and the hope that if she fulfilled her obligation to the government she’d be reunited with her son. She had helped agents find Mendoza’s records and decipher them. She also connected investigators to other labor-trafficking victims, ones who’d been afraid to speak up. And her sworn statements corroborated information that turned up in the investigations of other agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Labor and the FBI. And in March 2022, she would testify at Mendoza’s sentencing hearing.

From the witness stand, Sofi locked her eyes on the prosecutor asking questions. She described the work she was forced to do for free, the ways that Mendoza controlled her, the beatings, the deception. She spoke of the Guatemalan children she was punished for trying to feed and the trip to the courthouse where she was tricked into signing a marriage license. As it turned out, Mendoza never finalized the paperwork. It wasn’t until after she escaped that she found out they weren’t married.

She was asked about the first time he touched her, the first time he had sex with her.

“How many times did he rape you?” the prosecutor asked.

“Many,” Sofi said.

“How long were you with him, do you remember?”

“One year.”

“And during that year, did he rape you on a weekly, monthly or daily basis?”

“Whenever he wanted to.”

The prosecutor turned to the day of the kidnapping. It was a day that made Sofi fear she’d never see her son again — or, worse, that she’d see her son killed. If the police hadn’t arrived, Sofi explained, “I probably would be dead.”

After hours of testimony, there was only one significant point Mendoza’s lawyer objected to: that Mendoza forced Sofi to be with him. He said it was his client’s assertion that he and Sofi had had a “consensual relationship.” When Mendoza spoke, briefly, he asked the judge for forgiveness. “I learned from this,” he said. “I will turn away from the past.”

As the hearing drew to a close, Judge Lisa Godbey Wood explained that she had watched Sofi’s body language and studied the tone of her voice as she testified. And she could see how much Sofi had to lose, especially in the face of threats to her and her son. She couldn’t find a single reason not to believe Sofi. “I would find by any standard of proof that she’s telling the truth,” Wood said. “As a result I find that the rapes did occur.”

Wood turned to Mendoza. “People think that there’s no slavery anymore,” she told him, moments before sentencing him to 30 years in prison. “There is, and you were doing it right here in our state.”

But though this case revealed how easy it is to exploit and abuse visaholders, little has changed. Most defendants have pleaded guilty, avoiding the worst charges and ending up suspended from H-2A work for just a few years. The remaining four are expected to go to trial this December. In the years since Mendoza’s sentencing, as in the years before, only a tiny fraction of farms are investigated for potential H-2A violations. The Biden administration increased protections for H-2A workers, but several lawsuits filed by states including Georgia have prevented them from fully going into effect. This past June, the Trump administration went one step further, suspending any enforcement of the new program’s rules until that litigation is resolved.

The number of H-2A visas issued has increased every year since Sofi arrived. The escalation of Trump’s deportation efforts this year has led to arrests of undocumented farmworkers — who account for over 40% of all field laborers — and sparked enough fear to convince others to no longer show up to work. If farmers are squeezed further by the shortage of farmworkers, the H-2A program can fulfill that demand. There’s no limit to how many visas can be issued.

The Reunion

In October 2023, a year after she wrapped up her efforts to expose the dangers of the H-2A program, Sofi got approval to be reunited with her son. He could come here on the same kind of visa she was about to receive, for victims of severe human trafficking and their families. There would be a path to citizenship for both of them.

The life she’d fought for was so close and, yet, just out of reach. Her past was still present. She was reminded of it constantly, by flashbacks to her days in captivity, by fear that seized her when an unfamiliar car cruised her street, by migraines she chalked up to those final blows from Mendoza. And it wasn’t only the memories that were hard. Even now, she struggled to survive.

That winter, she worked at a nursing home. But after she and the father of her toddler split up, she couldn’t stretch her $450-per-week paycheck to cover rent, utilities and car insurance — let alone send any money to Mexico for her older son’s tuition, uniform and shoes. The stress wore her down. She developed facial paralysis, but the nursing home wouldn’t give her time off to address it. Then she slipped and broke her ankle. She couldn’t walk, much less work, until she recovered from surgery. Without health insurance, the bills piled up, roughly $24,000. The one thing that could help her — the more than $16,000 in court-ordered restitution for unpaid H-2A wages — had yet to materialize.

Even if she could afford to send for her son, she told herself, she couldn’t afford to support him.

Her mind drifted back to Mexico. The comfort of home. The chance to see her parents again. But she was jolted out of that dream by the fear she still felt from the threat against her son’s life. She felt they’d never truly be safe in Mexico, not after her testimony against Mendoza. In the U.S., they’d at least have some protections.

It ended up taking more than a year from the time he got his visa, but finally, right around when Trump was elected, Sofi’s son arrived. She hugged him for the first time in five years and introduced him to his 3-year-old brother. Her excitement was clouded just slightly by the fact that she could only buy her oldest a few sets of clothes. The three of them crammed into a single room in a small blue house full of Spanish-speaking laborers. For a week, she tried to make do on a single pack of soup. She ended up skipping meals.

Sofi wants to believe that this country is in fact a land of opportunity. But sometimes her faith wears thin. “Not all of us get to be smiled upon by the United States,” she said.

Sofi hasn’t been able to finish her and her son’s applications for green cards. After paying $1,000 for the required medical exams, she couldn’t come up with the $400 to cover vaccines or a reference letter from an employer. But she still dreams of her son in a military uniform. She can see him as a Marine in the blue pants and dark jacket and white hat.

Not long after he started at his new elementary school in January, he asked what would happen if immigration agents came to the school and confused him with someone who’s undocumented. From that day forward, Sofi sent him to school with a photocopy of his passport and visa in his backpack. She told him not to worry, that maybe, because of everything she’s been through, nothing bad would happen to him.

With every passing day of school, every new word of English he picks up, she gains more hope. He’s one more step away from a life of picking fruit.

Mollie Simon of ProPublica contributed research. Abraham Kenmore contributed reporting. Design and development by Zisiga Mukulu of ProPublica. Visual editing and art direction by Shoshana Gordon of ProPublica.

by Yilun Cheng, Houston Chronicle

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

This article is co-published with the Houston Chronicle and The Texas Newsroom as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

Billionaire Elon Musk is taking issue with a recent investigation by the Houston Chronicle and The Texas Newsroom that raised questions about a flood tunnel project he’s pitching to address Houston’s chronic flooding woes. But experts said his response, which he did not explain to the newsrooms, isn’t supported by facts or data.

Last month, the newsrooms reported that Musk’s tunneling company, The Boring Co., has been lobbying elected officials for months to allow it to build tunnels under Houston for flood mitigation. Boring has proposed digging two 12-foot-wide tunnels beneath Buffalo Bayou — the main waterway running through central Houston — to carry stormwater out of neighborhoods and toward the Gulf of Mexico during major storms. Experts say, however, that larger tunnels, closer to 30 to 40 feet in diameter, could carry far more water and be more effective.

Musk and representatives with Boring did not respond to interview requests or answer questions the newsrooms sent in advance of last month’s story about whether Boring’s smaller tunnels would be able to handle the scale of floodwater Houston is likely to encounter in the future.

Instead, Musk waited until hours after the story published to post a response on X, the social media company he’s owned since 2022.

“Boring Company tunnels will work and cost <10% of alternatives,” his Aug. 28 post read. “If more flow is needed, additional tunnels can be built and furthermore they can be route water from many parts of the city, not just one.”

The post was written in response to a post on X from U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt, a Houston Republican who helped arrange private meetings with government officials in Harris County and across the state to sell them on Boring’s flood tunnel plan. Hunt also did not respond to questions from the newsrooms ahead of publication of the original story, but he weighed in on X after the story was published.

“A lifelong Houstonian and Texas Congressman spoke to the smartest man on planet earth about solving a generational flooding issue in our city that no one else will fix,” Hunt wrote.

Musk’s post offered no data or engineering explanation to back up his assertions. So the newsrooms examined his statements, comparing them against flood studies, and interviewed engineering experts, some of whom pointed out key technical and logistical challenges with the Boring plan.

One of Musk’s claims is likely false, and the others are not yet possible to verify with certainty, according to the newsrooms’ examination.

Again, when the newsrooms pressed Musk and Boring representatives to explain the tech billionaire’s claims, they did not respond. Nor did Hunt.

Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park is visible from the roof of The Allen, a nearby condominium, in 2023. The bayou is the main waterway running through central Houston. (Kirk Sides/Houston Chronicle) Would Boring’s tunnels cost less than 10% of alternatives?

Musk’s proposal carries a lower price tag than the estimated cost of the larger system the flood control district has spent years and millions of dollars studying. But that’s partly because the two are strikingly different proposals.

Hunt’s team has said Boring’s Buffalo Bayou project would cost $760 million, according to internal communications obtained by the newsrooms through public records requests.

The county’s flood control district, on the other hand, proposed in 2022 tunnels of 30 to 40 feet in diameter for that segment of the system at a price of about $4.6 billion.

Since the project is still in the research phase, the county numbers are preliminary. But based on the figures available, Boring’s proposal would cost closer to one-sixth of the county’s estimate — not less than 10%, as Musk’s post suggested. So Musk seems to be exaggerating how much cheaper his system would be.

Flood control experts also maintained that the reduced price is somewhat proportional to the reduced capacity of Boring’s narrower tunnels. Two 12-foot tunnels would provide less than one-fifth of the volume that a single 40-foot tunnel offers.

That means they would divert less water from vulnerable areas than one large tunnel.

Jim Blackburn, a Houston environmental lawyer and flood policy expert, said while Musk’s company deserves a fair hearing, cheaper does not automatically mean better.

“If it’s a smaller tunnel, then I would expect it to cost less,” Blackburn said. “You’ve got to look at how much flood mitigation you get for the dollars you spend.”

Emily Woodell, a spokesperson for the Harris County Flood Control District, said the agency needs more information before it can weigh in on any of Musk’s claims.

“We’d have to do a lot of study before anything could even potentially move forward, so I wouldn’t want to speculate,” she said. “Until we have a project or another study, we’d point people to our website for the reports and data we’ve compiled to date.”

Can additional tunnels be built for more water flow?

Musk’s post said if more floodwater needs to be moved, more tunnels can be added. Engineers said it is not that simple.

Larry Dunbar, a veteran water resources engineer who has advised Houston-area governmental agencies on drainage issues, said based on size alone, it would take about 11 of Boring’s tunnels to carry the same amount of water as one large tunnel. Lined up side by side, with enough room between them to keep the ground stable, the full system could span hundreds of feet. That would require securing rights to more land and building more access points for maintenance, he said.

And each new phase of construction might bring another round of reviews and mobilization costs, Dunbar said, undercutting the speed and affordability that Boring has touted as key advantages of its proposal.

“The issues start to just get more and more complicated,” Dunbar said. “Not that it can’t be done, but just to kind of throw out there — ‘Oh, if we need more, we’ll just do more’ — well, there’s a lot more to it than that.”

Harris County Commissioner Tom Ramsey, who has an engineering background, agreed. More tunnels would also mean more equipment to maintain, which could drive up long-term costs, Ramsey said.

He added that the county would need to decide on the full plan at the outset so all system elements like pumps, drains and outfalls can be designed properly.

“It would not be simple to just add additional tunnels later,” Ramsey said.

John Blount, a former Harris County engineer who retired after more than three decades with the county, similarly dismissed Musk’s suggestion that Boring could just build more tunnels if the initial plan falls short.

While working on other infrastructure projects, Blount said, he has come across a number of contractors capable of building tunnels large enough to handle the job properly the first time.

“You don’t start small and figure it out later,” he said. “This whole concept of putting in 20% of what you need to see if it’s enough makes zero sense.”

Buffalo Bayou, which runs through the heart of Houston, floods after Hurricane Beryl made landfall on July 8, 2024. (Raquel Natalicchio/Houston Chronicle) Can Boring’s tunnels move water from other parts of the city, and will the tunnels work?

Musk argued that Boring’s tunnels could be used in different parts of the city, not just along Buffalo Bayou.

Some local officials agreed that Musk’s tunnels might actually work better for smaller watersheds that do not take on as much water as Buffalo Bayou.

Ramsey said he supports exploring smaller tunnels for areas like Hunting and Halls bayous, which run through other parts of the city and also need resources to strengthen their flood protection. The county commissioner publicly called for a closer look at narrower tunnels during a commissioners court meeting in April, after Hunt had pitched him on Boring’s proposal in February.

“It’s another tool in our toolbox to help mitigate flooding. And certainly with what’s happening in the Hill Country,” Ramsey said, referring to recent deadly floods in Central Texas, “and what continues to happen in Harris County, we need as many tools as we can possibly get.”

Woodell, with the flood control district, told the newsrooms in August that the agency initially focused on large-diameter tunnels because engineering studies identified them as the most effective option for a countywide system.

However, she said smaller tunnels could be a viable solution in certain areas. Since that idea had not been a focus of research, she added, more study would be needed before any such project could move forward.

Colleen Gilbert, executive director of the Greens Bayou Coalition — a nonprofit that works to protect neighborhoods near Greens Bayou, in northeast Houston — said communities in her watershed are desperate for relief as well. They would welcome the massive storm tunnel once proposed by Harris County, she said, but even smaller tunnels would be better than nothing.

“We would be thrilled to have any and all possibilities looked at,” Gilbert said. “If Congressman Hunt and The Boring Co. are looking at this, we are delighted to hear it.”

Experts and officials the newsrooms interviewed, however, still took issue with Musk’s sweeping statement that “Boring Company tunnels will work” because it doesn’t take into account complexities of the project or that success largely depends on what kind of system the county ultimately wants.

In a two-page memo Boring sent to Hunt’s team in February and that was circulated among local officials in the county, the company framed the pitch as an “innovative, cost-effective solution” to Houston’s chronic flooding.

“We are confident in our ability to execute this project successfully,” wrote Jim Fitzgerald, Boring’s global head of business development.

But Dunbar said the only way to evaluate Musk’s claim is to focus on the purpose of the stormwater tunnels.

If the goal is to build as large a project as possible for the lowest price, Dunbar said, Boring’s proposal might fit the bill. But if the goal is to shield lives and property from another Hurricane Harvey-level flooding event, he believes the smaller-scale project simply does not measure up.

“You have to have some underlying reason why you build this tunnel, what you’re trying to accomplish,” Dunbar said. “And I have not heard that Elon has given that answer.”

Rock Owens, retired Harris County attorney for environmental affairs who represented agencies including the flood control district, said he has seen local officials repeatedly greenlighting massive projects that were not well thought out and led to costly legal battles.

He pointed, for instance, to flood control issues along White Oak Bayou in northwest Houston. In a lengthy legal battle that began in 1999, about 400 homeowners in the area blamed the county for approving upstream development without adequate flood control, which they said caused repeated flooding of their homes.

The Texas Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of the county in 2016. But Owens said even unsuccessful lawsuits are costly and the kind of challenge that could have exposed the county to a substantial damages award.

Musk’s ethos of moving fast and worrying about consequences later, Owens said, only heightens the risk.

“That works fine in the private sector, but not the public sector,” he said. “We’re not looking at Mr. Musk’s personal fortune; we’re looking at the livelihood and lifelong investments of people who live here.”

Yilun Cheng is an investigative reporter with the Houston Chronicle. Reach her at yilun.cheng@houstonchronicle.com.

Lauren McGaughy of The Texas Newsroom contributed reporting.

by Willoughby Mariano, WBUR, with additional reporting by Todd Wallack, WBUR

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with WBUR. Sign up for Dispatches to get ProPublica’s stories in your inbox every week. To keep up with the latest Boston news, sign up for WBUR’s morning newsletter.

Seventeen years had passed by the time Boston police knocked on Louise’s door to say they had identified the man who allegedly raped and stabbed her in October 2005.

The suspect was now a father of two, a possible serial rapist and likely beyond the reach of the law, investigators told her. Police had taken so long to identify him that they missed the state’s deadline to prosecute her case.

In Massachusetts, the law says prosecutors have only 15 years to file charges after an alleged rape. Past that statute of limitations, it’s nearly impossible to bring charges. Still, prosecutors thought they might be able to move this particular case forward on a technicality.

Louise was afraid. She had spent years reliving the terror of that night and battling drug use that spun out of control after the attack. At times she failed out of rehab programs or stayed in homeless shelters. (WBUR does not identify victims of sexual assault without their permission and agreed to identify Louise only by her middle name.)

By 2022, she was 42, sober, living in her own apartment and raising two school-age sons. She could not slip back into her old ways.

But, as the daughter of a Marine veteran, Louise believed she needed to fight: She felt her community would not be safe until her rapist was in prison.

“You’ve got to stand for something,” Louise said.

Past the 15-year deadline in Massachusetts, no DNA match, eyewitness testimony or even confession can give a rape victim a chance at facing an attacker in court.

This statute of limitations places Massachusetts behind almost every other state in the country.

A review of criminal codes by WBUR and ProPublica found that as many as 47 states allow more time to charge rapes or similar assaults of adults than Massachusetts. For example, Vermont and Maryland are among a number of states that have no deadline to file charges for rape. Other states like Montana and Texas extend their deadlines when there’s DNA evidence.

In many states, Louise’s case could be decided in court on the strength of its evidence. But here, evidence would not matter. The case would be almost impossible to win.

Lost Chances

(Isabel Seliger for ProPublica)

Law enforcement and rape crisis workers across Massachusetts said in interviews that they routinely encounter cases where no charges were filed before the state’s strict deadline. How often rape suspects avoid prosecution as a result is unclear.

Massachusetts is unusual in that state victim privacy laws bar police from releasing incident reports of rape to the public. Unless a suspect is charged in court, it’s often difficult to find any official records about a rape. And even when someone is charged, police can still withhold information about what they did — or did not do — to identify and capture a suspected rapist.

This makes it all but impossible for anyone outside law enforcement to scrutinize rapes that are past the deadline to prosecute.

In order to understand the extent of cases lost to the statute of limitations, WBUR and ProPublica spoke to researchers, prosecutors and lawmakers.

Rape crisis center leaders say survivors of sexual assaults that happened many years ago regularly ask whether the criminal legal system can help them. The Suffolk County district attorney’s office, one of the most populous jurisdictions in the state, is based in Boston and prosecuted Louise’s case. A longtime sex crimes prosecutor there said his office reviews several cases each year that it cannot pursue because of the statute of limitations.

About two years ago, the Bristol County district attorney’s office identified 21 rapes that it could have prosecuted were it not for the statute of limitations. They came to light when the agency used a federal grant to analyze DNA evidence in rape cases that had not been fully tested when it was first collected.

Bristol County District Attorney Thomas Quinn is one of the state’s few prosecutors who has spoken in favor of allowing charges after the deadline in cases with DNA evidence.

“This is to rectify a wrong, if you will, or a process that didn’t work,” Quinn told WBUR. “These are serious charges. Women are being raped.”

Details of Louise’s case only became public because Suffolk County prosecutors took the unusual step of filing charges even though they had missed the state’s charging deadline. This led to the release of some records about the rape that would otherwise have been shielded by the state’s privacy laws.

Those records show that years before the deadline passed in Louise’s alleged rape, police had already gathered many of the clues they would later use to identify a suspect, but did not solve the case.

Louise: His Name Is Ivan

(Isabel Seliger for ProPublica)

When she was 25, Louise’s life was starting to fall apart. She worked as a waitress and switchboard operator, and she was experimenting with drugs.

In the overnight hours of Oct. 22, 2005, a man she had been friends with demanded payment for drugs he had given her, according to a court record, then coerced her into having sex with a stranger at a hotel to pay off the debt.

After 2 a.m., the friend dropped her off in downtown Boston.

If you or someone you know has experienced sexual violence, you can contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673 or rainn.org.

It was raining hard, the trains had stopped running and she wanted a ride to a friend’s house. That’s when she thought she saw a friendly face.

The man who drove up to her in a Lexus SUV introduced himself as Ivan and said he knew her from UMass Boston, where she had taken classes, she recalled. He said he was on a study break, and he looked the part. He had a young face and wore a baseball cap with a college name on it.

She said the man offered to pay for sex and she refused, court records show. He drove her to a secluded area in Everett, just north of the city, and raped and stabbed her, she told police. When Louise escaped his car, he chased her down with a knife and she fell.

“He kept stabbing me,” she said in an interview. “I remember my head jerking back because the knife was in my head.”

The man fled to his car after the struggle. Louise sought help at a nearby house.

At the hospital, it took more than 100 stitches to close the stab wounds that covered her body. Doctors told her the knife barely missed her major organs.

Louise let a specialist swab her body for the man’s DNA. While she said she did not disclose at the time that she had been coerced into sex work earlier that night, she told investigators everything else she knew: Police records said she gave the name her attacker used, his race, which she said was either white or Asian, and a description of his car. At the time, she told police that he said he had attended UMass Boston and was now at Tufts. She hoped this information would lead to an arrest.

Had police checked with UMass Boston, they would have discovered that 18 men named Ivan attended the school in the years surrounding the attack, according to student records reviewed by WBUR. The man who police ultimately connected to DNA evidence in Louise’s case was among them.

Everett police interviewed Louise several times and reviewed surveillance camera footage, she said, but the calls and visits from police waned over the coming months.

Louise stopped calling the police to check on her case as the years went by. She said she had moved on from using painkillers to relying on heroin, cocaine and other drugs to make it through the day. She feared that her rapist would return to kill her, and the drugs were her way of coping with severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, she said.

In 2008, Boston police received new evidence suggesting that whoever attacked Louise could be a serial rapist, a detective later said in court records. The department’s crime lab found that DNA from her case matched an unsolved 2006 attack. That victim was picked up in Boston’s North End, then stabbed and raped in suburban Wellesley.

It’s unclear how police responded to this new information. With the help of WBUR and ProPublica, Louise used an exception for survivors in the state’s privacy law to obtain her Everett police report. But the two-page record details nothing of the investigation beyond the first 24 hours after the attack.

Everett police declined to comment on the case. The Middlesex County district attorney’s office, which had jurisdiction at the time of the attack, did not comment. The Suffolk County district attorney’s office, which took over the case after Boston detectives in its jurisdiction identified a suspect, said it did not have details about how prior agencies handled the case. Boston police did not provide a response to multiple requests for an interview.

Louise said she does not recall whether police or prosecutors told her that DNA tests showed her unknown assailant may have attacked another woman.

Years later, when police finally identified a suspect, it would be too late to hold anyone accountable. The deadline to charge a suspect with attempted murder in Louise’s case had passed after 10 years and the deadline for rape had passed at 15 years.

Extending the Statute of Limitations

Currently, the only states that have shorter deadlines than Massachusetts and don’t make exceptions for DNA evidence are North Dakota and New Hampshire, a WBUR and ProPublica review of state laws found. The most restrictive is New Hampshire’s six-year deadline.

Decades of research into how rape is reported and investigated has driven lawmakers outside of Massachusetts to extend their statutes of limitations.

During the 2000s, several states passed exceptions for cases with DNA as it became clear that this kind of forensic evidence could help solve even very old cases.

Other states followed as police departments began to disclose in the 2010s that they systemically failed to test DNA evidence in rape cases. Meanwhile, a growing body of research found that police regularly performed inadequate rape investigations, deciding reports were unfounded before interviewing witnesses, collecting evidence or testing DNA. Across the country, most reports of rape do not result in prosecution, research shows.

 ”They judge the victim,” said Michigan State University professor Rebecca Campbell, who has authored multiple studies on how police conduct rape investigations. “That’s what I found in my research, and it’s been replicated by other research teams and other jurisdictions throughout the United States.”

The widespread problems prompted national reforms. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice launched its National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative to devote hundreds of millions of dollars to testing previously ignored DNA. This effort produced enough evidence to finally bring charges in some of these cases, and lawmakers in other states revised their deadlines so prosecutions could move forward.

The move to extend the deadline has been a bipartisan cause in many states. Just last year in Oklahoma, former state Sen. Jessica Garvin, a Republican, led a successful effort to eliminate the state’s statute of limitations in cases where there is a confession or DNA evidence. The bill passed unanimously.

“ We were able to accomplish that last session with really very little, if any, pushback,” Garvin said. “It’s not a Republican issue. It’s not a Democratic issue.”

In Massachusetts, legislation that would extend the deadline has been introduced during every session since at least 2011. But every time, it has failed to gain steam.

Defense attorneys have opposed any changes, saying that making the deadline longer risks violating the rights of the accused.

Witnesses, surveillance footage and other evidence that may clear a suspect becomes more difficult to find as time passes, said Shira Diner, a board member of the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

“The further and further you get away from the alleged commission of the crime, the harder it is for someone to ever mount a defense,” she said.

The last time state lawmakers changed the statute was in 1996 after victims came forward to say they had delayed reporting their rapes because of community backlash or poor treatment by police. Legislators lengthened the state’s deadline to prosecute rapes of adults from 10 to 15 years.

Connecting the Dots

(Isabel Seliger for ProPublica)

In late 2021, the Department of Justice initiative awarded Boston $2.5 million to reexamine up to 100 of the city’s most serious unsolved rapes. The funds paid a small group of investigators to comb through old case files to search for clues.

The new team revisited Louise’s rape within months. This time they determined that her case and the North End rape were similar to earlier attacks, court records show.

Most were unsolved, but a man named Ivan Cheung was arrested in one of them. Boston University police took him into custody in 2003 after they found him in possession of a knife and the belongings of a woman who was allegedly raped at knifepoint. The Boston Police Department, which took over the case, said in court records that they suspected the victim was covering up her ties to the sex work industry. Prosecutors dropped the charges several weeks later.

When the new team of investigators revisited this case in 2022, they noticed that Cheung resembled the assailant Louise described in her attack: a man named Ivan who had attended UMass Boston. At the time of the rape, he owned a Lexus SUV.

This focus on Cheung led to a breakthrough. That June, undercover officers tailed him to a mall parking lot in Dorchester, where they watched him smoke and toss away a cigarette.

DNA from that cigarette matched two assaults: Louise’s rape and the North End attack.

By September, police had arrested Cheung for Louise’s attack, the North End rape and two other open cases involving teenage girls. He was living in the Boston area and working as a financial services executive.

The arrest was possible because investigators received the time and resources to take a fresh look at old cases, said Suffolk County Assistant District Attorney Ian Polumbaum, who prosecuted the case.

A detective showed Cheung a photo of Louise and asked if he had raped her and others.

Cheung told police that he did not recognize the women and that there was no way his DNA could have been found on any of them, court records show.

“I’m telling you no fucking way. I don’t even know her name. I don’t even know her face,” he said during the recorded interview with police. Cheung and his attorney declined an interview with WBUR.

The only way Suffolk County prosecutors could move forward with Louise’s case and the North End attack was on a technicality: A state law suspends the deadline if a suspect lives out of state. Prosecutors said Cheung traveled frequently, but they couldn’t prove he had relocated. In October 2023, charges against Cheung for the attacks on Louise and the North End victim were dropped.

With her case over, Louise said she pinned her hopes on the two remaining cases connected to the suspect. Police said in court records the alleged victims were 13 and 14 and being trafficked for sex at the time of their attacks. Because they were so young, the state’s statute of limitations did not block their cases from moving forward, and there was a chance a judge would allow Louise to testify if they went to trial.

But those two cases had other problems: They had no DNA evidence, and prosecutors acknowledged that the evidence tying those cases to Cheung was not as strong. In one of the cases, Boston police had not interviewed the alleged victim until nearly two decades after her attack, and she was unwilling to testify, court filings show. In the other, a judge noted in a ruling that police conducted no forensic medical exam of the victim and appeared to make no attempt at locating a crime scene.

“The police response was severely deficient,” Suffolk Superior Court Judge Christopher Belezos wrote in the December 2024 ruling.

The district attorney told the judge they needed Louise’s testimony to show the rapes were so similar that Cheung was the only possible assailant. But Belezos barred Louise from testifying, saying her case was too different: The attacks had happened in different locations and their descriptions of their assailants’ race and cars did not match.

Prosecutors dropped Cheung’s remaining charges in January.

“ It was frustrating, but at that point, legally we had no choice,” said Polumbaum. In court records, Cheung also denied any involvement in these alleged attacks.

Now that the court battle is over, Louise is fighting to keep her peace of mind. She crowds her spare hours with therapy and support groups, and she fills her apartment walls with symbols of renewal, change and faith. A pink foil decal with the word “Believe” hangs among prints of butterflies, dragonflies and birds.

When WBUR interviewed Louise, it was the first time she had discussed her rape publicly. She said those interviews, and the failure to convict Cheung, helped her realize she wanted to do more.

In June she testified before the state Legislature’s Joint Committee on the Judiciary to urge them to pass House Bill 1987, which is pending. It would allow prosecutors to charge suspects after the deadline in some rape cases with DNA evidence.

“ It really needs to be changed for the safety of all, for the public at large,” she testified. “That’s why I’m speaking.”

Patrick Madden of WBUR contributed reporting, and Jesús Marrero Suárez of WBUR contributed research.

by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards

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

The U.S. Department of Education has pulled funding for programs in eight states aimed at supporting students who have both hearing and vision loss, a move that could affect some of the country’s most vulnerable students.

The programs are considered vital in those states but represent only a little over $1 million a year in federal money. Nonetheless, they got caught in the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, with an Education Department spokesperson citing concerns about “divisive concepts” and “fairness” in acknowledging the decision to withhold the funding.

The funding, which was expected to continue through September 2028, will stop at the end of the month, according to letters from the Education Department to local officials that were obtained by ProPublica. The government gave the programs seven days to ask officials to reconsider the decision.

The programs, part of a national network of organizations for every state, provide training and resources to help families and educators support students who are deaf and blind, a condition known as deafblindness that affects the ability to process both auditory and visual information. Those students often have significant communication challenges and need specialized services and schooling. (Education Week first reported that the department had canceled grants related to special education.)

Nationally, there are about 10,000 children and young adults, from infants to 21-year-olds, who are deafblind and more than 1,000 in the eight affected states, according to the National Center on Deafblindness. The programs targeted by the Education Department are in Wisconsin, Oregon and Washington, as well as in New England, which is served by a consortium for Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont.

“How low can you go?” said Maurice Belote, co-chair of the National DeafBlind Coalition, which advocates for legislation that supports deafblind children and young adults. “How can you do this to children?”

In Oregon, the 2023 grant application for the deafblind program there included a statement about its commitment to address “inequities, racism, bias” and the marginalization of disability groups. It also attached the strategic plan for Portland Public Schools, where the Oregon DeafBlind Project is headquartered, that mentioned the establishment of a Center for Black Student Excellence — which is unrelated to the deafblind project. The Education Department’s letter said that those initiatives were “in conflict with agency policy and priorities.”

The director of the Wisconsin Deafblind Technical Assistance Project received a similar letter from the Education Department that said its work was at odds with the federal government’s new focus on “merit.” The letter noted that the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, which oversees the project, had a policy of ensuring that women, minorities and disabled veterans would be included in the hiring process.

The Education Department also was concerned about other words in the application, said Adrian Klenz, who works with deafblind adults in the state. He said he has talked with state officials about the discontinuation of the grant.

“I was told that apparently the administration is going through past grants and two words were flagged: One was transition and one was privilege,” Klenz said. “Transition — transitioning from childhood to adulthood. Privilege came up because a parent wrote a glowing review of staff that said what a privilege it was to work with them.” ProPublica obtained a copy of the grant application and confirmed that those words were included.

In a statement, Education Department Press Secretary Savannah Newhouse told ProPublica that the administration “is no longer allowing taxpayer dollars to go out the door on autopilot — we are evaluating every federal grant to ensure they are in line with the Administration’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education.”

Newhouse said the Education Department renewed more than 500 special education grants that fund services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. She said the agency decided not to renew fewer than 35.

“Many of these use overt race preferences or perpetuate divisive concepts and stereotypes, which no student should be exposed to,” she said, adding that the funds will be put toward other programs.

The department started funding state-level programs to help deafblind students more than 40 years ago in response to the rubella epidemic in the late 1960s. While the population is small, it is among the most complex to serve; educators rely on the deafblindness programs for support and training.

Deafblind programs help educators learn the most effective ways to teach reading and connect families with state and local resources. The programs also tally the number of students across the country who are affected by deafblindness.

Disability advocates, who promote inclusion for people in their communities with disabilities, said they are struggling to reconcile how they can now be under attack for language about inclusion.

What’s more, under Joe Biden, who was president when the grant applications were submitted, language about diversity and inclusion efforts was required. The department at the time noted that “deafBlind children have complex needs and are among the most diverse groups of learners served” using federal special-education funds.

“We were required by the Biden administration to write a statement around equity,” said Lisa McConachie, of the Oregon DeafBlind Project, which serves 114 students in the state.

She said the Trump administration’s view of DEI is different from how inclusion is thought of by disability advocates. “Our passion and our mission is around advocacy for inclusion for kids with disabilities,” she said. “Students in special education are often marginalized in their schools. Students in special education are often excluded.”

Lanya Elsa, who lives in Washington and has two sons served by the state’s deafblind program, said the organization has provided strategies for her son’s educators over the years and has helped her connect with other families. She also is the former director of the Idaho program.

Elsa said that while the funding loss may seem small, “those vulnerable students have nothing else. It is devastating.”

The Education Department notified Wisconsin on Friday that funding for its deafblind program as well as a separate federal grant to recruit special-education teachers was being discontinued. Officials there plan to appeal, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

About 170 deafblind students in Wisconsin are served by that grant, which funds assistive technology tools, coaching, family support and professional training across the state. And the recruitment of special-education teachers was begun to address a severe shortage.

“Make no mistake, losing these funds will directly impact our ability to serve some of our most vulnerable kids,” Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly said in a written statement. “Losing these dollars at this point in the year will be devastating for the kids who need these supports the most.”

In Oregon, the impact will be felt soon. McConachie said about 20 families had signed up for a parent retreat next month to swap medical equipment, share resources and learn about services to help students when they get older.

“Gathering those families together is a lifeline for them,” she said. “These families are vulnerable and so are the kids.”

Without funding, the weekend will now be canceled. “The impact can’t be undone,” she said. “The disruption will be harmful for many years to come.”