ProPublica

by Cassandra Jaramillo

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Update, Aug. 9, 2023: Ohio voters rejected Issue 1 in a special election on Aug. 8, according to The Associated Press. The proposal would have raised the threshold to pass constitutional amendments in Ohio, including the upcoming abortion rights measure on the ballot in November.

In her eight years as a pediatrician, Dr. Lauren Beene had always stayed out of politics. What happened at the Statehouse had little to do with the children she treated in her Cleveland practice. But after the Supreme Court struck down abortion protections, that all changed.

The first Monday after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling was emotional. Beene fielded a call from the mother of a 13-year-old patient. The mother was worried her child might need birth control in case she was the victim of a sexual assault. Beene also talked to a 16-year-old patient unsure about whether to continue her pregnancy. Time wasn’t on her side, Beene told the girl.

“What if it were too late to get her an abortion? What would they do? And I just, I felt sick to my stomach,” Beene said. “Nobody had ever asked me a question like that before.”

Beene felt she had to do something. She drafted a letter to a state lawmaker about the dangers of abortion bans, then another doctor reached out with an idea to get dozens of doctors to sign on. The effort took off. About 1,000 doctors signed that letter, and they later published it as a full-page ad in The Columbus Dispatch.

Beene felt momentum building within the medical community and decided to help use that energy to form the Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights coalition. Now, Beene and the coalition are working to pass a citizen-led amendment to enshrine reproductive rights into the state constitution. The state’s six-week ban on abortion was blocked by a judge in October 2022.

The group is a part of an emerging political force: doctors on the front lines of the reproductive rights debate. In many states, the fight to protect reproductive rights is heating up as 14 states have outlawed abortion. Doctors who previously never mixed work with politics are jumping into the abortion debate by lobbying state lawmakers, campaigning, forming political action committees and trying to get reproductive rights protected by state law.

In Texas, at a two-day court hearing earlier this month , women who were denied abortion care testified they were harmed by the state’s abortion ban. Two Texas doctors, who are plaintiffs, took the stand to testify about the chilling effect they say the laws have had on them. Dr. Damla Karsan, a Houston obstetrician, said she had never testified in a court case before but felt compelled to participate in this one to advocate for her patients and colleagues.

“I feel like I’m being handicapped,” Karsan said, referring to the Texas abortion law. “I’m looking for clarity, a promise that I will not be persecuted for providing care with informed consent from patients that someone interprets is not worthy of the medical exception” that would permit a legal abortion.

Although doctors’ groups have formed on both sides of the issue, most of these groups oppose abortion bans, largely because doctors worry that abortion bans could put their patients’ health at risk. Doctors now find themselves risking criminal and civil penalties in some states if they act to help patients who are suffering.

The Ohio coalition, along with its partners, gathered signatures for months in order to put the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot. The group filed more than 700,000 signatures on its petition, nearly twice the minimum number needed. The amendment’s language would protect several aspects of reproductive medical care, not just abortion: misscarriage care, contraception and in vitro fertilization.

“We see all those areas being negatively impacted by the Dobbs decision,” Beene said. “So we felt that by establishing that fundamental right to reproductive freedom, we would be able to protect all of those issues.”

In Nebraska, doctors formed the Campaign for a Healthy Nebraska PAC, which raised money to target key races, according to the Flatwater Free Press. The group also worked to get the Nebraska Medical Association to publicly oppose abortion restrictions, the news organization reported.

The Good Trouble Coalition in Indiana also mobilized medical professionals to work with legislators on abortion laws.

States including Michigan and Vermont have also used citizen-led ballot initiatives to get reproductive protections included in their constitutions, efforts that were supported by voters. In Michigan, doctors created a committee to help campaign for the proposal. Beene said the Ohio coalition modeled its strategy on Michigan’s approach.

In at least one state, doctors have rallied for a measure that would have limited abortion access.

In Kansas, a coalition of 200 physicians, nurses and pharmacists publicly supported an amendment to remove the right to an abortion from the state constitution, according to the Kansas Reflector. Voters ultimately rejected the amendment, with 59% voting against the initiative.

Mary Ziegler, an abortion historian and a law professor at the University of California, Davis, said medical associations have been involved in the abortion debate before, but the organizing efforts are broader this time, with several doctors’ groups throwing their support behind ballot initiatives that protect reproductive rights and draw widespread public support.

“It’s not a trivial thing that it’s a ballot initiative, because one of the other things we’ve seen is that voters are with them,” Ziegler said. “Doctors who are afraid of alienating potential patients or colleagues are realizing that bans are not popular with most people. So the risk may be lower than people thought of taking a stand.”

Beene prepared for backlash when she and other Ohio physicians came out against abortion bans. But she didn’t expect that lawmakers would try to change the rules needed to pass a citizen-led amendment just months after the coalition started to collect signatures.

Lawmakers in May passed a controversial resolution to raise the threshold needed for an amendment to pass from a simple majority to 60%. Voters will decide whether to adopt the proposal, known as Issue 1, in an Aug. 8 special election.

The Republican-controlled Ohio legislature passed a law last year banning special elections, citing their low turnout and high costs, but state lawmakers scheduled this August’s election despite the ban. Republicans have signaled that this vote on Issue 1 was aimed at blocking the reproductive rights amendment.

Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, a nonpartisan voting rights organization, said the group is against Issue 1 because it would overturn more than 100 years of precedent in the state for how citizen-initiated amendments are passed.

“What they’re trying to do is to trick voters into voting our own rights away in a low-turnout August election,” Miller said. “Even voters who never miss an election are unaware that there is an August special election.”

It’s possible that only a single-digit sliver of the population will vote —  records from the Ohio secretary of state’s office show the 2022 August primary election had 8% voter turnout.

If Issue 1 is adopted, the reproductive-rights amendment would require approval from 60% of voters to pass in November, which Beene said she believes is what lawmakers want.

“They’ve sunk to tremendous lows and they’re doing everything they can to try to stop us,” Beene said.

Are You in a State That Banned Abortion? Tell Us How Changes in Medical Care Impact You.

by Jennifer Berry Hawes, photography by Gavin McIntyre for ProPublica

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In his younger days as a carriage driver, Tony Youmans would strike a rapport with customers, nearly all of them white, as he prepared to show them around downtown Charleston, South Carolina. Youmans knew that long-whitewashed racial history lurked everywhere — beneath every cobblestone, every courtyard garden, the hooves of every draft horse he steered past the finely preserved antebellum structures.

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But if he mentioned slavery or pointed out enslaved people’s quarters, “a couple would cringe and roll their eyes, so you quickly went back to the moonlight and magnolias.”

Today, he is part of a movement to tell a more complete story of the city. After 40 years in its booming tourism industry, he is seeing a huge shift in visitors’ reactions, from denialism to curiosity.

“African American tourism right now is red hot, especially in the South,” Youmans said. He sees this up close as manager of the Old Slave Mart Museum and director of the Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon, two key historic sites. “People are hungry for this information,” he said, “and they come to Charleston specifically looking for it.”

Elijah Green, a formerly enslaved man, sits in front of the Old Slave Mart in Charleston, South Carolina. Green once told an interviewer that the mart’s owner was “very cruel” and that “seldom one of his slaves survive a whipping.” (The Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County)

For generations, Charleston has been better known for its wartime history and physical beauty than the horrific institution that built it. But new interest from visitors, historians and armchair detectives alike is helping to unearth details of the painful past of this coastal city where about 40% of captive Africans arrived into American chattel slavery. Just last month, ProPublica reported how a graduate student discovered an 1835 newspaper advertisement for an auction of 600 people at the Exchange — marking the largest known slave sale in U.S. history. It had gone unrecognized as such for nearly two centuries.

Multiple companies now offer tours of Charleston emphasizing Black history and culture. Plantations that once described enslaved laborers as “servants” and “workers” hold Juneteenth commemorations. The City Council apologized for the city’s role in slavery. And an expansive new museum opened in June to tell the African American story at a wharf where thousands of captives once arrived to be sold.

Yet, as that redress gains potency, tensions are flaring. Republicans increasingly frame demands for a frank accounting of slave history as the exploitation of a bygone past to push “woke” agendas.

South Carolina’s GOP-controlled legislature enacted a measure similar to hundreds nationwide, concentrated in former slave states, that restrict teaching related to race. Since 2021, a budget provision has forbidden state education funds from being used to teach that any student “bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race” or that someone should feel “discomfort, guilt or anguish” due to race.

As a result, one school district near the state capital faced a lawsuit, and a student in a nearby district challenged a lesson about systemic racism. But it remains to be seen how the restrictions will impact racial reckoning in Charleston, an old city where buildings stand atop slave burial grounds and countless stories remain hidden.

The Concrete Story

Tonya Matthews is ushering this once-ignored history out onto an enormous stage.

After 23 years of plowing through the indifference and denial that once permeated Charleston, the International African American Museum opened in late June. It stands at a downtown wharf where ships delivered an estimated 30,000 captives to sell.

It is hard to overstate the mammoth feat of raising $125 million to build a museum to share the African American experience in a city that a generation ago scarcely acknowledged the realities of slavery at all. Matthews, the museum’s president and CEO, often hears: “I never thought this would happen.”

The International African American Museum opened in late June. It sits on the former site of Gadsden’s Wharf, where all Charleston-bound slave ships were received during the final 22 months of the legal transatlantic slave trade in the United States. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

Fresh off huge buzz around the museum’s opening, Matthews said she was more focused on telling that story than tracking the state’s political headwinds, which she called “a lot of noise at the top.” She doesn’t expect it to affect what the private museum teaches, nor does she hear much about it from people on the ground — the teachers and other visitors she called the “curious folks.”

But it’s impossible to ignore for both white and Black Americans trying to grapple with the country’s original sin, whether they are descendants of enslaved people or those who enslaved them.

“It’s all a very, very personal journey, which is why the noise is so threatening and striking and discouraging to everyone,” she said. “Because when we hear it, we take it in personally.”

Along with nine galleries and various traveling exhibitions, the museum also offers the Center for Family History to bridge gulfs in African American genealogy. That requires help from white families whose records often are the only ones that exist about Black people’s enslaved ancestors. The museum aims to provide a safe space for that exchange.

“One side is simply asking for the authentic story,” Matthews said. “And the other side is asking not to be judged.”

Old Story, New Audience

Christine King Mitchell is pushing Charleston’s slave history from obscurity to prominence at a small, city-owned museum tucked off a cobblestone road.

On a recent morning, she stood with her back to a row of windows that look out over what once was a four-story brick fortress, a barracoon called the “jail” where enslaved people for sale were housed. The complex included a “dead house,” a morgue. Today, the site is a private parking lot.

Mitchell works at the Old Slave Mart Museum, where many auctions moved after the city banned them at the Exchange and surrounding streets in 1856. From the dimly lit second floor, she tells an unvarnished story of slavery here and across Charleston. Record numbers of people are coming to hear it.

Christine King Mitchell shares the history of South Carolina’s slave trade with students and other visitors at the Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston.

She began working at the Slave Mart a decade ago — and annual visitors have skyrocketed since, from about 30,000 to more than 80,000 last year. They now narrowly surpass visitors to the Exchange, one of the most historic colonial public buildings in the country.

Mitchell’s first audience of the day was a class from a private school in Greenville, a city three hours away in upper South Carolina. They listened with quiet intensity as she explained how slavery infused every vein of the city’s economy.

“You’re talking insurance companies making money, the shipbuilding industry making money…”

A big screen beside her projected an 1856 document titled: SLAVE POLICY. In it, Aetna Life Insurance Co. had insured a 24-year-old enslaved woman named Sebina for $600. “This city was built on the backs of Black people,” Mitchell said. “You can start to understand the tentacles.”

Mitchell informs visitors about the business of slavery during a presentation at the Old Slave Mart Museum. First image: Visitors stop to examine panels containing historical information on slavery at the Old Slave Mart Museum. Second image: Shackles used to bind enslaved people during transport are on display at the museum.

When she first read the policy about five years ago, she cried. For white people, slavery might seem distant. But to her, it feels very near. She remembers her first freeborn grandfather, “and I’m not 100 years old yet.” Now 67, she grew up in the 1960s picking cotton with her mother.

This history plays forward today. Mitchell, who wrote a new book, “The Business of Slavery,” noted the generational wealth gap that persists between Black and white people. The education disparities. The Black women paid 52 cents for every $1 a white man is paid in South Carolina.

After the class left, while waiting for the next one to file in, she explained the importance of her work. “If you understand the past, you understand the present.” She pointed an index finger and moved it in a circular motion toward the museum’s display panels, the chains under glass, the bricks in the walls with enslaved people’s fingerprints still pressed into them.

“It’s all of this.”

Unearthing Buried Stories

Lauren Davila is using archival research to unearth lost stories in what once was the heart of the local slave-trading district — although you’d hardly know it traversing the streetscape today.

Davila was a College of Charleston graduate history student when she began compiling a digital map of businesses connected to the slave trade around Broad Street, one of the city’s most iconic stretches. Rows of mostly two- and three-story buildings, many of them predating the Civil War, line the street. Wrought iron and columns adorn the structures, which today house law firms, restaurants and banks — with little indication of what they were once used for.

Lauren Davila, photographed behind the Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon, discovered a newspaper ad that promoted the sale of 600 people while conducting research as a graduate student at the College of Charleston.

Only two buildings overtly acknowledge their histories despite the concentration of horrors that happened in the vicinity. “Charleston is really doing a disservice to locals, tourists and Black people as a whole by not acknowledging it,” said Davila, now an adjunct at the College of Charleston.

While searching Charleson newspaper archives last year for an especially prolific slave-trading firm, Davila paused at one of its advertisements. Published in 1835, the ad informed readers of the upcoming sale of 600 enslaved people. She had discovered the largest known slave auction in American history, a finding first reported by ProPublica in June.

The sale was held at the Exchange, a grand 1771 structure at the head of Broad Street. One of the two historical markers on the street that mention slavery stands outside the building, where city leaders once entertained George Washington. Installed in 2016, the marker describes how public auctions of enslaved people were held there.

The other marker, added in 2021, hangs on a bank building a block down that once housed a slave trader’s office. Margaret Seidler was researching her family tree when she discovered a notorious slave trader among her ancestors and then hired a deeds researcher who pinpointed the building as his former office.

Seidler, a white Charlestonian who funded some of Davila’s research training, has since been tracking down descendents of slave traders. Many she approached have cried when she presented evidence of their ancestors’ actions. Some privately thanked her.

Fewer are willing to publicly acknowledge it. Others won’t at all. They don’t see the point. One white descendant told her that slavery was unfortunate but is getting too much emphasis today. All the discussion did, he added, was give people ideas about reparations.

But another recently agreed to publicly acknowledge a prominent trader among her ancestors as a way to “recognize the importance of this truth being known and told as part of the history of Charleston.”

And soon, there could be a third marker a few doors down from the office of Seidler’s ancestor. Davila traced the building that once housed the firm that organized the sale of 600 people to 24 Broad St.

Since 1989, Stephen Schmutz has owned the building, an elegant salmon-colored structure where he has spent a long career practicing law. A large framed portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. hangs near his desk, a gift from the Racial Justice Network for his work. He also represented three families whose loved ones were among nine Black people murdered by a white supremacist in 2015 inside Emanuel AME Church, just a mile away.

Schmutz’s building stands close enough to the Exchange that someone standing outside might have heard wailing from enslaved families torn apart. When ProPublica told him that his building once housed a notorious slave-trading firm, he was stunned.

“It has been a lot of things,” he said. “But I didn’t know it had been one of those things.”

Davila has asked him to meet and discuss putting a marker outside his building; he told ProPublica he wouldn’t object.

Changing the Narrative

Harold Singletary joined thousands of others celebrating the International African American Museum’s opening last month. Shortly after, he read ProPublica’s story about the sale of 600 people — and learned that several of his ancestors were among those sold.

They included the mother and grandparents of a woman Singletary so reveres that he named his business, BrightMa Farms, after her. It operates in part on the same 10-acre plot she farmed after the Civil War freed her.

He quickly realized that the farm’s corporate office sits barely a four-minute stroll from the Exchange, where his ancestors stood before potential buyers. He used to work for a developer on Broad Street near the building that housed the firm that sold them. It all felt very surreal.

Harold Singletary recently discovered that some of his ancestors were sold as part of the 600-person sale in Charleston, which took place not far from the corporate office of his business, BrightMa Farms.

He supports efforts by Davila and Seidler to put a marker outside so that others who walk by learn the story. “It’s connecting dots. It’s these conversations that never were had,” he said. “We are still in a position of changing the narrative.”

For him, teaching history isn’t an esoteric examination of dates and events. Everywhere he goes in Charleston, the past feels very near. As white lawmakers work to protect students from feeling discomfort while learning about their state’s racial legacy, Singletary wants them to consider how he experiences it. He wants them to know the pain he, and his children, feel walking past the place where their ancestors were sold or the building where the white men who orchestrated it grew rich.

Correction

July 31, 2023: This story originally misstated a street number. Several residents want to put an historical marker at 24 Broad St. There already is one at 34 Broad St.

by Jeremy Schwartz

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

Two months after Texas lawmakers stripped millions of dollars from a company that supplies child identification kits, a bill to fund a similar program in Pennsylvania is facing key opposition.

In March, two Pennsylvania senators filed legislation that called for purchasing and distributing child identification kits for all of the state’s first graders. The kits, which would cost the state about $350,000, needed to use “inkless” fingerprinting technology, according to the bill.

Such a provision would provide an advantage to one vendor: the National Child Identification Program, a Waco, Texas, company run by former NFL player Kenny Hansmire, who has a track record of failed businesses and has been disciplined by Connecticut banking regulators.

On May 2, the bill sailed through the Senate Education Committee on a unanimous vote, a key step that was celebrated by the company’s representatives and the legislation’s authors. During a press conference that day, Hansmire turned to a common phrase he uses to promote the kits, calling the bill a “gift of safety” and urging the lawmakers to support the measure.

“We’re asking the state of Pennsylvania to step up, the Senate and the House to step up,” he said.

A week later, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune published an investigation that found no evidence that the kits had ever been used to find a missing child and that the company had used exaggerated statistics as it sought to secure government dollars across the country.

After the investigation was published, Texas lawmakers — who had approved legislation in 2021 that delivered nearly $6 million to the company — zeroed out future funding for the effort.

Pennsylvania lawmakers also began taking a closer look at the company. The bill’s authors removed the requirement that kits be “inkless,” and the measure passed the full Senate last month with a 34-15 vote. Now the bill is awaiting a hearing in the House Education Committee. But the chair of that committee told the news organizations that he has no plans to bring the legislation forward for a vote.

Jason Thompson, a spokesperson for bill sponsors Sens. Scott Martin and Camera Bartolotta, both Republicans, said the removal of the provision that required the kits to be “inkless” would allow a wider pool of potential vendors to seek a state contract. Hansmire has claimed that his company’s inkless technology makes its kits superior.

“Understanding the clear value of providing these kits to young people, Senator Bartolotta and Senator Martin amended their bill to provide additional flexibility to ensure whatever kits are distributed to students meet the needs of Pennsylvania families, law enforcement and taxpayers,” Thompson said.

But that change was not enough to persuade multiple state lawmakers who questioned the use of taxpayer funding to pay for the kits, including Rep. Peter Schweyer, chair of the House Education Committee.

“This just never seemed like it was all that well thought out,” Schweyer, a Democrat, said, adding that addressing school violence and mental health are more urgent priorities. “I’d rather hire a couple more cops or spend money on a couple more psychologists in our most at-risk schools.”

Two Democratic senators offered similar concerns.

Sen. Maria Collett said she was worried that the legislation, as originally proposed, appeared to benefit a single vendor. She noted that several nonprofits in the state already provide child ID kits for free to parents who want them.

“To ask the taxpayers of Pennsylvania to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars, year over year, to a private vendor for a product that we have no data showing the efficacy of is unconscionable, in my opinion,” she said.

Sen. Nikil Saval said the news organizations’ investigation raised concerns among lawmakers.

“A number of us, initially, were supportive of the effort,” Saval said. “Frankly, the reporting gave a number of us pause.”

Beyond questions of the kits’ effectiveness, the news outlets’ investigation found Hansmire had a string of failed businesses, had millions of dollars in outstanding federal tax liens and had previously been barred from some finance-related business in Connecticut by banking regulators because of his role in an alleged scheme to defraud or mislead investors.

Hansmire, who did not respond to emailed questions for this article, has said the kits help law enforcement find missing children and save time during the early stages of a search. But none of the law enforcement agencies contacted by the news outlets could recall the kits having assisted in finding a missing child.

Hansmire also previously said that his legal disputes, including his sanction in Connecticut, had been “properly resolved, closed and are completely unrelated to the National Child ID Program.” He claimed to have “paid debts entirely” but did not provide details.

The Pennsylvania House Education Committee is scheduled to reconvene in late September, following the Legislature’s summer break.

If the committee takes no action, another legislative avenue called a “code bill” could potentially provide funding for the kits, but Schweyer said he isn’t aware of a push for such a move.

“It doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of momentum for it here,” he said. Schweyer added: “For now, it’s a dead issue in Pennsylvania.”

by Duaa Eldeib

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Members of Congress on Thursday introduced sweeping legislation that aims to reduce the country’s stillbirth rate, tackling gaps in research, data and awareness as well as authorizing tens of millions of dollars in new funding.

If passed, the Stillbirth Health Improvement and Education (SHINE) for Autumn Act of 2023 would be the most comprehensive federal stillbirth law on record. Rep. Young Kim, R-Calif., who introduced the bill in the House, called it “the first step in the right direction” to help prevent stillbirths and ensure healthy pregnancies.

As a mother, grandmother and co-chair of the Maternity Care Caucus, Kim said she understands the challenges firsthand. She said that when one of her daughters lost a baby a few years ago, the doctor’s response was, “It happens.”

“These experiences have made me want to be a part of the solution,” she said. “I want us to have more information and make sure things are better for my grandkids. We should be able to prevent the preventable.”

Every year in the U.S., more than 20,000 pregnancies end in stillbirth, the death of an expected child at 20 weeks or more. Research shows as many as 1 in 4 stillbirths may be preventable, a figure that jumps to nearly half as the due date nears. But for years, the U.S. stillbirth crisis has been overlooked.

ProPublica has reported extensively on the devastating effects of stillbirth on families and the country’s failure to prevent, prioritize and raise awareness around stillbirth. Stark racial disparities underscore the crisis, as Black women are more than twice as likely to have a stillbirth as white women. But government officials, doctors and researchers often cite the dearth of research, data and autopsies as barriers to change.

Kim and other lawmakers lauded ProPublica’s reporting for bringing the stillbirth crisis to the forefront and revealing shortcomings in how the nation’s health care system was combating stillbirths.

“ProPublica’s work has been so important for shedding light on the challenges related to stillbirth, amplifying the stories of mothers and women whose voices have not been heard, and highlighting the gaps in our stillbirth-related data and where the United States stands compared to other countries,” said Kim, who was not involved in last session’s legislation.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., introduced legislation in the Senate last year with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., but it did not pass. They joined forces again to reintroduce a measure on Thursday. Booker said the growing list of bipartisan cosponsors and the relentless work of advocates makes him optimistic that it will pass this session.

“Sadly, despite staggering statistics, stillbirth remains one of the most underfunded and understudied public health issues in the United States. This legislation would provide long-overdue resources towards research and data collection,” said Booker, adding that he was “incredibly grateful” to ProPublica for raising awareness and giving a human face to the ongoing crisis, which has been “critical” to garnering support for the legislation.

The SHINE for Autumn Act is named after the daughter of New Jersey maternal health advocate Debbie Haine Vijayvergiya. Autumn Joy was stillborn 12 years ago this month.

The SHINE for Autumn Act is named for the stillborn daughter of Debbie Haine Vijayvergiya, a maternal health advocate. Her daughter, Autumn Joy, was stillborn in 2011. (Liz Moughon/ProPublica)

“This is life-saving, historic, monumental legislation,” Haine Vijayvergiya said. “I’ve been waiting and working so hard all these years, knocking on doors and screaming from rooftops trying to get someone’s attention, trying to find anyone who can help to elevate the sense of urgency around this issue.”

She teared up as she expressed gratitude to the lawmakers who listened and signed on to the legislation. She’s now turning her attention to getting the bill passed, which means a steady stream of meetings and calls.

“ProPublica has helped to shine the very brightest light,” she said. “I don't think we’d be where we are today without the help of ProPublica.”

The bill marks the second time this month that federal lawmakers have introduced stillbirth legislation. The Maternal and Child Health Stillbirth Prevention Act specifically adds stillbirth prevention to the list of federal funding programs earmarked for mothers and children.

The SHINE for Autumn Act would authorize a total of $45 million in federal funding over the next five years for the various programs. That includes building a partnership between federal and state agencies to focus on collecting better data on stillbirths and risk factors, as well as building capacity at the local level to assess and standardize that data. It also seeks to develop and make educational awareness materials publicly available. Many women interviewed by ProPublica said they didn’t know they were at risk until they delivered their stillborn baby.

In addition, the bill paves the way for a perinatal pathology fellowship program to help provide additional training for fetal autopsies. In 2020, autopsies were conducted or planned in less than 20% of stillbirths, according to data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which also shows that the cause of death is not determined in about one-third of stillbirths.

Rep. Dave Joyce, R-Ohio, Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., and Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Ill., are all cosponsors in the House. Kelly, who co-chairs the Maternity Care Caucus with Kim, said the federal government has a major responsibility when it comes to ensuring maternal and newborn care, and part of that includes addressing the alarming racial disparities in maternal mortality and stillbirth.

“Stillbirth is a deeply painful experience for many mothers, and another area (of) health care where Black women feel a disproportionate burden,” she said. “By shedding light on this issue and directing more resources and more awareness to supporting moms and babies, we can improve outcomes across the board.”

Key medical organizations, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, have also backed the legislation. Dr. Tony Sciscione, president of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, said preventing stillbirths is crucial.

“One of the most difficult things that maternal-fetal medicine subspecialists do is comfort families as they try to understand why their baby was stillborn,” he said. “For patients and clinicians, there are far too many questions and far too few answers.”

by Isabelle Taft, Mississippi Today, and Mollie Simon, ProPublica

This article contains descriptions of threats of violence and mental illness.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Mississippi Today. It was also co-published with Sun Herald and Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

If you or someone you know needs help:

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

Nearly 40 years ago, a federal appeals court ruled that Alabama officials could not jail people in mental health crisis who were sent to the state for help. Jailing people going through the state’s civil commitment process, the court decided, amounted to punishment. And about 30 years ago, after Kentucky was labeled the worst state in the nation for jailing mentally ill people without charges, legislators there banned it.

But a new survey of counties and an analysis of jail dockets in Mississippi, which has no such law, has found that people going through the civil commitment process for mental illness are regularly jailed as they await evaluation and treatment, even when they haven’t been charged with a crime. Some counties routinely hold such people in jail — people awaiting treatment for mental illness or substance abuse were held in jail without charges at least 2,000 times from 2019 to 2022 in 19 counties alone, sometimes for days or weeks.

Nationally, Mississippi is a stark outlier. Mississippi Today and ProPublica conducted a nationwide survey of disability advocacy organizations and state agencies that oversee behavioral health. None described anything close to the scale of what’s happening in Mississippi.

Civil commitment laws are meant to ensure people get treatment even when they don’t recognize that they need it, said James Tucker, an attorney and the director of the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program. Locking them up as they wait for a treatment bed doesn’t fulfill that goal.

“The bargain for your lack of freedom is that the state has decided you need treatment,” he said. “The minute that order is entered, the state has a constitutional duty to deliver treatment.”

At least 12 states plus the District of Columbia prohibit jailing people undergoing commitment proceedings for mental illness unless they have been charged with a crime.

Mississippi law, however, allows people going through the civil commitment process to be sent to jail if there is “no reasonable alternative.” If there are no publicly funded beds in appropriate facilities, local officials sometimes decide they have no other option.

“We Forbid the Use of Jails”

In the 1970s, a federal class-action lawsuit against Alabama officials alleged that it was unconstitutional to jail people going through the commitment process for mental illness while they awaited hearings. It was common at the time: Probate judges in three-quarters of the state’s counties had jailed people, according to discovery findings cited in a court ruling.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs — everyone in the state who had been committed or would be in the future — cited previous lawsuits that had uncovered fire hazards, overcrowding and a dearth of mental health and routine medical care in Alabama’s county jails.

The district court ruled against the plaintiffs’ constitutional claims, reasoning that if the local jail was the only option in a county, it was the least restrictive facility that would also protect society.

"The bargain for your lack of freedom is that the state has decided you need treatment. The minute that order is entered, the state has a constitutional duty to deliver treatment." – James Tucker, director of the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program

But in 1984, a panel of judges on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that reasoning. Circuit Judge Thomas Alonzo Clark wrote in his opinion that nothing prevented counties from placing people in a public facility in another county or in a local private facility that was equipped to handle mentally ill patients.

Clark cited a doctor’s testimony that jail often worsened psychosis, made it harder to treat people and increased suicidal tendencies.

“We forbid the use of jails for the purpose of detaining persons awaiting involuntary civil commitment proceedings, finding that to do so violates those persons’ substantive and procedural due process rights,” the judge wrote.

The reasons that Alabama officials provided for placing people in jail were similar to Mississippi officials’ arguments today. But Mississippi is in a different federal circuit, and the practice there has not been tested with a class-action lawsuit.

A sister of one woman who had died in a Mississippi jail in 1987 tried and failed to convince a federal judge that the woman’s rights had been violated when she was incarcerated without treatment.

Colett Boston, left, and Everlean Boston hold a photograph of their mother, Mae Evelyn Boston, in Oxford, Mississippi. When the sisters were young, their mother died in jail as she went through the civil commitment process. (Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today)

Mae Evelyn Boston, an Oxford woman who had dealt with paranoid schizophrenia for most of her adult life, had a psychotic episode shortly after giving birth. Her older daughter, Everlean, was 12 years old; she remembers her mother saying she was going to kill the baby because the girl “had a demon in her.”

One of Boston’s sisters initiated commitment proceedings — making Boston one of more than 100 people jailed for that reason from 1984 to 1988 in Lafayette County, according to a deposition cited in a 1990 ruling by U.S. District Judge Neal Biggers. When deputies arrived to take her mother into custody for evaluation, Everlean recalled, it took six of them to get her onto the ground before handcuffing her and placing her in the back of a cop car.

Once Boston was in jail, guards did not complete a medical screening required by department policy and didn’t know Boston had given birth via cesarean section 12 days before, Biggers wrote. She died two days later from heart failure caused by blood clots.

Everlean Boston remembers her mother smoking cigarettes and listening to the blues on quiet Sundays at home. The day deputies took her mother away was the last time she saw her. “I never got to say goodbye,” she recalled. “I never got to say I loved her. It hurts.”

“I never got to say goodbye. I never got to say I loved her. It hurts.” – Everlean Boston, whose mother, Mae Evelyn Boston, died in jail as she went through the civil commitment process

Biggers concluded that the “medical care customarily provided by the county for mentally ill detainees does not fall below constitutional standards” and that what happened with Boston represented a “scheduling error” and an “isolated instance.” The county, which argued it had provided adequate care for Boston, had the right to detain people like her “in the interest of societal safety,” he found, and those people were not entitled to placement in the “least restrictive alternative” such as a hospital. Biggers considered the Alabama appeals court ruling from a few years earlier, but concluded it didn’t apply because it was based on specific facts about that state’s jails.

“The court declines to hold that use of jails for temporary detention of persons awaiting civil commitment proceedings is unconstitutional per se,” Biggers ruled.

Since then, at least nine lawsuits have been filed over the deaths of Mississippians incarcerated during civil commitment proceedings. None of those lawsuits directly challenged the constitutionality of being jailed during the commitment process. The U.S. Supreme Court has not ruled on the matter, academics and attorneys with expertise in civil commitment said.

In the years after Boston’s death, Mississippi continued to stand out.

The chancery courthouse in Lafayette County, at the site that previously housed the county jail where Mae Evelyn Boston died (Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today)

In 1992, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and Public Citizen’s Health Research Group conducted a national survey about the practice of jailing mentally ill people.

Almost a third of city and county jails in Mississippi responded. About 76% of respondents said they detained people who had not been charged with a crime and were awaiting an evaluation, treatment or hospitalization for mental illness. That was the second-highest percentage of any state in the country and far higher than the national average of 29%.

An unnamed Mississippi jail official said in the organizations’ report that jails were a “dumping ground for what nobody else wants.”

The report gave its “Worst State Award” to Kentucky, where 81% of responding jails reported holding people without criminal charges for mental evaluations.

Two years later, Kentucky’s legislature voted unanimously to ban the practice. The state health agency and its federally designated disability rights organization told Mississippi Today and ProPublica that Kentucky jails today are not used to hold people without charges awaiting mental health evaluations.

Few States Compare to Mississippi

Officials with the Mississippi Department of Mental Health emphasize that they do not support the practice of jailing people during the commitment process. But a spokesperson said they “have heard anecdotally from other states regarding challenges of individuals waiting in jail.”

Nationally, even basic data like the number of people committed each year is elusive. After reviewing some of Mississippi Today and ProPublica’s findings, the Treatment Advocacy Center, a national nonprofit that advocates making it easier for people with mental illness to get treatment, started planning a project to understand how often people are jailed without charges during the commitment process across the U.S.

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Mississippi Today and ProPublica contacted agencies overseeing mental health and disability advocacy organizations in every state to find out whether Mississippi is an outlier. It is.

Respondents in 42 states and the District of Columbia said they were not aware of people being regularly held in jail without charges during the psychiatric civil commitment process. In a handful of those states, respondents said they had seen it once or twice over the years.

In two states, people can be sent from state psychiatric hospitals to mental health units inside prisons. In a few others, respondents said they had seen people jailed for noncompliance with court-ordered treatment for mental illness or substance abuse.

Respondents in three other states — Alaska, South Dakota and Wyoming — reported that people sometimes are sent to jail to await psychiatric evaluations, but the information they provided suggested that it happens to fewer people, and for a shorter period, than in Mississippi.

In 2018, staffing shortages at the Alaska Psychiatric Institute caused people to be held at the Anchorage Correctional Complex until they could be evaluated. The next year, an Anchorage judge ordered an end to the practice except in the “rarest circumstances,” finding that it had caused “irreparable harm.”

A subsequent settlement declared that jails shouldn’t be used unless no other option was available and that such detentions should be as short as possible.

But detentions do still occasionally happen in the state when people in rural areas await transportation to an evaluation center, said Mark Regan, legal director at the Disability Law Center of Alaska. According to the Alaska Department of Family and Community Services, people awaiting evaluation were held in jail 555 times from mid-2018 through late February 2023.

Across South Dakota, people without charges sometimes have been held in jail during the commitment process, according to law enforcement agencies and Disability Rights South Dakota, but such holds are limited by law to 24 hours; in Mississippi, the vast majority of cases analyzed were for more than 24 hours. The South Dakota Department of Social Services said it doesn’t track how often it happens and declined to answer questions.

And in Wyoming, a person can be held in jail for up to 72 hours on an emergency basis before a hearing, but they must have a mental examination within 24 hours. Such holds in jail have occurred “in very rare circumstances,” according to the state.

Attempts to constrain the use of jails date back at least to 1950, when the federal government sent governors model legislation that limited the incarceration of people for mental illness to “extreme emergency” situations. The National Institute of Mental Health called incarcerating such people “among the worst of current practices.”

Some states adopted the legislation. Mississippi did not.

Agnel Philip contributed reporting.

by Isabelle Taft, Mississippi Today, with data analysis by Agnel Philip, ProPublica, reporting by Mollie Simon, ProPublica

This article contains detailed descriptions of mental illness and suicide.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Mississippi Today. It was also co-published with Sun Herald, Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal and The Guardian. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

*** If you or someone you know needs help:

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

When sheriff’s department staff in Mississippi’s Benton County took Jimmy Sons into custody several years ago, they followed their standard protocol for people charged with a crime: They took his mug shot, fingerprinted him, had him change into an orange jumpsuit and locked him up.

But Sons, who was then 20 years old, had not been charged with a crime. Earlier that day, his father, James Sons, had gone to a county office to ask that his youngest son be taken in for a mental evaluation and treatment. Jimmy Sons had threatened to hurt family members and himself, and his father had come across him sitting on his bed with a loaded shotgun.

On Sons’ booking form, in the spot where jailers usually record criminal charges, was a single word: “LUNACY.”

The booking form for Jimmy Sons, identifying his “offense” as “lunacy” (Obtained by Mississippi Today)

In every state, people who present a threat to themselves or others can be ordered to receive mental health treatment. Most states allow people with substance abuse problems to be ordered into treatment, too. The process is called civil commitment.

But Mississippi Today and ProPublica could not find any state other than Mississippi where people are routinely jailed without charges for days or weeks during that process.

What happened to Sons has occurred hundreds of times a year in the state.

The news organizations examined jail dockets from 19 Mississippi counties — about a quarter of the state’s 82 — that clearly marked bookings related to civil commitments. All told, people in those counties were jailed at least 2,000 times for civil commitments alone from 2019 to 2022. None had been charged with a crime.

Most were deemed to need psychiatric treatment; others were sent to substance abuse programs, according to county officials.

Since 2006, at least 13 people have died in Mississippi county jails as they awaited treatment for mental illness or substance abuse, Mississippi Today and ProPublica found. Nine of the 13 killed themselves. At least 10 hadn’t been charged with a crime.

A woman going through the civil commitment process, wearing a shirt labeling her a “convict,” is transported from her commitment hearing back to a county jail to await transportation to a state hospital in north Mississippi this spring. (Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today)

We shared our findings with disability rights advocates, mental health officials in other states and 10 national experts on civil commitment or mental health care in jails. They used words such as “horrifying,” “breaks my heart” and “speechless” when they learned how many people are jailed in Mississippi as they go through the civil commitment process.

Some said they didn’t see how it could be constitutional.

“If an ER is full, you don’t send people to jail,” said Megan Schuller, legal director of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, a Washington, D.C.-based organization. “This is just outright discriminatory treatment in my view.”

Mississippi Today and ProPublica also interviewed 10 individuals who had been committed and jailed, as well as 20 family members.

Many of those people said they or their family members had been housed alongside criminal defendants. Nobody knew how long they would be there. They were often shackled when they left their cells. Some of them said they couldn’t access prescribed psychiatric medications or had minimal medical care as they experienced withdrawal from illegal drugs.

“It felt more criminal than, like, they were trying to help me,” said Richard Millwood, who was booked into the DeSoto County jail in 2020 following an attempted suicide. “I got the exact same treatment in there as I did when I was in jail facing charges. In fact worse, in my opinion, because at least when I was facing charges I could bond out.”

"I got the exact same treatment in there as I did when I was in jail facing charges. In fact worse, in my opinion, because at least when I was facing charges I could bond out." — Richard Millwood, who was booked into jail following an attempted suicide

DeSoto County leadership, informed of Millwood’s statement, did not respond.

Millwood spent 35 days in jail before being admitted to a publicly funded rehab program 90 miles away.

Jimmy Sons didn’t receive a mental evaluation when he was booked into the Benton County jail in September 2015, according to documents in a lawsuit his father later filed. Less than 24 hours later, he was dead. Left alone in a cell without regular visits by jail staff, he had hanged himself.

He had been back in Mississippi for just a few days, planning to join his dad in electrical work, said his mother, Juli Murray. He had set out from her home in Bradenton, Florida, so early in the morning that he didn’t say goodbye.

Murray remembers the phone call from Jimmy’s half-brother in which she learned her son was in jail. She didn’t understand why.

“If you do something wrong, that’s why you’re in jail,” she said. “Not if you’re not mentally well. Why would they put them in there?”

The Lesser Sin

When James Sons went to the clerk’s office in the tiny town of Ashland to file commitment paperwork for his son, he took the first step in Mississippi’s peculiar, antiquated system for mandating treatment for people with serious mental health problems.

Jimmy Sons at age 18 at his father’s home in Mississippi (Courtesy of John Sons)

It starts when someone — usually a family member, but it could be almost anyone — signs a form alleging that the person in question is “in need of treatment because the person is mentally ill under law and poses a likelihood of physical harm to themselves or others.”

James Sons filled out that form, listing why he was concerned: Jimmy’s guns, his threats, his talk of suicide.

Then a special master — an attorney appointed by a chancery judge to make commitment decisions — issued a “Writ to Take Custody.” It instructed sheriff’s deputies in Benton County, just south of the Tennessee border, to hold Jimmy Sons at the jail until he could be evaluated.

The sheriff’s office asked Sons to come in on an unrelated matter. When he showed up, Chief Deputy Joe Batts told him he needed a mental health evaluation. Batts tried to reassure Sons that the process would be as quick as possible and would end with him back home, according to Batts’ testimony in the lawsuit Sons’ father filed over his death.

Then Batts told Sons, “What we’re going to have to do now is take you back and book you.”

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What he never told Sons, he later acknowledged in a deposition, was that the young man would have to wait in jail for days before he would see a mental health provider. The first screening required by law was four days away. If it concluded he needed further examination, he would be evaluated by two more medical professionals. Then the special master would decide whether to order him into treatment at a state psychiatric hospital.

The whole process should take seven to 10 days, according to the state Department of Mental Health. But sometimes it takes longer, the news organizations found. And if someone is ordered into treatment at their hearing, they generally have to wait for a bed, though the department says average wait times for state hospital beds after hearings have dropped dramatically in the last year.

While waiting for their hearing, people like Sons are supposed to receive treatment at a hospital or a short-term public mental health facility called a crisis stabilization unit. But state law does allow people to be jailed before their commitment hearing if there is “no reasonable alternative.” (The law is less clear about what’s allowed following a hearing.)

The Benton County Sheriff’s Department formerly housed the county jail where Jimmy Sons died, in Ashland, Mississippi. (Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today)

Mississippi Today and ProPublica spoke to dozens of officials across Mississippi involved in the commitment process: clerks who handle the paperwork, chancery judges and special masters who sign commitment orders, sheriffs who run the jails, deputies who drive people from jails to state hospitals, and the head of the state Department of Mental Health.

None of them thinks jail is the right place for people awaiting treatment for mental illness.

“We’re not a mental health hospital,” said Greg Pollan, president of the Mississippi Sheriffs’ Association and the sheriff of rural Calhoun County in the north of the state. “We’re not even a mental health Band-Aid station. That’s not what we do. So they should never, ever see the inside of my jail.”

Batts himself, who took Sons into custody in Benton County, said law enforcement officers across Mississippi “hate to detain people like that. But we’re told we have to do it.” He acknowledged that the facility “was substandard to begin with, not having the space and the adequate facilities to hold and monitor someone in that mental state — it just puts everybody in a bad situation.” And he said he thought the state could provide alternatives to jail.

Some counties jail most people going through the commitment process for mental illness, Mississippi Today and ProPublica found. Other counties reserve jail for people who are deemed violent or likely to hurt themselves. And at least a handful sometimes jail people committed for substance abuse — even though a 2021 opinion by the state’s attorney general says that isn’t allowed under state law.

This happens because until people are admitted to a state hospital, counties are responsible for covering the costs of the commitment process unless the state provides funding. If a crisis stabilization unit is full or turns someone away, the county must find an alternative, and it must foot the bill.

Counties can place patients in an ER or contract with a psychiatric hospital — and some do — but many officials balk at the cost. Many officials, particularly those in poor, rural counties, see jail as the only option.

“You have to put them somewhere to monitor them,” said Cindy Austin, chancery clerk in rural Smith County, located in central Mississippi. Chancery clerks are responsible for finding beds for people going through the commitment process. “It’s not that anybody wants to hold them in jail, it’s just we have no hospital here to hold them in.”

Timothy Gowan, an attorney who adjudicated commitments in Noxubee County from 1999 to late 2020, said people going through the commitment process there generally were jailed if they were determined to be violent and their family didn’t want them at home.

According to the Noxubee County jail docket, people going through the civil commitment process with no criminal charges were booked into the jail about 50 times from 2019 to 2022. Ten stays lasted at least 30 days. The longest was 82 days.

“Putting a sick person in a jail is a sin,” Gowan said. “But it’s the lesser of somebody getting killed.”

Some counties rarely hold people in jail — sometimes because a sheriff, chancery judge or other official has taken a stand against it. Rural Neshoba County in central Mississippi pays Alliance, a psychiatric hospital in Meridian, to house patients.

"We’re not a mental health hospital. We’re not even a mental health Band-Aid station. That’s not what we do. So they should never, ever see the inside of my jail." — Greg Pollan, president of the Mississippi Sheriffs’ Association and sheriff of Calhoun County

The practice isn’t confined to poor, rural counties. DeSoto County, a populous, relatively wealthy county near Memphis, jailed people without charges about 500 times over four years, the most of any of the counties analyzed by Mississippi Today and ProPublica. The median jail stay there was about nine days; the longest was 106.

The state and county recently set aside money to build a crisis stabilization unit — currently, the nearest one is about 40 miles away — but the county and the local community mental health center haven’t decided on a location, said County Supervisor Mark Gardner.

Some county officials say that keeping people out of jail during the process requires the state to step up. State Rep. Jansen Owen, a Republican from Pearl River County in southern Mississippi who represents people during the commitment process, said he believes counties that spend “millions of dollars on fairgrounds and ballparks” could find alternatives to jail. But he also sees a need for more state-funded facilities.

“You can’t just throw it on the counties,” he said. “It’s a state prerogative. And them being held in the jail, I think, is a result of the state kicking the can down the road to the counties.”

Wendy Bailey, head of the state Department of Mental Health, said it’s “unacceptable” to jail people simply because they may need behavioral health treatment. Department staff have met with chancery clerks around the state to urge them to steer families away from commitment proceedings and toward outpatient services offered by community mental health centers whenever possible.

The Department of Mental Health says it prioritizes people waiting in jail when making admissions to state hospitals. The state has expanded the number of crisis unit beds from 128 in 2018 to 180 today, with plans to add more. And it has increased funding for local services in recent years in an effort to reduce commitments.

But Bailey said the department has no authority to force counties to change course, nor legal responsibility for people going through the commitment process until a judge orders them into treatment at a state psychiatric hospital.

Locked in the “Lunacy Zone”

Willie McNeese’s problems started after he came home to Shuqualak, Mississippi, a town of about 400 people and a lumber mill, in 2007. He had spent a decade in prison starting at age 17.

He found the changes that had taken place — bigger highways, cellphones — overwhelming, said his sister, Cassandra McNeese. He was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

“It’s like a switch — highs and lows,” said Willie McNeese, now 43. “I might have a whole lot of laughter going on, trying to make the next person laugh. Then my day going down, I be depressed and worried about situations that nobody can change but God.”

McNeese has been involuntarily committed in Noxubee County 10 times since 2008 and has been jailed during at least eight of them, one for more than a month in 2019 according to court records and the jail docket. During his most recent commitment starting in March 2022, McNeese was held in jail for a total of 58 days in two stints before eventually going to a state psychiatric hospital.

Cassandra McNeese, left, and her mother, Yvonne A. McNeese, in Shuqualak, Mississippi. Cassandra’s brother, Willie McNeese, has been held in jail during civil commitment proceedings at least eight times since 2008. Cassandra McNeese said Noxubee County officials told her jail was the only place they had for him to wait. ”This is who you trust to take care of things,” she said. ”That’s all you have to rely on.” (Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today)

From 2019 to 2022, about 1,200 civil commitment jail stays in the 19 counties analyzed by Mississippi Today and ProPublica lasted longer than three days. That’s about how long it can take for people to start to experience withdrawal from a lack of psychiatric medications, which jails don’t always provide. About 130 stays lasted more than 30 days.

McNeese said he spent much of his time in jail last year standing near the door of his cell, what jail staff called the “Lunacy Zone,” screaming to be allowed to take a shower. A jailer tased him to quiet him down, and his clothes were taken from him. For a period, his mattress was taken, too.

“It’s a way of punishment,” he said. “They don’t handle it like the hospital. If you have a problem in the hospital they’ll come with a shot or something, but they don’t take your clothes or take your mattress or lock your door on you or nothing like that.”

McNeese said he had inconsistent access to medication and received none during his first stay in 2022, which lasted 25 days.

The Noxubee County Sheriff’s Department did not respond to questions about McNeese’s allegations.

Staff from Community Counseling, the community mental health center where McNeese had regular appointments, could have provided him with medication, but McNeese said no one from the center came to visit him in jail. A therapist at Community Counseling said staff go to the jail only when they’re called, usually when there’s a problem jail staff can’t handle. Rayfield Evins Jr., the organization’s executive director, said when he recently worked in Noxubee, deputies brought people from the jail to his facility for medication and treatment.

"If you have a problem in the hospital they’ll come with a shot or something, but they don’t take your clothes or take your mattress or lock your door on you or nothing like that." — Willie B. McNeese, jailed multiple times following a diagnosis for bipolar disorder

Mental health advocates in Mississippi and other people who have been jailed during the commitment process said the limited mental health treatment McNeese received is common.

Mental health care varies widely from jail to jail, and no state agency sets requirements for what care must be provided. Jails can refuse to distribute medications that are controlled substances, which includes anti-anxiety medications like Xanax. The state Department of Mental Health says counties should work with community mental health centers to provide treatment to people waiting in jail as they go through the commitment process.

But those facilities generally don't have the resources to provide services in jails, said Greta Martin, litigation director for Disability Rights Mississippi.

Martin’s organization, one of those charged by Congress with advocating for people with disabilities in each state, investigates county jails when it receives complaints. “We are not seeing any indication that these individuals are getting any mental health treatment while they are being held in these county facilities,” she said.

Willie McNeese was incarcerated at the old jail in Noxubee County multiple times during civil commitment processes, including his first commitment in 2008. (Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today)

McNeese said those jail stays added physical discomfort and pain to the delusions that got him committed in the first place. “Then you get to the mental hospital — they have to straighten you all the way back over again,” he said.

Since being released from the state hospital last year, McNeese said, he has been doing well. He is now living in Cincinnati with his wife.

Scott Willoughby, the program director at South Mississippi State Hospital in Purvis, said it can be hard to earn patients’ trust when they arrive at the psychiatric hospital from jail.

At his facility, patients sleep two to a room in a hall decorated with photographs of nature scenes. Group counseling sessions are often held outside under a gazebo. In between, patients draw and paint during recreational therapy.

Willoughby has spoken with patients who had attempted suicide and were shocked to find themselves in jail as a result.

“People tend to associate jail with punishment, which is exactly the opposite of what a person needs when they’re in a mental health crisis,” he said. “Jail can be traumatic and stigmatizing.”

“I’m More Scared of Myself”

When Sons learned that he was going to be booked, he became anxious about being locked in a cell, Batts testified. So he was assigned to an area of the jail reserved for trusties — inmates who are allowed to work, sometimes outside the jail, while they serve their sentences.

On the afternoon of his first day in jail, Sons was sitting on his bed when a trusty named Donnie Richmond returned from work. Richmond said in a deposition that he asked a deputy who the new guy was.

“You better watch him,” Richmond recalled the deputy telling him. “He kind of off a little bit.”

Richmond offered Sons a cigarette and cookies and asked him why he was there. Sons took a cigarette and told Richmond the deputies had said he would hurt someone.

“He was like, ‘Man, I’m going to be honest with you,’” Richmond testified. “‘I ain’t going to hurt no one. I’m more scared of myself, of hurting myself.’”

Sons was not placed on suicide watch. The jail’s suicide prevention policy applied only to those who had attempted suicide in the jail, although attorneys for the jail officials in the lawsuit over his death said there was an unwritten policy to closely monitor people going through the commitment process.

An excerpt of the Benton County Sheriff’s Department’s suicide prevention policy at the time of Sons’ death (Obtained by Mississippi Today)

That evening, Sons told a jailer he was feeling anxious around the other men. He asked to be moved to a cell by himself.

A guard took him to a cinder block cell with no windows. There was no television and nothing to read. He was given a blanket.

A security camera in Sons’ cell was supposed to allow jail staff to watch him at all times. But jail officials said in depositions that no one noticed anything unusual the next morning.

At 11:28 a.m., Sons rose from his bunk bed, walked to the door and placed his ear near it. He went back to his bunk, fashioned a noose and tied it around his neck. He sat there for three minutes before hanging himself, according to a narrative of the video in court records.

He stopped moving just before 11:38 a.m. A trusty serving lunch peeked through a tray opening in the door 48 minutes later and saw his body.

The door of the Benton County Jail cell where Sons was held (Obtained by Mississippi Today)

Sons’ father sued Benton County, the sheriff and several of his employees over his death. The defendants denied in court filings that they were responsible, but the county’s insurance company eventually settled the case for an undisclosed sum. (All that’s publicly known is that the county paid a $25,000 policy deductible toward defense costs.)

Sheriff’s department staff said in depositions they had kept an eye on Sons, but they couldn’t watch the video feed constantly. Lawyers for the defendants said there was no evidence sheriff’s department employees knew someone could kill himself in the way Sons did.

Sheriff A. A. McMullen, who is no longer in office, acknowledged in a deposition that “any mental commitment is a suicide risk,” but he said he wasn’t sure it would have made a difference if Sons had been placed on suicide watch.

“You could write up the biggest policy in the world and you couldn’t prevent it. There’s no way. God knows, you know, it hurts us,” he said. “If they’re going to do it, they’re going to do it.”

McMullen couldn’t be reached for comment for this story.

In an interview, jail administrator Kristy O’Dell, who joined the department after Sons died, said the jail still holds two or three people going through the commitment process each month.

John S. Farese, an attorney for Benton County, told Mississippi Today and ProPublica that the county, like others, “does the best they can do with the resources they have to abide by the laws” regarding commitments. He said the sheriff and the county will try to adapt to any changes in the law “while still being mindful of our limited personnel and financial resources.” He declined to comment on the specifics of the Sons case, which he didn’t work on.

Murray, Sons’ mother, was at a grocery store around noon the day her son died. As she picked out a watermelon, she thought about him, a fitness buff who loved fruits and vegetables. A strange thought crossed her mind: “Jimmy’s never going to eat watermelon again.”

When she got home, she got the call that he was gone.

John Sons, Jimmy’s half-brother, wrote in a text to Mississippi Today and ProPublica that the family is left with “complete and total guilt for putting him in the prison and always the wonder if we would not have done that move, if he would be with us today.”

But Richmond, the trusty who briefly shared a cell with Sons, testified that it was jail staff who “messed up.”

“He hung himself,” Richmond said. “I say this. God forgive me if I’m wrong. We couldn’t have saved that man from killing himself, but we could have saved that man from hanging himself in that jail.”

How We Reported This Story

No one in Mississippi has ever comprehensively tracked the number of people jailed at any point during the civil commitment process, according to interviews with dozens of state and county officials.

Last year, the state Department of Mental Health released, for the first time, a tally of people who were admitted to a state hospital directly from jail following civil commitment proceedings. The department tracked 734 placements in fiscal year 2022. (Under a law that takes effect this year, every county must regularly report to the department data regarding how often people are held in jail both before and after their commitment hearings.)

But that figure understates the scope of commitments. It doesn’t include people who were sent places other than a state hospital for treatment or who were released without being treated, and it counts only the time people spent in jail after their hearings. People can be jailed for 12 days before a commitment hearing, or longer if a county doesn’t follow the law.

County jail dockets can provide a more comprehensive picture, so Mississippi Today and ProPublica requested them from 80 of Mississippi’s 82 counties. Seventeen counties provided dockets that clearly marked bookings related to civil commitments — with notes including “writ to take custody,” “mental writ” and “lunacy.” In two more counties, we reviewed dockets in person.

Many counties didn’t respond, said their records were available only on paper or declined to provide records. Some cited a 2007 opinion by the state attorney general that sheriffs may choose not to enter the names of people detained during civil commitment proceedings onto their jail dockets.

After cleaning and standardizing the data from the dockets, we counted the number of jail stays involving civil commitments in which the person was not booked for a criminal charge on the same day. (We ended up excluding about 750 civil commitments for that reason.) If the dockets provided booking and release dates, we calculated the duration of jail stays.

Our count of commitments includes those for both mental illness and substance abuse. None of the jail dockets specified which commitment process people were going through, although some county officials said they don’t jail people committed for substance abuse and haven’t for years.

State laws regarding commitment for mental illness and substance abuse are different, but in many counties they were handled similarly until late 2021. That’s when the Mississippi attorney general’s office said state law didn’t allow people going through the drug and alcohol commitment process to be jailed.

To identify deaths of individuals held in jail during the civil commitment process, we reviewed news articles and federal court records. We also reviewed nearly 90 investigations of jail deaths from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. Most of the deaths had not previously been publicly reported.

For our survey of practices in other states, we contacted agencies overseeing mental health and disability advocacy organizations in every state and Washington, D.C. We received responses from one or the other in every location, and we received responses from both in 33. We also searched for news reports of similar cases in other states.

Do you have a story to share about someone who went through the civil commitment process in Mississippi? Contact Isabelle Taft at itaft@mississippitoday.org or call her at 601-691-4756.

by Kavitha Surana

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Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, doctors have warned that limiting abortion care will make pregnancy more dangerous in a country that already has the highest maternal mortality rate among industrialized nations.

The case of Mylissa Farmer, a Missouri woman, is one example. Last August, her water broke less than 18 weeks into her pregnancy, when her fetus was not viable. She was at risk for developing a life-threatening infection if she continued the pregnancy. Yet during three separate visits to emergency rooms, she was denied abortion care because her fetus still had a heartbeat. Doctors specifically cited the state’s new abortion law in her medical records and said they could not intervene until her condition worsened. She eventually traveled to Illinois for care.

Even for people who don’t develop sudden life-threatening complications, doctors note that carrying a pregnancy to term is inherently risky because rapid physical and hormonal changes can exacerbate chronic health conditions and trigger new complications. If more people are forced to continue unwanted pregnancies, there are bound to be more pregnancy-related deaths: A study by the University of Colorado estimates a 24% increase in maternal deaths if the United States bans abortion federally. They predicted the increase would be even higher for Black patients, at 39%. Currently, 14 states have total abortion bans.

Additionally, when abortion is illegal, it makes the procedure more dangerous for those who still try to terminate their pregnancies. The World Health Organization found that unsafe or illegal abortions account for up to 10% of maternal deaths worldwide.

As the United States enters its second post-Roe year, advocates say it’s important to gather data on the impact abortion bans are having on the health of pregnant people to help both policy makers and voters understand the life-or-death consequences of the restrictions. Without such accounting, they say, the public may remain ignorant of the toll. Maternal mortality rates would be a crucial gauge of impact.

Despite the stakes, experts say, at least in the short term, it may be difficult or impossible to track the number of lives lost due to limits on abortion access.

ProPublica spoke to four members of state maternal mortality review committees. Here are some of the challenges they see to drawing any clear conclusions from maternal mortality data in the near future.

The Data Can Be Inconsistent

Each state has its own system for compiling the data maternal mortality researchers work with. The quality of the data varies vastly by state. It can involve comparing birth and fetal death records, scanning through obituaries, and sometimes begging coroner’s offices to send death records. Many states are still working toward a complete system.

“It really depends on the rigor of the contributing entities,” said Dr. Michelle Owens, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist and the clinical chair for Mississippi’s maternal mortality review committee. “We rely so heavily upon the information we glean from these sources, and if that information is not as reliable … it will definitely have a negative impact on our work and understanding of what the contributing things may have been and what the gaps are.”

All the maternal mortality experts that ProPublica spoke with noted issues with the “pregnancy check box” used in death certificates to denote whether a patient was pregnant at the time of death or within the previous year. In Florida, Dr. Karen Harris, an OB-GYN and a member of Florida’s maternal mortality review committee, has observed the check box “overselect some patients who were never pregnant, or not pregnant in the last year, and it underselects patients who were pregnant.”

Sometimes the check box is wrong because of clerical errors, the researchers said. Other times, it’s simply not filled out because no autopsy was performed to verify whether the person was pregnant. That information could be important in measuring deaths that happen early in pregnancy — including murders. Homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant or recently pregnant Americans, and researchers also would like to measure how abortion bans, which could force people in abusive relationships to carry unwanted pregnancies, affect those numbers.

Studying pregnancy-associated deaths within a year of pregnancy helps researchers account for any additional factors like substance abuse, unstable housing, suicide or mental health problems. These could be important in identifying deaths connected to continuing an undesired pregnancy.

The data can also be slow — some states, like Florida, provide data to the committee for the past year right away. But others are years behind. Currently, many states have only released data through 2019.

Records May Not Address Abortion Access

One of the thorniest questions facing maternal mortality experts: How can they determine if abortion access was a factor?

Dr. Lynlee Wolfe, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee Medical Center and a member of the state’s maternal mortality review committee, wishes maternal mortality review reports could include a check box for the question, “Did inability to get an abortion play a role?”

“But you often can’t dig that out of notes,” she said. “I think what we’re asking is kind of an untrackable number.”

The experts said they could look into causes of death that may be linked to a patient’s inability to get an abortion when they’re having an emergency pregnancy complication: Sepsis, hemorrhage and heart issues, for example, are all worth studying to see if medical records might indicate if doctors delayed ending the pregnancy because the fetus still had a heartbeat.

But beyond that, when the pregnancy was unwanted or exacerbated broader health concerns, it could prove very difficult to determine if abortion access was a factor in the patient’s decision-making.

For example, if a patient had a heart condition that carried a 50% chance of death in pregnancy, researchers would like to see whether the patient was counseled about the risk and offered a termination.

But in a state that had criminalized abortion, “no one’s going to write that down,” said Harris, the Florida doctor. “So we won’t be able to know in the in-depth review if this was a patient choice — or if it was something that was forced upon her.”

Researchers might be able to learn more about the patient’s state of mind and whether the pregnancy was desired or not from interviews with family members and social service records, Owens, the Mississippi doctor, said. But there’s no guarantee they would have discussed their feelings about the pregnancy with family members either.

“With stigma and controversy surrounding conversations and considerations around abortions, people are hesitant to share those thoughts and feelings outside a very small circle of trust,” she said.

Risk of Political Interference

Maternal mortality review committees are funded by their states, and some are overseen by state legislatures.

The maternal mortality review members ProPublica spoke with said they did not anticipate interference with their report findings, even if they found examples where abortion access was a factor in a maternal death.

But some maternal care advocates worry such committees are vulnerable to political interference and manipulation. Last year, the Texas Department of State Health Services announced it was delaying its 2019 maternal mortality review report, originally scheduled for September 2022, until mid 2023.

Some saw the delay as a way to keep negative numbers out of the public eye during election season and postpone their release until after the 2023 legislative session had ended. A member of the review committee said she believed there was no legitimate need for the delay and that it was “dishonorably burying these women.” ProPublica reached out to the committee and the Texas health agency to ask about these concerns, but did not receive any response.

After pushback, the report was partially released in December 2022. It found persistent disparities affecting Black mothers and showed that the childbirth complication rate had risen 28% since 2018.

In July, Idaho disbanded its maternal mortality review committee, making it the only state without one. Lawmakers cited the costs of operating the committee — though members said operating costs were about $15,000 a year and covered by a federal grant. The decision came after a lobbying group argued that the committee was a “vehicle to promote more government intervention in health care” and opposed its recommendation to extend Medicaid coverage to mothers for 12 months postpartum.

The Sample Size Is Small

Maternal mortality rates in the U.S. are higher than in other wealthy countries and have been rising in recent years, so many resources are devoted to studying root causes of the trend and possible strategies for reversing it. But the actual number of deaths is statistically small: In 2021, the U.S. saw an estimated 32.9 deaths per 100,000 births, or 1,205 total pregnancy-related deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This makes it difficult to draw conclusions that are rigorous by epidemiological standards, said Dr. Elliot Main, a Stanford professor and the former medical director for the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative.

While researchers may learn of individual cases where it’s clear that abortion access was an issue in the patient’s outcome, it could take years to have a data set large enough to reveal a clear picture.

Main also pointed out that many other factors influence maternal mortality rates, which muddles the picture. “Maternal deaths are so rare and often complicated in their underlying causes,” he said. “If you see a trend over time, we have to break it down to see what’s really causing that.”

Before the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization struck down federal protections for abortion rights, U.S. maternal mortality rates were already rising. Influences include COVID-19, the opioid crisis and people having children at older ages, when they are at higher risk for complications. The U.S. also has long-standing racial and socioeconomic health care disparities affecting quality prenatal care — more than half of Georgia’s counties have no OB-GYN, for example. That can mean more patients go into pregnancy with undiagnosed health conditions and may be at higher risk for life-threatening complications.

Main and other researchers suggested that studying data on childbirth complications may provide more avenues for understanding the effects of abortion bans, because those are more common and would provide a larger data set to study.

Bans Don’t Prevent All Abortions

One reason the impact of Dobbs on maternal mortality rates could remain limited even in states that have banned abortion is that some people who want to terminate their pregnancy are still able to do so, either by traveling or by ordering abortion medication in the mail.

It’s impossible to know the full picture of how many are able to jump through the hoops and obtain abortions even when there are no legal options nearby. But WeCount, a research project led by the Society of Family Planning that has been collecting data from abortion providers, estimates that in the six months following Dobbs, about 35,000 people in abortion-ban states were able to get abortions in other states — just over half of the people estimated to have sought abortions in those states, based on numbers from the same time period the previous year. It’s unclear what happened to the other half. Some may have continued their pregnancies, others may have ordered abortion pills in the mail, which could be sent by organizations based in Europe and Mexico and not be recorded in any database.

Still, having to travel out of state to a limited number of abortion providers meant more patients were forced to wait until their second trimester, researchers said, when an abortion can be more complicated.

And while abortion pills are considered an exceedingly safe method of terminating a pregnancy through the first 10 weeks, according to the Food and Drug Administration and leading medical organizations, patients should still have the option to take them with the instruction and care of a medical provider, advocates say.

by James Bandler

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

Reflecting rising concerns that Big Tech’s infatuation with artificial intelligence threatens privacy and economic competition, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has begun investigating Google’s efforts to swoop up medical information derived from biopsy specimens of millions of military service members.

Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat and the chair of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, wrote on Tuesday to Google and the Department of Defense, seeking information and records related to the company’s pursuit of a vast trove of medical data overseen by the military’s Joint Pathology Center. The archive represents a largely untapped gold mine for AI and health care companies, because computers can use the data to develop algorithms that detect patterns, like telltale signs of tumors, faster and often better than humans can.

In her letters, Warren accused Google of “aggressive attempts” to gain service members’ medical information and Defense Department officials of “favoritism” toward the tech giant. “I am alarmed by reports that Google tried to privately broker a deal to secure exclusive access to JPC data,” Warren wrote to Sundar Pichai, CEO of both Google and its parent company, Alphabet.

Warren was referring to a ProPublica report published last December, which revealed that at least a dozen Defense Department staff members pushed back against Google’s campaign for the medical data. ProPublica found that Google began in late 2015 to gather medical information at military installations and hospitals around the country, which it planned to use to build AI tools. Such software, the company hoped, would give it an edge in the race to develop algorithms that could help pathologists diagnose illnesses more quickly and accurately, predict prognoses and, eventually, Google scientists hoped, find new treatments for diseases, including cancers.

Google’s allies in the Defense Department and on the staff of the House Armed Services Committee tried to help the company, ProPublica reported. In exchange for exclusive access to the archive, the company offered to digitize the collection of pathology slides that are stored at a sprawling warehouse in Silver Spring, Maryland. But staff at the JPC and elsewhere expressed dismay about risks to the privacy of service members’ tissue specimens and about the use of a sensitive government resource by a corporation to develop unproven AI tools. In 2021, Google was not selected for a pilot project to begin digitizing the collection.

“The public deserves a full accounting of DoD’s secretive interactions with Google regarding private health data contained at the JPC and complete transparency surrounding DoD’s blatant favoritism towards Google,” Warren wrote to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III. She has asked both Google and the Defense Department to respond by Aug. 8.

A Warren spokesperson characterized the letters as a “prelude to inform a potential Senate investigation and potential future legislation.” The senator said in a statement on Tuesday that the JPC “has millions of tissue samples from servicemembers and veterans that are meant to support the public good — but Google came dangerously close to landing an exclusive monopoly on these samples and the right to charge DoD for access to this data.”

A Google spokesperson declined to comment but referred ProPublica to statements and a blog post that the company published in response to the December story. “We had hoped to enable the JPC to digitize its data and, with its permission, develop computer models that would enable researchers and clinicians to improve diagnosis for cancers and other illnesses,” the company said then. “Despite efforts from Google and many at the Department of Defense, our work with JPC unfortunately never got off the ground, and the physical repository of pathology slides continues to deteriorate.”

A Defense Department spokesperson declined to comment, saying the agency doesn’t discuss communications with members of Congress. The JPC has said that its highest priority is to ensure that any medical information shared with outside parties is “used ethically and in a manner that protects patient privacy and military security.”

Since the Civil War, the U.S. military has been collecting and studying human tissue of armed service members in an effort to reduce the toll of injuries, diseases and fatalities suffered in wartime and peace. The collection has spurred numerous advances in medicine and science, including the first genetic sequencing of the 1918 flu virus. Today, the repository holds more than 31 million matchbook-sized blocks of human tissue and 55 million pathology slides.

Pathology is ripe for the AI revolution. A single pathology slide, which can be scanned and digitized, holds vast amounts of visual information. In 2021, Google told the military that the JPC collection of veterans’ skin samples, tumor biopsies and slices of organs holds the “raw materials” for the most significant biotechnology breakthroughs of this decade — “on par with the Human Genome Project in its potential for strategic, clinical, and economic impact.”

But lawmakers, regulators and ethicists have struggled to keep pace with developments in AI. Some models can process information now at a scale that’s beyond human comprehension.

The corporate use of the JPC collection is particularly delicate. Most of the specimens come from military service members who did not consent to the use of their tissue for research. In addition, there are national security ramifications. China has already collected huge health care data sets from the U.S., both legally and illegally, as it seeks to develop its own AI capabilities, according to the National Counterintelligence and Security Center.

Warren has emerged as one of Google and Big Tech’s most vocal critics on Capitol Hill. In 2019, she assailed the company’s efforts to amass millions of patient records in a partnership with the Catholic health care system Ascension, dubbed “Project Nightingale.”

Doris Burke contributed research.

by Jeff Ernsthausen

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Once a week, a little past noon on Wednesdays, a line of cars forms outside the wrought-iron gates of the Carolands mansion, 20 miles south of downtown San Francisco. From the entrance, you can see the southeast facade of the 98-room Beaux Arts chateau, which was built a century ago by an heiress to the Pullman railroad-car fortune. Not visible from that vantage point is the stately reflecting pool, or the gardens, whose original designer took inspiration from Versailles.

I was sitting just outside this splendor, idling in my rented Toyota Corolla, on a clear day last winter. Like the other people in the line of cars, I was about to enjoy a rare treat. Carolands is an architectural landmark, but it’s open only two hours a week. Would-be visitors apply a month in advance, hoping to win a lottery for tickets. Like most lotteries, this one has long odds. I had applied unsuccessfully for the three tours scheduled for February. Finally, I resorted to my journalist’s privilege: I emailed and called the director of the foundation that owns the estate, explaining that I was a reporter planning to be in the area for a few days. Could she help? Eventually, she called back and offered me a place on a tour.

It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult. When billionaire Charles Johnson sought a tax break in 2013 for donating his mansion to his private foundation, the organization assured the Internal Revenue Service and state officials that the public would be welcome. “The Foundation will fulfill its charitable and educational purpose by opening the Carolands Estate to the public,” it stated in its application for tax-exempt status, which included a pamphlet for a self-guided tour. The foundation later told a California tax regulator that the estate was open to the public every weekday from 9-5.

The Carolands Estate (San Francisco Chronicle/AP Images)

There was a lot of money at stake. Johnson, a Republican megadonor and part owner of the San Francisco Giants, had gotten an appraisal valuing the property at $130 million, a price higher than any publicly reported home sale in the U.S. up to that time, and five times the $26 million he and his wife, Ann, had reportedly paid 14 years earlier to buy and restore what then was a dilapidated property.

The plan worked. The IRS granted the foundation tax-exempt status. That allowed the Johnsons to collect more than $38 million in tax savings from the estate over five years, confidential tax records show.

But the Johnsons never opened Carolands to the public for 40 hours a week. Instead, the foundation bestows tickets on a few dozen lottery winners, who receive two-hour tours, led by docents, most Wednesdays at 1 p.m. Self-guided tours, like the ones described in the attachments to Johnson’s IRS application, are not offered. “It sounds like a vanity project with little to no public benefit,” said Roger Colinvaux, a professor of law at The Catholic University of America who specializes in the tax law of nonprofit organizations. (Experts also questioned Carolands’ $130 million valuation — which turbocharged the Johnsons’ deduction — while acknowledging that as long as it’s based on a qualified appraisal, which it was, the IRS is unlikely to challenge the size of the deduction.)

Charles Johnson and his wife, Ann, collected more than $38 million in tax deductions as a result of donating their estate. (Mike Coppola/Getty Images for the New York Philharmonic)

For the ultrawealthy, donating valuables like artwork, real estate and stocks to their own charitable foundation is an alluring way to cut their tax bills. In exchange for generous tax breaks, they are supposed to use the assets to serve the public: Art might be put on display where people can see it, or stock sold to fund programs to fight child poverty. Across the U.S., such foundations hold over $1 trillion in assets.

But a ProPublica investigation reveals that some foundation donors have obtained millions of dollars in tax deductions without holding up their end of the bargain, and sometimes they personally benefit from donations that are supposed to be a boon to the public. A tech billionaire used his charitable foundation to buy his girlfriend’s house, then stayed there with her while he was going through a divorce. A real estate mogul keeps his nonprofit art museum in his guesthouse and told ProPublica that he hadn’t shown it to a member of the public since before the pandemic. And a venture capitalist couple’s foundation bought the multimillion dollar house next to their own without ever opening the property to the public.

Unlike public charities, private foundations are typically funded by a single donor or family, who retain a high degree of control long after receiving a tax break for ostensibly giving their possessions away. “This is the classic problem with private foundations: Substantial contributors can see it as their thing,” said Philip Hackney, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and former IRS attorney. “There’s generally not a coalition who cares, other than the family, so there’s nothing to ensure that the assets are used for a particular purpose,” he added.

In theory, it’s illegal to fail to provide a public benefit or to make personal use of foundation assets. But the rules defining what’s in the public interest are vague, according to tax experts; for example, Congress has never defined how many hours a museum would need to be open to be considered accessible to the public. And with the IRS depleted by a decade of budget cuts, enforcement has been lax. The agency examines an average of 225 returns among the 100,000 filed by private foundations each year, according to agency statistics.

Peter Kanter, an attorney representing the Carolands Foundation, told ProPublica that “we believe pretty strongly that the foundation is serving its purpose of preserving and showcasing this historic and unique property to the public.” He said that tours are limited because the foundation has only a few volunteer docents who are knowledgeable about the home, and because significantly higher traffic might compromise the foundation’s ability to preserve its unique architecture. Kanter also emphasized the public value of free charitable events that the foundation occasionally hosts for other nonprofits at the estate.

At the Carolands, guides didn’t emphasize benefits to the public — just the opposite. A docent told my tour group that the foundation prefers lotteries to holding regular hours and charging admission. This, he explained, preserves the home for those who “really want to see it.” Indeed, exclusivity and rarefied taste were a theme of the tour, which included tales of the exacting specifications of Harriett Carolan, the Pullman heiress, a Francophile who imported an entire salon that had been built in France on the eve of the revolution. (For their parts, when Ann and Charles Johnson unveiled the restored chateau at a costume party, they dressed as Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.)

Before the tour, one of the docents asked how many of us had ever visited a nearby historical mansion, called the Filoli estate, built in the same era as the Carolands. Many hands shot up among the tour group. When he asked if any of us had visited the Carolands before, no one raised their hand.

Curious, I popped by Filoli the following afternoon. It is run by a public charity and is open from 10 to 5 every day. In contrast to the Carolands, I was able to simply show up, pay admission and enter. Inside, I encountered dozens of employees who provided helpful information and watched over the manor and its gardens while more than a hundred visitors wandered about. Photography, which had been prohibited inside the Carolands, was permitted at Filoli.

Congress and the IRS have never clearly defined what qualifies as a “public benefit.” By contrast, identifying a private benefit is much simpler. Decades ago Congress prohibited what it called self-dealing by insiders. The laws are designed to keep them from using or profiting from foundation assets. Among other things, the rules bar leases between a donor and their foundation. Violations can incur a penalty known as an excise tax.

At least one billionaire appears to have run afoul of those real estate rules, according to tax experts. Since 2009, Ken Xie, CEO of a cybersecurity company called Fortinet, has gotten more than $30 million in income tax deductions for contributing shares of his business to a private foundation that he started to support various charitable causes.

In 2017, Xie’s foundation (whose sole officers are Xie and his brother) spent $3 million to purchase a home in Cupertino, California, from his new girlfriend while he was going through an acrimonious divorce. After the foundation purchased the home, Xie allowed his girlfriend to continue living there; he also stayed there for a time. These details emerged in a lawsuit filed by the now-ex-girlfriend, who was permitted to file the suit anonymously, in county court. (The suit is ongoing.) According to leases filed in the case, the foundation charged her rent, but Xie agreed to pay half of it.

Xie himself appears to have been aware that he risked violating the rules. In a December 2019 text message to his girlfriend that was included in the court case, Xie wrote, “I covered some house part but also try not creat issue related to foundation and tax, believe will make some progress next few months by transfer house out of foundation, may need 2 step by first transfer to other entity.” The next month, his foundation transferred the property to an LLC.

Ken Xie, CEO of cybersecurity company Fortinet, has earned more than $30 million worth of tax deductions by donating shares to a private foundation. (K.Y. Cheng/South China Morning Post/Getty Images)

In an email to ProPublica, Gordon Finwall, a lawyer for Xie, said the foundation is “fully committed to complying with all applicable rules and regulations.” He acknowledged that Xie “spent some time at the Cupertino property in 2017 and 2018,” but asserted that the sublease was never in effect and Xie never paid his ex-girlfriend any rent.

Two days after I emailed Finwall in April inquiring about the Xie Foundation’s purchase of the house, the foundation filed records with the California attorney general’s office, stating that it had “discovered a self-dealing event” and including a federal tax return with the word “amended” handwritten at the top. In his email to ProPublica, Finwall said that, after amending its returns, the foundation “paid some excise taxes related to Mr. Xie’s stay at the property.” Finwall also said that Xie had planned to file the amended returns months earlier but didn’t do so because his accountant mailed the IRS forms to Xie at an outdated address.

Despite the blurriness of many rules relating to foundations, the issue of public access has given rise to controversy in the past. After a New York Times article in 2015 exposed the limited hours of many private museums, the Senate Finance Committee, under then-chairman Orrin Hatch, launched an investigation. Hatch expressed concerns about museums that require advance reservations and maintain limited public hours. He questioned instances where “founding donors continue to play an active role in management and operations of the museum” and “museum buildings are adjacent to the donor’s private residence.”

But no meaningful rule changes followed the investigation. And absent new laws, cracking down on abusive foundations would require the IRS to put scarce resources into an area that many experts said simply isn’t a priority, particularly after the agency’s previous attempt to police abuse by political nonprofits a decade ago caused a conservative firestorm.

The agency doesn’t appear likely to increase oversight any time soon. A recently published budget blueprint outlining IRS priorities for the $80 billion in new funding it received from the Inflation Reduction Act made no mention of increasing audits of private foundations.

“The IRS protects the public interest by applying the tax law with integrity and fairness to all,” the agency wrote in a statement to ProPublica. The statement cited a compliance program that “focuses on high-risk issues” among tax-exempt organizations, and it asserted that the program “deploys the right resources to address noncompliance issues.” The IRS also pointed to a recent tax court case that it won against a foundation that, among other things, kept a collection of African artifacts in a basement with no public access. And an agency spokesperson highlighted a rule stating that foundations can lose their exempt status if they operate in a manner “materially different” than what they claimed they would do in their initial application.

Despite the attention spurred by the Hatch investigation, some foundations seem to have continued undeterred. Consider the Lijin Gouhua Foundation. Collecting Chinese paintings and sharing them with the public was the stated mission of the organization, which was launched by Bay Area venture capitalists J. Sanford “Sandy” Miller and his then-wife, Vinie Zhang Miller, in 2006. Since then, the couple generated $5.6 million worth of income tax write-offs largely from donating shares of tech companies like Twitter and Snapchat to their private foundation.

When the couple cashed in the foundation’s stock to buy a potential museum space for the art in 2017, they opted against a high-traffic location where lots of people could easily access it. Instead, they chose the $3.1 million house adjacent to their own estate in Woodside, an exclusive enclave outside of San Francisco.

“A private museum is usually by appointment only,” Vinie Miller said when asked about the out-of-the-way location. “We wouldn’t hold long showing hours. It’s usually people we have a relationship with.” She said that the main way for the public to access the collection was through loans of artwork the foundation has made to universities, other museums and galleries. (In an email, Sandy Miller wrote: “Please be advised that I am not married to Vinie and that I have no involvement with the Lijin Gouhua Foundation.” Public records show Vinie filed for divorce from him in 2019; Sandy ceased to be listed as president of the foundation on IRS filings that year as well.)

The museum that was purchased with the foundation’s tax-exempt funds never actually opened. Vinie Miller said the plan was “hypothetical” and that the foundation held the home as an investment instead. That’s at odds with the foundation’s publicly available tax returns, which have listed the property as being used for charitable purposes. (Miller did not respond to a follow-up question asking about the discrepancy between her statements and the foundation’s tax returns.) As Colinvaux, the specialist in nonprofits, put it, “If it’s an investment asset, then it’s not a charitable use asset, and they shouldn’t be counting it as such” on their IRS filings.

In one similar instance involving another foundation, the IRS expressed hesitation about the organization’s plans, then backed off. In 2006, San Diego real estate magnate Matthew Strauss sought a $4 million write-off for the guesthouse that held part of his contemporary art collection. An IRS employee wrote that it appeared Strauss and his wife “are using the assets of the Foundation (the guest house gallery) as a facility for housing and displaying a large portion of their personal art collection for their enjoyment and benefit as well as the enjoyment and benefit of invited guests.” The employee wanted to know when actual art would be donated, what kind of access the public would have to the gallery, and how the couple planned to inform people that they could visit, among other things.

The couple’s lawyer assured the IRS representative that she’d gotten the wrong impression. The Strausses would host no personal events there and the public would have access to view the collection “upon request.” The couple anticipated donating “substantially all” of their $50 million collection to the foundation. They couldn’t say when, but the couple planned to make donations “in a fashion that minimizes income taxes.”

As 2006 turned into 2007 with no sign that the IRS would bless its museum tax deduction, the couple sought political help. In January, the head of the IRS’ tax-exempt division received a letter from the office of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D.-Calif.), inquiring about the delay in approving the application from the couple, who’d given her more than $15,000 over the past few election cycles. That June, their application was approved. (“The senator was not advocating in support of the constituent’s application, but instead requested clarification on the case after nine months of an inability to resolve the case,” a spokesperson for Feinstein said, noting that her office frequently sends such letters on behalf of constituents).

As of 2021, 15 years after the Strausses’ lawyer told the IRS they would donate $50 million in art, the foundation holds $6 million worth. The rest remained in a private trust.

To learn more about Strausses’ gallery, I tried to schedule a visit earlier this year. As with Carolands, I was able to get in, but it took some effort. The foundation’s website doesn’t list an address or hours of operation. A contact form available for visitors to inquire about tours wasn’t working when I tried it repeatedly. I ultimately had to pester employees of Strauss’ real estate company for a couple of weeks before someone responded and asked me to submit a biography for their boss to review. (My bio described me as a reporter with ProPublica, with the first coverage area listed as “tax policy.”)

Soon after I sent in my biography, I received a call from Matthew Strauss himself. After a brief conversation, he declared me “worthy” of the first tour he said he’d given in three years and sent along directions to the museum.

I didn’t see any signs outside the couple’s estate, nicknamed Rancho Del Arte, that indicated a museum could be found anywhere on the premises. From the outside, their guesthouse seemed relatively unassuming, its multimillion-dollar value betrayed only by the horse stables and privacy hedges of the nearby mansions I passed on the way in. A path wide enough for a golf cart wound its way through a grove of palm trees, past oversized sculptures and a private tennis court, to the Strausses’ own sprawling abode a hundred yards or so away.

The inside was more remarkable. The Strausses remodeled the building in the early 2000s with custom fixtures to illuminate works from their collection of contemporary art. Sounds and music from dueling audiovisual works on the main floor flooded the space, while the click-clack of a never-ending ping pong game echoed up from a conceptual piece in the basement. These noisier forms shared space with paintings on canvas and metal and with textured mixed-media compositions.

Dressed in sweats and sporting a Bentley baseball cap, Strauss personally led my solo tour, meandering from one prized possession to the next. He exhibited an uncanny memory for how he obtained each piece, likening the acquisition process to the thrill of a hunt. (“Once you get the fox, it’s not as much fun.”) He spoke of one painting as “my poor man’s ‘Mona Lisa’” and another as “my victory piece.”

Matthew Strauss in front of “Sunshine and Snow,” by Kenneth Noland, at his foundation’s museum. (Jeff Ernsthausen/ProPublica)

Halfway through my visit, we stopped to take in the view from the museum’s balcony. “At this point, you can see why I had to buy this property,” he told me, explaining that he’d bought the guesthouse from his neighbor in the late 1990s to keep anyone else from moving in. “Anybody here, they would have knocked it down, and you know, really ruined our privacy.”

As the tour continued from room to room, Strauss leaned into his persona as a friendly professor. He asked probing questions about each modern piece before delving into centuries of art history. “I really show [people] how to look at art, I don’t just tell them ‘This is So-and-So,’” he said, recalling the tours he used to give to college students.

Before the pandemic, the foundation would conduct a dozen or two dozen tours each year, drawing a total of about 400 visitors to the gallery, according to the foundation’s website. But even as California’s other museums welcomed guests back in the spring of 2021, the foundation remained dormant.

Strauss acknowledges the tax benefits of having the foundation and maintained that he had made efforts to make his art available to the public. “I feel like I have an obligation to show it, but it’s got to be under favorable conditions,” he said. He’d told me he’d like to get tours going again, but only when schools and universities stop requiring masks and start treating COVID-19 “like normal.”

Strauss said he gets requests from individuals to see the collection “all the time.” But, he added, “to show one or two, it’s not worthy. It’ll wear me out.” Letting people come on their own was out of the question (they might damage the art), as was having regular public hours (it’s a zoning issue, he said, and the neighbors would never go for it). Strauss declined to respond to a list of follow-up questions that I sent after the tour.

A couple months from turning 90, Strauss was more focused on the big picture. Sooner or later, he said, he plans to give away most of the collection, which he estimates to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Most of his personal collection will go to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, while the foundation’s assets will go to the University of California, San Diego under a deal that is in the process of being finalized.

As we made our way through the gallery, Strauss paused before a reproduction of a Life magazine cover featuring the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. Did anything catch my eye about it, he asked.

I stared for a moment.

“Why don’t you knock on it,” he suggested. “Maybe that’ll help you.”

Strauss sensed my hesitation to touch the art — he wanted me to see it was made of metal — and tried to put me at ease.

“You’re not supposed to,” he chuckled. “But this is my museum!”

For this story, ProPublica reviewed a nationwide database of parcels provided by the real estate data analytics firm Regrid to find homes owned by private foundations.

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by Robin Urevich, Capital & Main, with additional reporting by Gabriel Sandoval, ProPublica, photography by Barbara Davidson for ProPublica

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On her first day in office last December, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency over housing and homelessness, promising to provide shelter for people living on the streets and make it easier for developers to build affordable housing.

At the time, I was a few weeks into my fellowship with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. I had previously worked on a two-year series of stories on housing for Capital & Main and found that while the city struggled to create affordable housing, some low-income residents were losing homes they’d lived in for years, especially in areas where property values were rising.

The Bass administration clearly aimed to create more affordable housing. But I wondered whether the city was effectively using its enforcement mechanisms to preserve the dwindling supply of low-cost housing that already existed.

With Gabriel Sandoval, a research reporter at ProPublica, I found that in 2008, the LA City Council had passed a law aimed at reserving more than 300 residential hotels as low-cost housing. We decided to see if it was working.

An excerpt from an LA ordinance regulating the demolition and conversion of residential hotel units

Residential hotels provide small, basic rooms, sometimes with shared bathrooms. They often house low-income workers and elderly and disabled people who can’t afford other apartments. City officials determined the hotels were residential by using the state’s legal definition: buildings of six or more units that served as permanent housing for their residents.

Gabriel and I searched hotel webpages and online travel sites and found that some places, like the H Hotel in Koreatown, which are supposed to remain available to local residents, had instead morphed into tourist accommodations.

Once a Residence, Now a Tourist Hotel The H Hotel’s website has a gallery of interior and exterior photos. The building, formerly known as the East West Hotel, in April 2011. It was designated as a residential hotel in 2008 and again in 2011. (Via Google Maps)

El Patio Inn in Van Nuys bills itself as “an inexpensive hotel near Universal Studios Hollywood.”

“Experience the effervescent spirit of Los Angeles with a stay at El Patio Inn, your gateway to the city’s most notable attractions,” the hotel’s website says. “Whether you’re looking to be mesmerized by the magic of Universal Studios Hollywood, enchanted by the art treasures of The Getty Center, or drawn into the allure of Hollywood’s star-studded Walk of Fame, El Patio Inn provides a convenient base for your LA adventures.”

City officials had designated El Patio as residential in 2008. The owner appealed, and in 2013, a Housing Department hearing officer affirmed its residential status, according to the agency’s records. El Patio’s general manager didn’t return phone calls seeking comment.

Eventually we identified 21 residential hotels with more than 800 rooms in total advertising to tourists, in apparent violation of city law.

Promoting Local Attractions El Patio Inn was designated as a residential hotel in 2008, and that decision was affirmed in 2013. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

With their own websites, ads on booking sites and Yelp and Google reviews, these hotels didn’t hide their efforts to draw business and leisure travelers. For example, the Hometel Suites website describes the hotel as “modern,” “boutique” and “the perfect central base to explore all the great restaurants, shops and tourist attractions that Los Angeles has to offer.”

Points of Interest Hometel Suites, designated a residential hotel, advertises rooms to tourists. (Screenshots by ProPublica)

Visitors can book rooms for up to $235 per night and even a “party hall” for $450.

Hometel Suites general manager Becky Hong had previously said the hotel has no plan to offer residential rentals but didn’t respond to a question about whether its tourist accommodations violate the law.

Travelers on a budget can find a “family room” for $175 per night at the Lincoln Park Motel, whose website advertises the property’s proximity to “Downtown Los Angeles, Dodgers Stadium and many other attractions.”

A Budget Honeymoon Suite The Lincoln Park Motel offers rooms near Los Angeles attractions as well as a honeymoon suite with a hot tub. (Screenshots by ProPublica)

Lincoln Park owner Jeffrey Xiao didn’t return calls and declined to answer questions about his property’s short-term rental ads. “No, thank you for reaching out to me,” Xiao texted.

We wondered, if we were able to find what seemed like violations so easily, why city leaders weren’t doing more to enforce the ordinance.

We asked officials if any of the 21 hotels were exempt from the law or had received city clearance to convert to tourist use. (The law allows owners to apply for exemptions from the residential hotel law if they can prove they have not historically operated as long-term housing. It also allows hotel owners to convert their properties to other uses if they either replace the affordable housing or pay into a city housing fund.)

While we waited for answers, we visited some of the hotels to see for ourselves how they were being used.

A map outside Hometel Suites illustrates attractions in California. Outside the American Hotel this summer (Capital & Main)

Some hotels had undergone seemingly obvious transformations. The H Hotel, formerly known as the East West Hotel, replaced its old sign on the building’s brick exterior with a big neon H. The property now includes a bar and a cafe with sidewalk seating.

The H Hotel’s operations manager, Nojan Haddadi, didn’t respond to an email requesting comment. He previously said the hotel offers only short-term rentals and has asked the city to remove its residential designation. The hotel’s owner previously declined to answer questions, citing advice from his attorney.

At other hotels, we found tourists outside.

El Patio Inn advertises its proximity to Universal Studios Hollywood.

These guests who were in town for a Dodgers baseball game were staying at the Knights Inn.

The Knights Inn is within walking distance of Dodger Stadium.

Knights Inn owner Charles Wang said the inn has always operated as a hotel and blamed the previous owner for failing to respond to the city when it put the building on the residential hotel list. The hotel’s franchise agreement requires it to be used for short-term rentals, he said.

The Housing Department told us that low staffing made it difficult to enforce the residential hotel law and that sometimes hotels barred its inspectors from coming in without an administrative warrant. Inspectors didn’t obtain warrants to enter the hotels, a process that would have entailed a day’s work, Housing Department code enforcement director Robert Galardi said.

After our story, the department said it would immediately investigate the 21 hotels and review its enforcement practices. Department spokesperson Sharon Sandow wrote in an email that the agency is “aggressively reviewing and investigating all the leads you provided and additional information as well. We are pursuing all avenues under the Code.”

Through our reporting, we obtained more than 10,000 pages of Housing Department records in response to California Public Records Act requests.

Housing Department correspondence and other documents showed all 21 hotels had been deemed residential and were subject to the city’s residential hotel law. For example, this 2013 letter from the Housing Department to an attorney representing the American Hotel confirmed its status.

This letter was sent to the American Hotel owner’s attorney, confirming that it is designated as a residential hotel. (Obtained by ProPublica)

But nearly all of the American’s rooms are currently offered to tourists, not residents.

Mark Verge, the American’s owner, said he didn’t recall the letter between his attorney and the Housing Department and has always operated the American as a hotel: “I have a hotel license. I pay bed tax.”

This Housing Department document shows the American Hotel was deemed residential in 2008.

When housing inspectors visited the American and other hotels, they appeared to miss what seemed like clear signs that the hotels offered short-term rentals.

At Hollywood’s Las Palmas Hotel, an inspector snapped this 2019 photo to show windows had been replaced without a permit. (You might recognize this hotel from the final scene of “Pretty Woman.”)

A portion of a 2019 inspection report showing the city cited the Las Palmas Hotel for replacing windows without a permit. There’s no indication the inspector asked about the sign. (Obtained by ProPublica)

The inspector cited Las Palmas for an illegal construction violation, but there is no record that he inquired about the sign that advertises “daily” and “weekly” rentals. Until recently, we found, the hotel was booking nightly rentals through its website. One of the hotel’s owners, Ashok Vanmali, declined to comment.

Last year at the H Hotel, a Housing Department inspector noted that a manager told him directly that the hotel was a “transient hotel,” using the legal term for hotels that rent rooms to travelers, and not a residential one.

But the inspector didn’t cite the H Hotel for violations of the residential hotel ordinance.

After we published our initial story, the mayor’s office asked the Housing Department to account for how some residential hotels had apparently turned into tourist lodging and how it could prevent these transformations from happening in the future. The Housing Department said that it would report back by the end of August.

Many hotels continue to advertise online.

by Alec MacGillis

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For the nation’s schoolchildren, the data on pandemic learning loss is relentlessly bleak, with education researchers and economists warning that, unless dramatic action is taken, students will suffer a lifelong drop in income as a result of lagging achievement. “This cohort of students is going to be punished throughout their lifetime,” noted Eric Hanushek, the Stanford economist who did the income study, in ProPublica’s recent examination of the struggle to make up for what students missed out on during the era of remote learning.

For the burgeoning education technology sector, however, the crisis has proven a glimmering business opportunity, as a visit to the industry’s annual convention revealed. The federal government has committed $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds to school districts since 2020, and education technology sales people have been eagerly making the case that their products are just what students and teachers need to make up lost ground.

“We’re huge in learning loss,” said Dan DiDesiderio, a Pittsburgh-area account manager for Renaissance Learning, a top seller of educational software and assessments. He was talking up his company’s offerings in the giant exposition hall of the Philadelphia Convention Center, where dozens of other vendors and thousands of educators gathered for three days late last month at the confab of the International Society for Technology in Education. For DiDesiderio, who was a school administrator before joining Renaissance, this meant explaining how schools have been relying on Renaissance products to help students get back on track. “During COVID, we did see an increase across the board,” he said.

Renaissance is far from the only player in the ed tech industry that is benefiting from the surge in federal funding, and the industry enjoyed a huge wave of private funding as the federal tap opened: The annual total of venture capital investments in ed tech companies rose from $5.4 billion to $16.8 billion between 2019 and 2021 before tailing off.

The largest chunk of the federal largess, $122 billion that was included in the American Rescue Plan signed by President Joe Biden in March 2021, requires that schools put at least 20% toward battling learning loss, and companies are making the case that schools should spend the money on their products, in addition to intensive tutoring, extended-day programs and other remedies. “The pandemic has created a once-in-a-lifetime economic opportunity for early stage companies to reach an eager customer base,” declared Anne Lee Skates, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, in a recent article. (Her firm has invested in ed tech companies.) The federal funds “are the largest one-time infusion of funds in education from the federal government with almost no strings attached.”

Five days before the convention, the National Center for Education Statistics had released the latest devastating numbers: The decline in math scores for 13-year-olds between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years was the largest on record, and for the lowest-performing students, reading scores were lower than they were the first time data was collected in 1971.

But the mood was festive in Philadelphia. The educators in attendance, whose conference costs are generally covered by their district’s professional development funds, were excited to try out the new wave of nifty gadgets made possible by the advances in artificial intelligence and virtual reality. “For a lot of us, it’s like coming to Disneyland,” said one teacher from Alabama.

One could also detect the slightly urgent giddiness of a big bash in its final stages. Schools need to spend most of their recovery funds by 2024, and many have already allocated much of that money, meaning that this golden opportunity would soon close. And summer is the main buying season, with the fiscal year starting July 1 and with educators wanting their new tools delivered in time for school to start in the fall.

Hanging over the proceedings was an undeniable irony: The extent of learning loss was closely correlated to the amount of time that students had spent doing remote learning, on a screen, rather than receiving direct instruction, and here companies were offering more screen-based instruction as the remedy. Few of the companies on hand were proposing to replace the classroom experience entirely with virtual instruction, but to the degree that their offerings recalled the year-plus of Zoom school, it could be a bit awkward. “A lot of people don’t like us, because we can do remote-school stuff,” said Michael Linacre, a salesperson for StarBoard Solution, before demonstrating one of the cool things a StarBoard whiteboard could do: He jotted 1+2= with his finger and up popped 3. “There’s a mixed feeling about that now.”

Most of the vendors were not about to let that awkwardness get in their way, though, as they cajoled teachers to listen to their pitch, often with the lure of free swag.

“I love the shirt — I’m a huge ’N Sync fan,” said a library technology specialist from a New Jersey elementary school at the booth for BrainPOP, a group of educational animation websites whose display included a T-shirt that nodded to the 1990s boy band. The vendor praised the teacher for getting the reference — the union guys setting up the expo had totally missed it, he said — and told her that all one had to do to get one of the shirts was attend one of several pitch sessions during the day. “Students who use BrainPOP two or more times a month show measurable gains toward grade-level proficiency,” asserted a large poster listing the various sessions.

Nearby, a Microsoft salesperson named Mike had a full audience sitting on white settees arrayed in his zone as he launched into his demonstration of the company’s new AI tools for helping kids learn to read aloud. He showed how a program called Reading Coach captured video of a student reading a passage aloud and flagged mispronunciations, with an automated voice declaring, “These words were the most challenging for you.” There were even more features in the offing, Mike said; the program would soon produce comprehension questions to ask about whatever passage the teacher gave the students to read, and it would soon be able to gauge students’ level of expressiveness, too.

One might wonder what all this would leave to the actual teacher, but Mike assured the audience that Reading Coach would simply allow educators to focus on other tasks. “It’s a time saver,” he said.

In fact, education technology is replacing teachers in another sense: A large share of the vendors on hand were themselves former educators who had left the classroom for jobs with tech companies, where they could still feel like they were involved in education, but without the stresses of the classroom and often with higher pay. One former first grade teacher who had made this transition herself two years ago said she had seen the trend accelerate among her colleagues during the pandemic, when the challenges of juggling hybrid online and in-person instruction and managing students who were struggling with learning loss and delayed socialization had made jobs in ed tech seem especially alluring.

Remote learning “flipped the field on its head,” she said. “We were getting a lot more responsibilities than before, a lot more hours, a lot more stress.” At the first of the two ed tech companies she has worked for, she said, “almost everyone was an ex-teacher hired the past couple years. Ed tech is a good space for teachers to go to: It’s a corporate job, but they respect the skills that teachers have.”

Knowing that the ed tech sector was not only seeking a large share of federal recovery funds for schools but also playing a role in the teacher shortage gave the proceedings an extra edge. The profusion of inventively named vendors was overwhelming: Beanstack, Impero, Bluum, Archangel, Teq, Ozobot, Nuiteq, Vivacity, Figma. Kami and Hāpara sounded more like Ikea furniture, but no, they were here, too.

Among the rookie attendees wandering the hall was Joseph Tey, a Stanford computer science major. He was there with a classmate to ask teachers how they felt about the rise of AI. Were they worried about students cheating? Were they going to incorporate AI into their instruction? “Tech adoption in education is tough,” Tey said. “Do you adopt something only when the fire is under your ass? COVID was one fire. This is another fire.”

The COVID-19 fire had been great for one vendor, Wakelet, a website that allows users to pull together videos, images and text files into a single webpage, for use by individuals who want to to promote a resume or body of work or by teachers seeking to present information on a given subject. Its use by teachers had boomed during remote learning, said co-founder Rick Butterworth. “The pandemic was really a benefit for us because we had so many users who came on board,” he said. “2020 was an interesting year for us.” The site has been free to use, with the company funded for several years by angel investors, he said, but it was now about to start offering tiered paid plans for schools, ranging up to $6,000 per year. Among the features available to paying customers: “bespoke professional development.”

Across the aisle, a vendor named Whitney, a former elementary school librarian, was corralling passersby for her next pitch session for MackinMaker. “Have a seat! We’re about to have a demo. It’s really fun. Just fill out the card for the giveaway.” The giveaways were T-shirts that were waiting on each chair.

“It’s all about the giveaway,” said one teacher, with gentle sarcasm, as she took her seat.

Whitney gave her pitch for MackinMaker’s online e-book marketplace. After she was done, her colleague Ethan told the teachers, “If you need a different size T-shirt, let us know.”

Luring teachers into pitches was easiest at the various sellers of virtual reality headsets, some of which had long lines of educators waiting their turn. I tried a headset from ClassVR that was playing virtual reality programs from Eduverse. The first scene was a pastoral landscape of fields and stone walls whose context was unclear until the vendor explained that it was a scene from the Civil War. She clicked over to another of Eduverse’s 500-odd options, this one featuring men building railroads in the 19th century, where I accidentally got myself hit in the head, virtually, by a sledgehammer.

Schools could buy eight of the headsets for $4,299, or 30 for $16,999, the vendor said. Sales in recent years had been “amazing, in terms of rapid growth.”

The afternoon of the convention’s opening day was wearing on, and the conference tote bags were already getting overstuffed with all the free swag. Conveniently, Kahoot (an Oslo-based operation with the slogan “Make learning awesome”) was giving out tote bags as prizes for those who won in demonstrations of its AI-generated quiz games. I participated in a game with questions about the Fourth of July and was frustrated to accidentally input the wrong answer on my smartphone in response to a question about the size of the U.S. population in 1776. (The correct answer was 2.5 million.)

The Kahoot vendor handed out the three tote bags to the victorious educators, who would have two more days of conventioneering to fill them up. “Did you learn something about Independence Day?” she said.

A few weeks later came a reminder that the stakes for the ed tech sector went far beyond tote bags and T-shirts: Kahoot announced that a group led by Goldman Sachs’ private equity division was buying it for $1.7 billion.

by Ava Kofman

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Last week, regulators rolled out enhanced oversight for new hospices in Arizona, California, Nevada and Texas. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which pays for most of American hospice care, announced that this change was spurred by “numerous reports of hospice fraud, waste, and abuse” and “serious concerns about market oversaturation.”

In November, ProPublica and The New Yorker highlighted that the four states were overrun with for-profit hospices, many of them sharing the same addresses and owners. Some of these hospices obtained licenses only to sell them to other entrepreneurs. Others appeared to be billing Medicare for “phantom” — that is, nonexistent — patients. Some did both. The government’s own data revealed a pattern of rapid hospice growth in the four states, far outstripping the demand for services.

Rapid Rise in Hospices Concentrated in West and Southwest

A ProPublica analysis of Medicare data reveals a sharp uptick in providers since 2018.

(Source: CMS data set of Medicare-certified hospices. Chart by Lena Groeger.)

During the new oversight period, which can last up to a year, Medicare and its contractors will now scrutinize the claims submitted by new hospices in these states before they pay them. This process — often known as “medical review” or “pre-pay review” — will make it more difficult for a hospice to bill the government for inappropriate patients or medically unnecessary services. Theresa Forster, vice president for end-of-life care policy at the National Association for Home Care & Hospice, praised this action, which all four industry trade groups had recommended. “This gives new hospices an opportunity to start off on the right foot and identify any problem areas from the start,” she said.

The change is part of a larger effort by CMS this year to address fraud, waste and abuse in its hospice program. In January, CMS overhauled its inspections of hospices, with the changes going into effect immediately. In March, the agency released a proposed rule that would require further analysis of the number of patients leaving hospice alive, the diagnoses provided on hospice claims and Medicare hospice spending. And in April, the agency made hospice ownership data public for the first time. The data will allow patients and families to better discern whether their hospice is for-profit or not-for-profit — a distinction that, as researchers have shown, can significantly affect the quality of care. “It’s plain and simple: families deserve transparency when making decisions about hospice and home health care for their loved ones,” Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “Shining a light on ownership data is good for families, good for researchers, and good for enforcement agencies.”

These reforms were prompted not just by the ProPublica-New Yorker story but by the continued pressure from lobbyists and lawmakers in its wake. This spring, during hearings held by the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees, members cited the investigation as they questioned Becerra on the agency’s next steps for tackling hospice profiteering. In one exchange, Becerra testified that his inspectors had “conducted some unannounced site visits of the hospices identified by that article” and that an audit of suspicious providers was underway. Legislators have sent a series of public letters to HHS, requesting urgent briefings and actions on hospice fraud, including two this summer. The most recent letter, released last week and signed by 26 representatives from both parties, applauded CMS’ commitment to addressing hospice abuse while also requesting further reforms, including targeted moratoriums in high-growth areas and standards to rein in deceptive marketing practices.

“This is an area that escapes partisan gridlock,” Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., one of the letter’s signatories and coordinators, told me. “No one sympathizes with people who are cheating this system, particularly when you are involving some of America’s most vulnerable populations.”

Palliative care physicians have also been pushing for stricter guidelines. In April, the Journal of Palliative Medicine published a statement of “Core Roles and Responsibilities” signed by 325 doctors in the field. The group was motivated to issue the statement, it wrote, “out of concern for physician colleagues who may be asked to participate in hospice programs that are staffed, structured, and operated in ways that put patients and families at risk of poor care, and concomitantly expose physicians to violations of clinical and ethical standards.” Among other improvements, it called for hospices to strengthen their staffing, training and frequency of visits.

Ira Byock, the lead author and the former president of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, said that the condition of hospice care in the United States represented a “true public health crisis.”

This year has also seen a spate of further reporting, commentary and research on the profit motive in hospice, including a detailed report on private equity’s role in hospice care from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Eileen Appelbaum, the center’s co-director and one of the co-authors of the report, “Preying on the Dying,” said that she has long been concerned about how investors can harm vulnerable patients and families. “Problems of asymmetric information — most patients and their caregivers have no prior experience with hospice care — further increase the difficulty of overseeing private hospice agencies,” the report notes.

Ben Marcantonio, the interim CEO at the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, the industry’s largest trade group, said that “in my experience, whether hospices are gaming the system is not a direct reflection of tax status. What we need is the right stewardship of taxpayer dollars, so the right delivery of care is provided at the right time with the right amount of resources.”

Blumenauer told me that he and other legislators were committed to checking in with CMS and trade groups like NAHC and NHPCO about ongoing, collaborative efforts to reform the hospice program. “Your article struck a chord on a series of levels,” he said. “We are going to continue pounding away on this issue.”

by Mary Hudetz

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Two decades ago, an anthropology professor at the University of Utah asked the National Science Foundation to fund research on Native American ancestors to determine when the cultivations of crops like corn first became prevalent in their cultures.

This story is part of The Repatriation Project, a series investigating the return of Native American ancestral remains.

The studies, according to the research proposals, would involve analyzing Ancestral Pueblo remains that museums had excavated around 1900 from some of the Southwest’s most sacred sites: a deep rift that winds through Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, an ancient village near cliff dwellings in Colorado and the remnants of a settlement at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico that dates back more than a thousand years. Nearly all of the remains were held at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

The analysis would destroy portions of the ancestral remains but yield valuable information, including a more precise date of when the individuals lived, Joan Brenner Coltrain, the Utah professor, said in the research proposals. This information could help the institutions finally return the remains to descendant tribes, she said at the time.

The NSF provided $222,218 under two grants for research that spanned eight years, starting in 2002. But the studies never resulted in Harvard or the AMNH repatriating human remains to any of the tribes that trace their ancestry to sites studied by Brenner Coltrain, including the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico and the Hopi in Arizona.

Instead, the work inspired even more destructive research on ancestral remains by other scientists supported by federal funding and done without the consent of tribes, many of which view such studies as a violation of their traditions and beliefs.

“There’s somehow this perspective that this kind of research will enhance us or benefit us,” said Theresa Pasqual, director of the historic preservation office for the Pueblo of Acoma. “What it does is it bolsters their careers; it bolsters their professional, academic standing. Let’s be real about it.”

In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, anticipating that within a decade federally funded museums and universities would return tens of thousands of ancestral remains and burial items. But as ProPublica reported this year, U.S. museums continue to hold the remains of more than 100,000 Native American ancestors, almost all of which they say are “culturally unidentifiable,” meaning they are unable to determine which tribe, if any, can rightfully claim them.

ProPublica found that by funding scientific studies on Native American human remains, the NSF and other federal agencies have created incentives for institutions to hold on to ancestors in ways that undermine the goals of NAGPRA. Federal agencies have awarded at least $15 million to universities and museums for such research since the law’s passage, a ProPublica review found.

As a result, tribes have been not only denied opportunities to reclaim and rebury their ancestors, but also excluded from having a say over the treatment of the remains.

“There’s this perverse sense of ownership, that ‘these are our samples.’ And ‘You know, we’re protecting it for the good of research,’” said Krystal Tsosie, a Navajo Nation citizen and assistant professor at Arizona State University whose research focuses on genetics and bioethics.

When another group of researchers was set to publish a study that had involved damaging Native American remains — including two from Chaco Canyon used in the Brenner Coltrain research — some on the team questioned the ethics of moving forward without permission or input from tribes. But an AMNH curator, who was listed as a contributor to the study, discouraged outreach to Pueblo leaders, according to previously unreported emails. Involving them could cause researchers to lose control of the project, he wrote.

The fallout from that study led the AMNH in 2020 to ban destructive research on human remains.

The museum said in response to questions from ProPublica that it has not repatriated the ancestral remains used in the studies because no tribes have formally claimed them under the law. Pueblo representatives have continued to visit the AMNH and meet with staff about its collection, the statement added.

Several tribal members and representatives interviewed for this story said museums’ demands that tribes initiate the repatriation process place an unfair burden on them to do the work of addressing the looting of Indigenous graves.

“The museums tend to think of all these objects as their personal property, and they don’t want to turn it back over to the tribes even though much of it was unscrupulously obtained,” said Kurt Dongoske, who is a tribal historic preservation officer for Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico.

The AMNH also said it is not aware of scientific research it authorized yielding enough information to allow for repatriation decisions.

Harvard, which declined to comment after receiving questions from ProPublica, has prohibited research on ancestral remains and items subject to NAGPRA under a temporary policy that allows an exception for studies done with tribal consent. The university has acknowledged publicly that as a premier research institution, it long ignored the wishes of tribal communities while benefiting from collections of their ancestral remains amassed through excavations and donations.

This year, the Interior Department is reviewing proposed regulations that would require institutions to halt research on Native American remains if requested by a tribe. The NSF said in response to written questions from ProPublica that it is committed to engaging more with tribes and is now beginning to standardize policies for funding research that impacts them. Under draft guidelines that could go into effect in January, the agency said, it would require all researchers to show that they have consulted with tribes on their research proposals before obtaining an NSF grant.

Still, the NSF and other federal agencies have continued to fund research on Indigenous remains in recent years.

Involving Indigenous groups in research can add to researchers’ understanding of ancestors’ lives and belongings, said Pasqual, of Acoma Pueblo. Without this context, scientific studies are incomplete, she said.

Pasqual’s background in archeology helps her understand how science’s view of her ancestors differs from that of her tribe’s culture. Scientists and museums, she believes, have long viewed ancestors’ remains as objects, specimens or property. Pueblo people have a continuing relationship with their ancestors and an obligation to steward them.

“There are a lot of folks who may see ancestors as being an open resource to do different types of DNA testing,” she said. “We recognize that there is an ethical obligation.”

Theresa Pasqual, director of the Acoma Historic Preservation Office, at Pueblo Bonito. (Russel Albert Daniels for ProPublica) Pueblo Bonito, a massive “great house,” once stood four stories tall, according to the National Park Service. (Russel Albert Daniels for ProPublica) “The Law Is So Vague”

For nearly two centuries, museums and universities used science to justify building and keeping massive collections of Native American human remains.

Harvard, which today holds the remains of 6,000 Native Americans, opened the Peabody museum in 1866 with a handful of pottery and other items, plus a small collection of Indigenous remains that were used to analyze the “anatomical characteristics” of the races, according to the museum’s first annual report, issued two years later.

By 1900, an AMNH anthropologist with medical training, Aleš Hrdlička, set up a makeshift laboratory in Chaco Canyon’sPueblo Bonito, a sprawling multistory settlement with hundreds of rooms and dozens of kivas, spaces that have long been used among Pueblo tribes and the Hopi for ceremonial and social purposes.

Hrdlička conducted his work as the expedition’s archaeologists cleared rooms in the “great house,” including a chamber the archaeologists labeled Room 33 where 14 people had been buried along with ceramics and thousands of pieces of turquoise. The team began taking remains and objects and sending them to New York by train, until concerns about looting at the canyon prompted a federal probe.

One of the expedition’s benefactors defended the work as a scientific enterprise, not a looting one. But the investigation still halted the excavation, and the investigator recommended making Chaco Canyon a national park to protect it.

Of the more than 150 ancestral remains from Chaco Canyon at the AMNH, Hrdlička helped unearth more than half, according to the museum’s inventory provided to the National Park Service under NAGPRA.

Doorways between rooms in Pueblo Bonito (Russel Albert Daniels for ProPublica)

David Hurst Thomas, a longtime archaeologist, said he considered the Chaco Canyon holdings to be the AMNH’s most important collection from the continent when he first stepped into his role as the museum’s curator of North American archeology in the 1970s.

“There are people who want to call that looting, and certainly by 21st-century standards that’s true,” said Thomas, who’s now retired. “But by late 19th-century standards, that’s one of the best digs in the country.”

Frustration that institutions had treated Native American ancestors as scientific specimens played a major role in driving Indigenous rights activists to push for federal repatriation legislation. When Congress passed NAGPRA in 1990, lawmakers anticipated repatriation would be completed within five to 10 years. As a result, the law is limited in how it addresses scientific analysis.

Vessels labeled with numbers at Pueblo Bonito in 1896. (American Museum of Natural History Library)

“The whole concept of NAGPRA was to return these collections to tribes, so that they would have rights over them. They would be able to authorize or not authorize testing,” said Melanie O’Brien, manager of the National Park Service’s National NAGPRA Program. “But that didn't happen.”

Congress simply did not envision that 33 years later institutions would be where they are now — holding tens of thousands of Native American remains they have designated as “culturally unidentifiable” and allowing them to be used for research, said O’Brien.

The law states that it should not be interpreted as authorizing new scientific studies to advance repatriation efforts. It also says that the only justification for halting repatriations in order to conduct research is if it is considered so important that the findings would be in the national interest. And even in such cases, institutions have three months from the study’s conclusion to return the human remains and items to tribes, according to the law.

No institution has ever sought an exemption for such a study, according to O’Brien.

Stewart Koyiyumptewa, the Hopi Tribe’s cultural preservation office director, believes NAGPRA should clearly acknowledge tribes’ right to have a say over studies of their ancestors, including those that involve taking and examining samples of their DNA. “But the law is so vague,” he said.

In a letter commenting on the Interior Department’s proposed regulations, Koyiyumptewa said clarifying this would help prevent remains or objects in museums pending repatriation from being used for scientific or museum work.

A photo taken during exploration of Chaco Canyon between 1898 and 1900. (American Museum of Natural History Library)

From the perspective of his culture, Koyiyumptewa said, samples extracted for DNA research and other studies still represent the remnants of a person and should be respected. “Even though the person may be deceased,” he said, “that small sample still has life.”

Alyssa Bader, who is Tsimshian and an assistant professor of anthropology at McGill University in Montreal, agrees that tribes should have a say over the treatment of biological samples of ancestral remains used in research.

But this work can be done ethically, Bader said.

She has collaborated with Indigenous communities to examine the diets of Tsimshian ancestors and how foods have changed in the distant and recent past. As her partners, Indigenous groups help shape research questions in ways that can benefit their communities.

This collaborative work requires more time and money but it is worth the investment, Bader said. “I 100% believe that it produces better research.”

Pursuing Research, Not Repatriation

Soon after NAGPRA’s passage, NSF records show, some institutions began to seek grants to preserve Ancestral remains for future scientific study, even though Congress had called for museums to be “expeditious” in returning them to tribes. At the time, many museums had not yet fulfilled the law’s requirement to inventory their collections.

It would take a full decade from the law’s passage — years longer than expected — for the American Museum of Natural History and Harvard to fully review their collections. The park service had extended deadlines for the institutions with vast collections to file inventories of the items and human remains that had been taken from Native American burials. In 2000, both finally reported that most of their holdings subject to the law could not be culturally affiliated, claiming they did not have enough information to make repatriation decisions.

Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Culture National Historical Park. This great house is the largest of all Chacoan great houses. (Russel Albert Daniels for ProPublica)

For example, the AMNH declared its entire Chaco Canyon collection to be “culturally unidentifiable.” In federal records, the museum said that people’s migrations from the canyon in the 1300s to villages in Arizona and New Mexico where their descendants now live left gaps in archaeologists’ knowledge about the region.

Martha Graham, who oversaw the museum’s NAGPRA compliance in the 1990s, told ProPublica that because multiple tribes claimed ties to the canyon, institutions needed even more time than the park service had granted them to consult with the tribes. Graham, who is from New Mexico and briefly worked for the park service at Chaco Canyon, said she appreciated the connection that the tribes, including the Hopi, had to the area. She left her job in 2001. But had she stayed, she would have pressed the museum to revisit its conclusion that it could not identify which tribes could reclaim what it held from the site, she told ProPublica. “We were pretty explicit, as I recall,” about the need for that to happen, said Graham.

In a statement, the museum said the work of “affiliating” collections did not end when it filed its inventory with the park service in 2000 and is ongoing. But the museum has not revised its decision, though it said it recognizes multiple Pueblo tribes’ ties to the canyon.

Thomas, the retired AMNH curator of North American archaeology, believed NAGPRA gave the museum even more reason to approve scientific research because it might help identify descendant groups for repatriation. He acknowledged in an interview that it was wrong to exclude tribes from decisions about such research.

An opening within New Alto, one of the great houses of Chaco Culture National Historical Park (Russel Albert Daniels for ProPublica) “Why Didn’t You Ask Us?”

Brenner Coltrain at the University of Utah pursued the first of two NSF grants in 2002, hoping to learn more about when farming became a central part of life for Ancestral Puebloans who lived more than 2,000 years ago on the Colorado Plateau. She began by analyzing human remains formerly buried in Arizona and Colorado and now held at Harvard’s Peabody museum, saying the work would “undoubtedly influence” the institution’s final repatriation decisions.

Brenner Coltrain did not grant an interview for this story. In an email, she told ProPublica that her work could help institutions make “informed decisions regarding repatriation” but “not ensure that repatriation will follow.”

The museum had granted Brenner Coltrain access to its collection on the condition that she share her findings with several tribes, including the Hopi, Pueblo of Acoma and Navajo Nation, according to her NSF research proposal.

Initially, the research involved having another Utah professor analyze mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, which was becoming increasingly prevalent in anthropological studies. Extracting it required pulverizing portions of bone. The genetic material, which is inherited from mothers, could help researchers learn more about trade routes, human migration and matrilineal lineages.

Brenner Coltrain and her colleague hoped to gather genetic information from more than three dozen ancestors. But they only had success with seven because the remains either were not well preserved or had lost bone mass.

The process was expensive and the results were disappointing, Brenner Coltrain said in a grant report to the NSF. It showed that the people from different ancient sites shared a common ancestry, a finding she said was “perhaps not surprising,” given what was already known about Native American genetics in the region.

But another form of destructive analysis that involved examining the bone chemistry of 80 ancestors led Brenner Coltrain to what she considered a more noteworthy finding: Corn had become a staple in the region by roughly 2,400 years ago. Her final reports did not say whether she shared this information with the tribes as Harvard requested.

Even though no repatriation happened following the first study, she successfully proposed similar research in a second NSF proposal in 2007. This time, she studied the remains of more than 140 ancestors held at the AMNH that had been excavated around the 1900s, mostly from Grand Gulch, a winding canyon within Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument. In the course of her work, she also extracted bone samples from the remains of at least two ancestors buried within Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon, according to a paper she and her co-researchers later published.

Joel Janetski, a now-retired anthropology professor at Brigham Young University who worked with Brenner Coltrain on the second of the studies, said in an interview that the researchers had followed all appropriate guidelines. They did not consult with tribes, he said, because they would have had to go around the AMNH to do so and therefore jeopardize future opportunities to research its collection.

“It would have been inappropriate,” he said.

Pasqual climbs a mesa at Chaco Culture National Historical Park, a place she has visited frequently since she was a child. (Russel Albert Daniels for ProPublica)

As Brenner Coltrain’s NSF grant ended, another researcher took an interest in the Chaco Canyon ancestors whose remains she had analyzed. Stephen Plog, a University of Virginia archaeologist, obtained samples from her and sent them to a radiocarbon-dating lab for further analysis, he said.

He co-authored a paper about the research in 2010. No one raised concerns about his work, Plog said in an interview: “No reviewer, nor anyone else commented to say, ‘You know, do you think it’s really right to just do destructive analysis of human remains?’”

Next, he collaborated with researchers at Penn State, Harvard and the AMNH on a paper that again focused on the ancestors from Pueblo Bonito’s Room 33. Their work was supported by NSF funding. Using mtDNA, they showed that eight individuals buried together in the room descended from a woman laid to rest among them and that the group’s lineage spanned 300 years.

In late 2016, the team was prepared to report their findings in Nature, the leading scientific journal.

But before publication, an anthropologist who wasn’t involved in the project urged members of the team to reach out to tribes, according to interviews and emails exchanged among the researchers. It was too late to get consent for destructive analysis that had already happened. But the team could still engage with the tribes and discuss the research ahead of publication, suggested George Perry, a professor at Penn State and co-author of the paper.

Peter Whiteley, a cultural anthropologist at the AMNH, firmly opposed the idea, saying in an email to Perry and other researchers that involving tribes would result in surrendering scientific “decision-making” to them. The team should publish first and contact the tribes later, he said.

Whiteley knew the region, having spent much of his career researching and writing books about the Hopi tribe. Since the 1980s he had done this work in collaboration with tribal members or with tribal authorities’ consent, he wrote in an email to ProPublica sent via an AMNH spokesperson.

The team studying the ancestors of Pueblo Bonito’s Room 33 had asked Whiteley to contribute expertise on matrilineal cultures among the Pueblo tribes but did so only after the research had been completed. Whiteley called the proposal to engage with tribes pre-publication “naive.”

“If they had wanted Pueblo and Hopi involvement, the time to seek it was at the beginning of the research, not its conclusion,” Whiteley told ProPublica.

Despite opposition from others on the research team, Perry sent letters to Pueblo and Hopi tribal officers before the paper was published. The possibility that tribes might disapprove of the research was all the more reason to engage, he said.

In retrospect, Plog said, he understands arguments against doing the type of research on Native American human remains that he and the others pursued. But he said he participated in the belief that his findings had the potential to advance public perceptions of Native Americans by showing the culture at Chaco Canyon had rivaled other great ancient civilizations.

Petroglyphs on a wall in Chaco Canyon, one of the the physical traces left by the people who lived there (Russel Albert Daniels for ProPublica)

Koyiyumptewa, the Hopi cultural preservation office director, said he felt upset upon learning the research had been done without the tribe’s input.

“You know, why didn’t you ask us?” Koyiyumptewa said in an interview.

News headlines seized on the finding that the Ancestral Puebloans shared a matrilineal line. One read, “Girl Power,” another “Moms Rule!” But that was hardly revelatory to people like Pasqual, who trace their roots through Chaco Canyon and sustain cultures that center matrilineal ties.

“We could have told you that,” she said of the Pueblo of Acoma.

She and others say tribes have their own ways of understanding and appreciating their past.

In her youth, her father used to take her to Chaco Canyon and teach her about the people who built the great houses and how their practices extend to her and others in the present. She has since driven countless times from Acoma Pueblo to the canyon, 100 miles to the north, where she observes traces of Pueblo ancestors, their footholds embedded in the canyon walls.

“If the Pueblo people identify themselves as descendants, that should be enough,” Pasqual said.

Footholds embedded in a mesa make up an ancient road. 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1 America’s Biggest Museums Fail to Return Native American Human Remains 2 Does Your Local Museum or University Still Have Native American Remains? 3 The Museum Built on Native American Burial Mounds 4 A Top UC Berkeley Professor Taught With Remains That May Include Dozens of Native Americans 5 The Metropolitan Museum of Art Adds A Renowned Native American Collection Despite Questions About Some Objects’ Origin 6 Behind ProPublica's Reporting on Repatriation

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by Renee Dudley

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Update, July 19, 2023: On Wednesday morning, Microsoft announced that it would be expanding logging access for its cloud customers at no additional cost. Users of basic-level 365 licenses will have detailed logs of email access and other types of log data previously available only to users of premium-level licenses. Microsoft also doubled the amount of time logs will be retained to 180 days for basic-level customers. Government and commercial customers will have the new features beginning in September.

“We are grateful to work in close coordination with CISA and our customers as we continue to invest in our built-in security and other protections,” Microsoft said in a statement.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, lauded the action.

“While we recognize this will take time to implement, this is truly a step in the right direction toward the adoption of Secure by Design principles by more companies,” CISA Director Jen Easterly said in a statement.

In 2019, hackers launched one of the largest cybersecurity attacks in U.S. history, eventually infiltrating various government agencies, as well as scores of private sector companies. The White House later attributed the attack, known as the SolarWinds hack, to Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. But as U.S. officials scrambled to respond to this spying, they realized they were missing key information: critical log files, the digital records of activity on users' computers.

The feature, which allows users to detect and investigate suspicious activity in their networks, is included in high-end Microsoft 365 plans but not in the basic version then used by some government agencies. Other agencies didn't retain sufficient log data over a long enough time frame. Had logging been more widely deployed, it might have tipped off officials to the intrusion sooner and enabled them to better investigate after it had been discovered.

Against this backdrop, President Biden nominated Chris Inglis to become the country’s first National Cyber Director. Inglis, a former National Security Agency official who began his career as a computer scientist, would go on to oversee the development of the administration’s National Cybersecurity Strategy. And as he and his team at the White House drafted that document, he kept returning to the SolarWinds hack. Known as a supply chain attack, this far-reaching breach started with compromised software that was used by many high-profile customers. “Everyone along that supply chain assumed that security was built in at the factory and sustained along the supply chain,” Inglis said of the SolarWinds attack. “We now know that wasn’t the case.”

The issue emerged again this month when some victims of a cyberattack linked to China were unable to detect the intrusion because they held basic Microsoft licenses rather than the premium ones that include logging. Hackers had exploited a flaw in Microsoft’s cloud computing service to break into about two dozen organizations globally, including the U.S. State Department.

These types of incidents reflect a larger trend, Inglis said: Computer users find themselves bearing a disproportionately large share of the burden of defending against cyberattacks. In response, the new strategy proposes shifting more of that burden to software makers themselves. Indeed, following the most recent cyberattack by Chinese hackers, Biden administration officials called on Microsoft last week to make security features like logging standard for all users.

Microsoft said it is engaging with the administration on the issue. “We are evaluating feedback and are open to other models,” a company spokesman said in a statement.

Although the Biden strategy, which was announced in March, is not binding, it represents a significant change in the government’s approach. Among its proposals: advancing legislation that would hold tech firms liable for data losses and harm caused by insecure products. Inglis, who stepped down from his role as director earlier this year, recently spoke with ProPublica about the national strategy document and the administration’s push to make technology providers do more to protect users from cyberattacks. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The Biden administration is talking about regulating cybersecurity. What would that look like in practice?

If you look at regulation of cyberspace at the moment, it’s mostly focused on operators. It’s not focused on those who build the cloud or major pieces of software. Governments need to consult with the private sector to understand what’s critical in those systems. We can use regulatory authorities that exist already, whether it’s the Department of Commerce, the FCC, the Treasury Department. When something is life- or safety-critical, you get to a place where you have to actually specify those things that you say are not discretionary. We did this with drugs and therapeutics. We did this with transportation systems. We need to do the same thing in cyberspace.

I’m reminded of a book I’m sure you’re familiar with, “The Cuckoo’s Egg,” Cliff Stoll’s story about the sprawling intrusion into U.S. government and military computer systems in the 1980s. Eventually, the trail led to West German hackers paid by the Soviet Union’s intelligence service, the KGB. These issues are not exactly new. Why has regulation never come up in this conversation before?

Well, I think it’s been brought up, but two things prevented it. First, we’ve thought about the idea that security is something that the technologists, the innovators, would actually take care of. They’ve always been of the mind that they would take care of it when they get around to it. But they’re always on to the next new innovation. So they never get around to it. We never double back to essentially build something in that wasn’t there at the start.

Two, we worried that too much regulation will actually suppress innovation and deny us the full benefit of technology. We still need to think about that. But it turns out that innovation is not a free lunch. I won’t cite any particular sources, but if you’re a good business person, you want to avoid any unnecessary cost. And so you’re always going to point out the downside of regulation.

You have alluded in this discussion to making products secure by design — the concept, which also is a focus of the national strategy document, that security should be built into digital products. What are some examples of this?

It’s pretty straightforward: Are the software or hardware systems meeting security expectations under reasonably foreseeable conditions? We’ve done that with automobiles. We have airbags, we have seat belts, we have anti-lock brakes. So what are the basic cybersecurity features that should be there at the get-go? Multifactor authentication or some reasonable equivalent to that. Some degree of segmentation so that if something gets into your system, it doesn’t rapidly race across. An easy way to patch vulnerabilities. The magic in the middle of that is that the vendor actually says, ‘I will take that responsibility.’ As opposed to saying, ‘Let the buyer beware. I’ll sell you the basic version. But if you want security features, then I’ll sell you a package on top of that.’ That’s nonsense.

That sounds like the whole Microsoft licensing debate in the wake of the SolarWinds attack, where the government lacked logging, a key security feature.

That’s right. Now, if you have an extraordinary security situation — you’re in the darknet, or you’re doing business in places where there’s very little jurisdictional authority exercised by the local police forces or the diplomatic cadre — then you ought to expect to pay more. But if you’re just an ordinary consumer, security ought to come along, built in.

I’m wondering how things are going to move ahead with this, given what seems to be the historic corporate outlook. When Microsoft President Brad Smith testified before Congress in early 2021, then-Rep. Jim Langevin of Rhode Island questioned him about charging extra for logging. Smith replied, “We are a for-profit company. Everything we do is designed to generate a return.”

So is Ford Motor Co. So is Tesla. It’s a pretty simple formulation, which is: At what point does profit trump safety? And the answer is, there is some reasonable alignment of the two. You can’t have all of one and none of the other. The businesses have to be able to sustain themselves; profit needs to be in the bargain. But they cannot deploy technologies that they know to be injurious to the welfare, health and safety of their customers. That is simply not the way this society works. I just think that companies that deploy products that have a detrimental effect on their customers either will find themselves [improving security] through self-enlightenment or market forces, or they should expect that they will be compelled to do that.

We should be pro-business. But business over the interest of the customers that it serves is essentially a graveyard spiral. It’s a race to the bottom. And so this is yet another moment where you have to align the interest of business with the interest of consumers that they will serve.

Help Our Journalists Report Important Stories About the Technology Industry

by Nicole Carr and Lucas Waldron

Time and again over the last two years, parents and protesters have derailed school board meetings across the country. Once considered tame, even boring, the meetings have become polarized battlegrounds over COVID-19 safety measures, LGBTQ+ student rights, “obscene” library books and attempts to teach children about systemic racism in America.

On dozens of occasions, the tensions at the meetings have escalated into not just shouting matches and threats but also arrests and criminal charges.

ProPublica identified nearly 90 incidents in 30 states going back to the spring of 2021. (That’s when the majority of boards resumed gathering in-person after predominantly holding meetings virtually.) Our examination — the first wide-ranging analysis of school board unrest — found that at least 59 people were arrested or charged over an 18-month period, from May 2021 to November 2022. Prosecutors dismissed the vast majority of the cases, most of them involving charges of trespassing, resisting an officer or disrupting a public meeting. Almost all of the incidents were in suburban districts, and nearly every participant was white.

In the course of our analysis, we examined hundreds of hours of footage — school board meeting feeds, social media posts and police bodycam videos — that revealed how the meetings became a forum for simmering anger over pandemic restrictions and, soon after, widespread fury over the belief that school boards are infringing on parental rights. In many cases, the heated discourse that started in the meetings spawned sweeping debates that ultimately restricted what could be taught in classrooms and reshaped the school boards themselves.

Explore our interactive story.