ProPublica

by Molly Parker, Lee Enterprises Midwest, and Beth Hundsdorfer, Capitol News Illinois

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

The watchdog for the Illinois Department of Human Services is seeking harsher penalties against health care workers who obstruct abuse and neglect investigations.

IDHS Inspector General Peter Neumer’s call to action comes on the heels of extensive reporting by Lee Enterprises, Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica last year that revealed a culture of abuse and cover-ups at Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center in rural southern Illinois. The news organizations detailed how uncooperative staff stymied the state’s ability to hold employees facing serious abuse allegations to account.

Specifically, Neumer is asking legislators for a change in law that would allow his office to report workers engaged in similar misconduct to an existing statewide registry. The move could bar those employees from working in the health care field in Illinois.

The Health Care Worker Registry monitors direct care aides, nursing assistants and other non-licensed health care officials; its database of professionals includes those who are barred from working with vulnerable populations. They may have been barred because of criminal records or if they have been found in an administrative proceeding to have engaged in financial exploitation, what is known as “egregious neglect” or physical and sexual abuse.

Under the current system, state workers who help their colleagues by lying to or misleading investigators can face termination if they’re caught, but findings against them can’t be reported to the registry. So short of criminal charges, which are rare, nothing would prevent them from going to work in another health care setting.

The Office of the Inspector General “regularly sees instances where facility or agency staff seek to protect each other from the consequences of their misconduct by remaining silent about what they witnessed or lying to protect their fellow employees," Neumer wrote in a recently released annual report on his office’s work.

In a follow-up interview, Neumer said expanding his office’s authority would help deter employees from “engaging in cover-up behavior or code-of-silence activity if they were aware that by doing so they risked losing their employment and possibly their ability to work in the health care industry in Illinois.”

For the earlier stories, reporters combed hundreds of pages of records, identifying more than four dozen cases between 2015 and 2021 in which the OIG cited Choate employees for providing false statements to the office’s investigators; for failing to make a timely report in accordance with the law; and for other failures to follow department policy concerning reporting and investigating abuse and neglect allegations. The few Choate workers charged with obstruction of justice or official misconduct for interfering with an investigation have had their charges dropped or reduced.

One case involved a mental health technician caught on a 911 audio recording threatening to break a patient’s finger. Though other voices could also be heard on the 911 call that was accidentally placed via a smartwatch, the other workers present refused to identify the perpetrator. The county prosecutor declined to bring charges related to the threats on the 911 call, citing insufficient evidence.

IDHS did not dispute any of the news organizations’ previously reported findings, saying in a statement at the time that the agency requires employees to cooperate with administrative investigations and trains them on the importance of giving law enforcement complete and truthful information. This week, a spokesperson said that although the inspector general works independently, IDHS has closely monitored the situation at Choate, worked with the inspector general and governor to implement reform, and “looks forward to reviewing and working collaboratively with lawmakers and the OIG on any legislative solutions.”

In his report, Neumer cited the inability to issue a finding to the registry in a particularly egregious 2014 abuse case at Choate that the news organizations had highlighted. In that case, at least 48 hours passed before anyone at the facility reported abuse to authorities, though numerous workers later told state police investigators that the patient’s injuries were some of the worst they’d ever seen. Throughout the state police investigation, multiple employees coordinated their stories and lied about what happened and who witnessed it, according to state police records.

Three of those employees were charged with felony obstruction of justice and each later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for failing to report the abuse to authorities. But those workers remained on the state payroll for nearly eight years. Others who knew about the abuse but didn’t report it faced no penalties.

This fall, the inspector general issued findings against eight employees it said engaged in the cover-up and recommended firing those who still worked at the facility. The employees were dismissed, but the law only allowed the inspector general to report one worker to the registry, the person whom his office found had committed the abuse. As a result, nothing bars the other seven from working in other health care settings.

Neumer told the news organizations that his proposal defines “material obstruction” as withholding or altering documentation or recorded evidence; improperly influencing, threatening or impeding witness testimony; giving untruthful information during an interview; failing to cooperate in an OIG investigation and lying to law enforcement. Employees would not be punished for exercising their lawful right against self-incrimination in a criminal case, he said.

Legislators in the Illinois House and Senate toured Choate last year in the wake of the news organizations’ reports, and they have held private meetings about issues where legislative solutions may be needed.

A spokesperson for House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch said he was “incredibly troubled” by the reports on Choate and is “closely reviewing” the inspector general’s recommendations.

At an unrelated news conference in September, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said that he had no plans to close Choate but would consider doing so if the facility was unable to improve safety conditions for patients. His spokesperson did not respond to specific questions about whether he believed the facility had since taken adequate steps to improve conditions.

In a statement issued last week, the spokesperson said that the governor worked with leaders at IDHS to implement reforms, and that he “looks forward to reviewing and working collaboratively with lawmakers and the OIG on any legislative solutions.”

by Margaret Coker, The Current

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

ProPublica and The Current previously covered title lending in Georgia in the article “How Title Lenders Trap Poor Americans in Debt With Triple-Digit Interest Rates.”

In her mid-20s, Cordelius Brown thought she had found the perfect job. She was thriving as a store manager at TitleMax, a Savannah, Georgia-based company that dominates a segment of the state’s subprime lending industry known as title lending.

Brown’s easy rapport and hustle made her a natural in convincing Georgians with few credit options to sign up for TitleMax’s lending product. She was earning more than she ever had, thanks to bonuses she received based on a percentage of her store’s profits made from the company’s targeted consumers — people like her own family who were struggling to make ends meet in low-wage service industry jobs, living on a fixed income or out of work because of poor health.

For people written off as credit risks by traditional lending institutions, a “title pawn” from TitleMax can help finance urgent needs. The transaction is straightforward: The company lends money in exchange for collateral — the title to the vehicle in which the customer drove to the store.

But Brown’s customers continued to struggle, despite the financing from TitleMax. A key reason, she came to believe, was that the actual costs of borrowing were being masked by the sales techniques used by the company, which is exempt from Georgia’s usury laws and can lend money at terms that would be illegal for other subprime lenders.

“I carry a lot of guilt,” the 35-year-old said. “My community trusted me. What the company was selling to the community wasn’t good for them.”

Brown believes TitleMax distorts the true cost of borrowing to its tens of thousands of customers annually in Georgia. (Malcolm Jackson for ProPublica)

In 2016, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined TMX Finance, the parent company of TitleMax, $9 million after the federal regulator determined that it violated federal laws with unfair, deceptive and abusive acts toward customers in Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee.

The CFPB also placed TMX Finance under a consent order to ensure the company’s compliance with the laws.

But Brown and two other former managers at TitleMax stores across south Georgia told The Current and ProPublica that, despite ongoing scrutiny by the federal regulator, the company continued similar sales techniques that distorted and hid the true costs of borrowing in Georgia until as recently as 2021.

Brown and another former store manager agreed to go on the record with their experience at five separate stores in Savannah and Columbus, Georgia. The third, who also worked in Savannah, requested anonymity out of fear of legal entanglements for speaking out against the company, which last year posted $735 million in revenue and is known in its key market of Georgia for its litigious nature.

The Current and ProPublica also reviewed internal TitleMax company documents, emails and text messages that corroborated the former store managers’ allegations.

TitleMax’s top executives have been clear publicly that the company’s business model depends on repeated monthly interest payments by its 293,000 customers nationwide. Brown, who worked as a store manager at TitleMax for almost seven years, and former Savannah store manager Ted Welsh Lupica both said that the company’s business model was drilled into them in training, and that they faced repercussions for telling customers how to pay off their debt quickly or in full.

Welsh Lupica, a military veteran, said his supervisors told him to stop being transparent with customers about the true costs of borrowing.

Still, Welsh Lupica kept providing this information to his customers. “I would be explicit. I would tell them, ‘Look, you make $2,000 a month and you want a $2,000 loan.’ I’d tell them, ‘Even if you pay us $200 a month, you are going to be doing that for the rest of your life because that’s not going to pay down the loan’” with the triple-digit interest rate, said Welsh Lupica, who worked with Brown for a few months at a store on Savannah’s east side.

Welsh Lupica joined TitleMax in Savannah when COVID-19 lockdowns started. He didn't like what he saw as high-pressure and misleading sales tactics. (Malcolm Jackson for ProPublica)

The CFPB, which in December extended its consent order with TMX Finance through late January, declined to comment on the former store managers’ allegations.

Welsh Lupica quit TitleMax in September 2020 after he said he received a second oral reprimand for his transparent sales pitch and has pursued a different line of work.

Brown was fired in June 2021 for violating store policies, a move that came shortly after she had filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging racial discrimination by the company.

TMX Finance did not respond to requests for comment.

TitleMax, the nation’s largest title lender, boasts that it offers a rewarding workplace with plenty of upsides for employees who work hard. The company has a “passion for customer service coupled with a desire to create opportunity,” according to its website. “Fast-paced, dynamic, energetic — and just plain fun!”

In 2015, fresh from earning an associate degree in business, Brown liked what the company was promising. She had always been described as a natural salesperson. And she was familiar with TitleMax’s products: Her sister and some of her family’s acquaintances had taken title pawns.

When she was first hired in Columbus, Brown avidly consumed the company’s slickly produced training folder, paying close attention to TitleMax’s explanations of how employees could boost their monthly pay and get promoted. Employees would boost store profits — and receive a financial bonus — based on closing new accounts, the average size of title pawns and persuading customers to keep monthly interest payments coming in. Each of TitleMax’s more than 200 stores in Georgia tracks its own financials — which means, for store managers, “the more you sell, the more you make,” Brown said.

As an assistant store manager at the time, Brown was not aware that the system that sounded so good to her was running afoul of federal consumer protection laws.

The year after Brown was hired, in September 2016, the CFPB found that TitleMax’s businesses in three states had been violating multiple federal laws intended to protect Americans from predatory lenders or deceitful financial practices. In a 21-page consent order, the federal regulator described how the true costs of borrowing were hidden by TitleMax’s sales pitches and the company’s proprietary document known as a “voluntary payback guide,” which was given to customers to instruct them on ways to minimize their monthly payments without informing them that it could lengthen the time to pay off their debt. Those practices, the CFPB investigators concluded, “materially interfere with a consumer’s ability to understand that the longer the consumer takes to pay off the transaction, the more expensive the transaction will be, or to understand how much more expensive the transaction will be if paid off over a longer time.”

The result was that customers would owe their original debt to the company, even after making payments for many months or years — something that boosted profits for the company but was “unfair, deceptive or abusive” to customers, according to the CFPB.

TMX Finance did not admit to any wrongdoing but agreed to pay a $9 million fine.

Shortly afterward, in a lawsuit filed in the Magistrate Court of Dekalb County, Georgia, a retired Navy veteran made similar allegations that the voluntary payback guide he had signed at an Atlanta-area store was deceptive. (TitleMax successfully had the case transferred to federal court in Georgia.)

In court filings, TitleMax pushed back against the allegations. Its lawyers argued that the voluntary payback guide could not be construed as deceptive because it was not a legally binding document, and that the company followed federal Truth in Lending Act disclosures in its title pawn contracts. The judge cited these two arguments when he dismissed the lawsuit in the company’s favor in 2018.

Still, after TitleMax announced the CFPB’s order internally to its employees, Brown recalled that the voluntary payback guide disappeared from her TitleMax store. Sales techniques, however, didn’t change, she said.

By 2017, Brown had been promoted to store manager and had worked at two Columbus stores. She was being praised by superiors for increasing performance at the outlets, which served a primarily Black clientele. In 2019, she was promoted again and sent to a third store. Within months, her district supervisor and the regional vice president were applauding her work to store managers around the region, according to the emails reviewed by The Current and ProPublica.

Brown said her success came down to building trust with potential customers and her long hours hustling after payments from delinquent customers.

Brown and other store managers in Georgia were still boosting customer interest in the company’s title pawn contracts by emphasizing the monthly interest rate that TitleMax would charge, generally between 9.9% and 12.9%, according to a review of corporate documents and an analysis of contracts by The Current and ProPublica. In Georgia, however, because the contracts are structured to last only 30 days and customers are allowed to roll over the contract an unlimited amount of times, the true costs of borrowing remained opaque.

From July 2019 through June 2022, roughly 210 TMX Finance stores in Georgia under the brand names TitleMax and TitleBucks issued new title pawns for approximately 47,000 vehicles annually. They represented more than 60% of the state’s total volume of title pawns. In November, a review of more than two dozen Georgia title pawn contracts conducted by The Current and ProPublica found that annual interest rates in typical TitleMax contracts ranged from 119% to 179%.

Brown said she focused on collecting those repeat monthly payments in line with her corporate training and relished the role. She couldn’t recall ever talking to her hundreds of customers about an amortization schedule that would reduce their principal and finally get their account balance to zero. Her training made it clear that the company never expected her to do that, she said.

Yet Brown was deeply affected by a wave of customers telling her of their stress and worry when they couldn’t reduce their debt.

Robert Jones, an elderly Black man who lives on fixed income in Columbus, was one such customer. He used TitleMax multiple times when he was facing medical debts from his treatment for emphysema. In the more than two years of making monthly payments to the company, Jones said, he dealt with at least four different managers, and Brown was the only one who cautioned him about adding on to his debt load of $2,000 to pay for a new, expensive medicine with an additional title pawn. Brown “worked hard to help me understand which way was up” in what he saw as confusing contractual terms, Jones said.

Still, Jones eventually had to borrow more money from TitleMax because of his lingering medical debts, a move that compounded his struggles to get out of what he called his “debt trap” with the company.

In other cases, Brown decided to be even more proactive in helping customers find solutions to their debt problems.

In November 2019, Brown advised four longtime TitleMax customers, each of whom owed around $10,000, about securing an installment loan with a lower interest rate from another lender to pay off TitleMax. When they did, Brown’s Columbus-area district director noticed these lump-sum payoffs. He then chastised Brown for losing what had been high-paying repeat monthly accounts, according to a text message reviewed by The Current and ProPublica. The district director told her to “stay aggressive,” according to the text exchange.

“Our customers are decent, hardworking people. They aren’t bums,” Brown told The Current and ProPublica. “But to TitleMax, they just have one purpose: money.”

In February 2020, TitleMax asked Brown to move to Savannah and take over a struggling store there. She was nervous — the city was more than four hours away from her family — but she took the offer that she believed would bring her another promotion. She had dreams of being the first in her family to buy a home, and a career at TitleMax was a way to achieve that.

But Brown couldn’t square the idea of getting ahead personally with what she was starting to believe was an ambiguous business model. That understanding solidified that spring when a new assistant manager was assigned to her store.

Welsh Lupica was mustering out of the Air National Guard just as the global economy was shutting down because of the COVID-19 epidemic. He needed a job to help pay the bills, and TitleMax, which had been declared an essential business by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, was hiring as industries across the state remained shuttered.

Welsh Lupica went through his TitleMax training with a more jaundiced eye than Brown had. He recalled asking during his training whether TitleMax used predatory practices and whether TitleMax was among the title lenders that had actively lobbied against a push to cap interest rates in Nevada at 36% to protect consumers against high-interest subprime lenders.

“In the military, I got a lot of financial education. We were always targets for that kind of crap,” Welsh Lupica said, referring to predatory lenders. The Pentagon, alarmed by the national security risks posed by the number of service members struggling to pay off debt, worked to strengthen federal laws protecting them from high-interest financial instruments, including title loans. “I wanted to know, ethically, what I was signing up for.”

Welsh Lupica said he was assured that TitleMax worked within the law, and that the company was a community asset.

Welsh Lupica began to feel differently, however, soon after he went to work with Brown at the TitleMax store on Skidaway Road in east Savannah, a mile away from Georgia’s first historically Black university and surrounded by leafy neighborhoods where a mix of working-poor and professional Black families lived.

Welsh Lupica and Brown formed a quick attachment as she taught him, a white man, how to gain the trust of their majority Black customers. That included tutorials on how to talk to older Black people, to drop some of his ramrod military formality and to be more self-deprecating in the store.

Brown, meanwhile, said Welsh Lupica opened her eyes to how the sales techniques that TitleMax had taught them as standard business practices confused customers about the true costs of a title pawn. Welsh Lupica explained to her how the minimum monthly payments that the company told them to emphasize with customers would lead people into a debt trap. Those minimal monthly payments would never decrease the principal, he told her.

“Customers who come to us looking for $2,000 or even $200 are not the type of people who can pay back that money at the end of the month. I knew that my customers would be paying month after month after month, but I didn’t realize how impossible it was,” Brown said.

Venus Lockett, a single parent who lives near Atlanta, turned to TitleMax when she couldn’t get a traditional loan because of her low credit score. The Atlanta-area store she dealt with never offered a printed contract, she said, and it took multiple trips dealing with multiple managers to get a clear sense of her debt.

Lockett said she would definitely have thought twice about signing a title pawn contract had she received the type of transparent sale pitch that Brown and Welsh Lupica offered. “You walk into TitleMax because you are desperate for any help to keep your kids warm and fed. But even desperate people can hear, if they are told plainly, what a terrible deal” a title pawn is, Lockett said.

In the spring of 2020, Brown decided to implement more transparency before customers signed their contract, something she saw as beneficial for them and the company. “We were there to make money for ourselves and TitleMax, and we could do that by building trust with the customer,” Brown said.

One such strategy was to print the sales contract — the only document that showed the annual interest rate — for customers before they signed it. Verbally, Brown and her team continued to talk about the monthly payments but described that as a fraction of the total annual cost of borrowing. They also clarified with customers that the minimum payment due each month would only cover interest, and that larger monthly payments would be necessary to get rid of the principal. “I would tell them, ‘I don’t care if you only have an extra dollar or $5, you need to give that to me as well,’” Brown recalled. “‘Otherwise, I’m going to see you in here month after month until the day you die.’”

The standard TitleMax procedure is to simply show customers contracts on a digital screen, not in a physical copy, according to the three former store managers. The only time a customer sees the annual interest rate is on the final contract, they said.

The third former store manager, who worked at two other TitleMax locations in south Georgia, confirmed that the sales techniques adopted by Brown and Welsh Lupica were not part of TitleMax’s standard routine. “We were trained to keep customers paying [their monthly interest], not how to tell the customer how to pay off the loan,” the former store manager said.

By late spring, however, the company got wind of the transparent sales pitch that Brown and Welsh Lupica had adopted — and communicated its disapproval, they said. Brown said her relationship with the company deteriorated, as she became emboldened to speak up against what she saw as workplace problems and to advocate for customers struggling to pay their title pawns.

Welsh Lupica, meanwhile, was transferred in June 2020 out of Brown’s store. He was sent to TitleMax’s flagship store in Savannah, which serviced over a million dollars in customer accounts each year. He didn’t adhere to the hard-nosed sales techniques that were routinely employed there, such as trying to get customers to agree to a higher amount of financing than they said they needed.

Instead, Welsh Lupica tried to continue the practice he had adopted at Brown’s store. But he said he was reprimanded and told to stop, especially his habit of printing the sales contracts for customers.

Feeling uneasy about the business practices, Welsh Lupica resigned in September 2020. “Most people who come to us are financially challenged,” said Welsh Lupica, who is now a Chatham County firefighter. “They rely on trust with the store manager.”

As 2020 continued, Brown became increasingly disillusioned with her work, especially with how the company dealt with Black employees and customers.

The pandemic was ravaging Georgia’s Black community — yet TitleMax did not pay for COVID-19 tests for employees in south Georgia, according to the three former store managers. Brown also complained to human resources and her district director that she had to work a full month without a day off or lunch breaks, while white managers in nearby stores were granted those basic rights, according to a civil rights discrimination lawsuit she later filed against the company, as well as the emails and text messages reviewed by The Current and ProPublica. Welsh Lupica confirmed Brown’s predicament. “Black employees were treated differently. I saw it happen,” he said.

The company also ignored pleas from Brown to try to evict a group of suspected drug users who slept in her store’s parking lot and made her and other employees feel unsafe, according to Brown’s lawsuit, as well as the reviewed company communications.

In October 2020, Brown was physically attacked as she was closing her store for the night, according to medical records and company communications. She took a leave of absence and returned to work in February 2021 because she needed a paycheck.

Brown said she resumed her practice of transparently explaining the true costs of borrowing to her customers. But she hit a wall a couple of months later when an elderly Black woman came into her store. Brown remembered watching the woman struggle painfully to walk from the parking lot to discuss her overdue account. The woman had had a stroke, she explained, and TitleMax had repossessed her car while she was in the hospital. Brown fought successfully with the company to have it pay $200 for a towing company to return the customer’s car. Yet what Brown saw as a decision affecting her customer’s life, the company seemed to view it as a mere accounting issue, according to company communications reviewed by The Current and ProPublica.

For Brown, that was the last straw. She filed a workplace grievance with the EEOC, alleging racial discrimination by TitleMax. In her claim, Brown listed multiple occurrences of what she described as unequal treatment she received as a Black woman compared with white colleagues, including being passed over for a promotion, unequal enforcement of the rules for breaks and vacation, and the use of racially insensitive language by her superiors.

In June 2021, TitleMax fired her, citing multiple violations of protocol, including once mistakenly repossessing a wrong vehicle.

Seven months later, the EEOC closed Brown’s complaint, declining to rule either for Brown or for the company. “The EEOC makes no finding as to the merits of any other issues that might be construed as having been raised by this charge,” the final report said. Employment and labor lawyers in Georgia say the EEOC rarely pursues the thousands of complaints it receives each year, leaving aggrieved workers in limbo about their allegations of discrimination. The EEOC declined to comment on the case, citing confidentiality.

At least two other former TitleMax employees in Georgia have sued the company in the last 10 years alleging racial discrimination or sexual harassment after filing EEOC complaints. One case was settled, but its terms are unknown. The other was dismissed before the discovery phase. The company’s employment contract had a mandatory arbitration clause — a closed-door dispute mechanism that companies often use to prevent workplace allegations or criticisms from becoming public. The EEOC declined to provide the total number of complaints filed against TitleMax, citing privacy laws.

In April, Brown filed her lawsuit against the company in the federal district court for the Southern District of Georgia, hoping that the courts would take her complaints more seriously. TitleMax never replied to the substance of Brown's allegations and instead argued for the case to be thrown out on procedural grounds. This month, the judge dismissed the case, which Brown filed on her own and without legal counsel, for technical reasons, faulting her for not presenting the legal complaints in a professional or appropriate manner. He did not rule on the merits of the case.

Brown also emailed a letter to the CFPB, citing her allegations of racial discrimination and TitleMax’s business practices as potential violations of federal law. But she did not use the dedicated email portal or phone number that the CFPB spokesperson said the agency encourages whistleblowers to use, and she has not heard back from the federal regulator. The CFPB declined to comment on Brown’s allegations, citing the ongoing consent order with TitleMax.

Brown now works for another Savannah-based company that sells furniture to elderly residents with mobility issues. She makes less money but feels better about work at the end of the day. At least one former TitleMax manager also works at the business, and they often swap stories about their shared experience.

“You can make money and be honest with your customers,” Brown said. “That’s the bottom line. In seven years at TitleMax, I didn’t see a single supervisor who understood that and wanted to do business in that way.”

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Jennifer Gollan

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

Online pharmacies that sell abortion pills are sharing sensitive data with Google and other third parties, which may allow law enforcement to prosecute those who use the medications to end their pregnancies, a ProPublica analysis has found.

Using a tool created by the Markup, a nonprofit tech-journalism newsroom, ProPublica ran checks on 11 online pharmacies that sell abortion medication to reveal the web tracking technology they use. Late last year and in early January, ProPublica found web trackers on the sites of at least nine online pharmacies that provide pills by mail: Abortion Ease, BestAbortionPill.com, PrivacyPillRX, PillsOnlineRX, Secure Abortion Pills, AbortionRx, Generic Abortion Pills, Abortion Privacy and Online Abortion Pill Rx.

These third-party trackers, including a Google Analytics tool and advertising technologies, collect a host of details about users and feed them to tech behemoth Google, its parent company, Alphabet, and other third parties, such as the online chat provider LiveChat. Those details include the web addresses the users visited, what they clicked on, the search terms they used to find a website, the previous site they visited, their general location and information about the devices they used, such as whether they were on a computer or phone. This information helps websites function and helps tech companies personalize ads.

But the nine sites are also sending data to Google that can potentially identify users, ProPublica’s analysis found, including a random number that is unique to a user’s browser, which can then be linked to other collected data.

“Why in the world would you do that as a pharmacy website?” said Serge Egelman, research director of the Usable Security and Privacy Group at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. “Ultimately, it’s a pretty dumb thing to do.”

Representatives for the nine sites did not respond to requests for comment. All were recommended on the popular website Plan C, which provides information about how to get abortion pills by mail, including in states where abortion is illegal. Plan C acknowledged that it does not have control over these sites or their privacy practices.

While many people may assume their health information is legally protected, U.S. privacy law does little to constrain the kind or amount of data that companies such as Google and Facebook can collect from individuals. Tech companies are generally not bound by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA, which limits when certain health care providers and health plans can share a patient’s medical information. Nor does federal law set many limits on how companies can use this data.

Law enforcement can obtain people’s data from tech companies such as Google, whose privacy policies say the companies reserve the right to share users’ data with law enforcement. Google requires a court order or search warrant, which law enforcement can obtain with probable cause to believe a search is justified. The company received more than 87,000 subpoenas and search warrants in the U.S. in 2021, the most recent year available; it does not provide a breakdown of these requests by type, such as how many involved abortion medication.

In a statement, Steve Ganem, product director of Google Analytics, said: “Any data in Google Analytics is obfuscated and aggregated in a way that prevents it from being used to identify an individual and our policies prohibit customers from sending us data that could be used to identify a user. Google has strict policies against advertising to people based on sensitive information.”

Google pledged last year that it would delete location history data related to people’s visits to abortion and fertility clinics, but the company has not announced any changes since then related to data involving abortion pill providers or how it handles government requests for data. A Google spokesperson did not respond when asked whether the company has turned over any data to law enforcement about users of online pharmacies that provide abortion medication or whether it has been asked to do so.

“This is problematic and dangerous — both the potential access that law enforcement has to figure out who is violating our new state bans and that we’ve let tech companies know so much about our private lives,” said Anya Prince, a law professor at the University of Iowa who focuses on health privacy. “It shows us how powerful this data is in scary ways.”

Medication Abortion

Using medications to induce an abortion involves taking two drugs. Mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone, effectively stopping the growth of the pregnancy. Misoprostol, taken a day or two later, helps the uterus contract, emptying it of pregnancy tissue. This drug combination is the most commonly used method of abortion, accounting for more than half of abortions in the U.S.

Demand for the drugs is expected to grow amid reproductive health clinic closures and the enactment of a cascade of state laws banning abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June.

At least 13 states now ban all methods of abortion, including medication abortion, though some allow exceptions for medical emergencies, rape or incest. People who are unable to shoulder the cost of traveling to states where abortion is legal are increasingly turning to online pharmacies to buy abortion pills without prescriptions. The mail-order pills can be taken at home, and they’re generally cheaper than abortion services provided in clinics — about $200 to $470 from online pharmacies, compared to about $500 for a first-trimester abortion conducted in a clinic.

Approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2000, mifepristone — the first tablet in the two-step regimen — can be used to help end pregnancies in their first 11 weeks. The agency initially restricted the drug, requiring patients to get it from clinicians in person.

Mifepristone became more accessible during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the FDA temporarily relaxed the requirement that people visit providers in person to get the drug. The agency scrapped the requirement altogether in December 2021, allowing people to obtain abortion medication through the mail after a telemedicine appointment.

Then, on Jan. 3, the FDA published new rules allowing retail pharmacies to dispense mifepristone to people who have prescriptions, potentially expanding access to medication abortion. But those rules do not help pregnant people in more than a dozen states where abortion bans prevent pharmacies from offering the drug.

A week later, Alabama's attorney general said that anyone using abortion pills could be prosecuted under a state law that penalizes people for taking drugs while pregnant — despite the state’s abortion ban, which excludes abortion seekers and penalizes providers instead. He then appeared to back off his statement, saying the law would be used only to target providers.

Nineteen states already ban the prescription of abortion drugs through telehealth, meaning people in those states must see a clinician in person or find abortion medication online on their own. Many appear ready to do the latter. After a draft of the Supreme Court’s abortion decision leaked last May, internet search traffic for medication abortion surged. Dozens of people have posted descriptions online of their experiences getting abortion pills, some in restrictive states. One Reddit user recounted their ordeal on an abortion subgroup in October: “I’m in TX so i ordered through abortion RX. It said it’ll be here soon like 5-6 days. I’m extremely nervous I’m doing this by myself, but I’ve looked and don’t have a lot of time to make a decision. This is the fastest way.”

A New Legal Era

Just two states — Nevada and South Carolina — explicitly outlaw self-managed abortion. But that hasn’t stopped prosecutors in other states from charging people for taking abortion drugs.

Prosecutors have cited online orders of abortion pills as evidence in cases charging people with illegal abortions in several states, including Georgia, Idaho and Indiana. And in at least 61 cases from 2000 through 2020 spread across more than half the states in the country, prosecutors investigated people or ordered their arrest for allegedly self-managing abortions or helping someone else to do so, according to a report by If/When/How, a reproductive justice advocacy organization. In most of these cases, people had used medication for their abortions.

Those prosecutors interested in criminalizing abortion are aided by state and private surveillance.

“This is an entirely new era,” said Ari Waldman, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University. “We’re moving to a modern surveillance state where every website we visit is tracked. We have yet to conceptualize the entire body of laws that could be used to criminalize people getting abortions.”

Law enforcement can use people’s behavior when visiting websites that sell abortion pills as evidence to build cases against those suspected of having abortions. Investigations and charges in these cases overwhelmingly stem from reports to law enforcement by health care providers, trusted contacts or the discovery of fetal remains, legal experts say. Once authorities launch an investigation, they can use online searches for abortion pills as part of the evidence.

“This information can tell a district attorney that you went to an abortion website and you bought something,” Waldman said. “That might be enough to get a judge to get a warrant to take someone’s computer to search for any evidence related to whatever abortion-related crime they’re being charged with.”

This was true even under the more limited abortion restrictions under Roe. For example, in 2017, prosecutors in Mississippi charged Latice Fisher with second-degree murder after she lost her pregnancy at 36 weeks. Prosecutors used her online search history — including a search for how to buy abortion pills online — as evidence. Fisher’s murder charge was eventually dismissed.

“We have a private surveillance apparatus that is wide and is largely unregulated,” said Corynne McSherry, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes digital rights. “Now Google knows what you’re searching. This is a real threat. If any third party has your information, it means your data is no longer in your control and it could be sought by law enforcement. This is 100% a worry.”

Opting Out

Many people aren’t aware of how to opt out of sharing their data. Part of the problem is that when users visit online pharmacies that share users’ information with third parties such as Google, their information can then be shared with law enforcement if allowed by the privacy policies of those third parties.

“The mere fact that you’ve used the online pharmacy to buy abortion medication, that info is now collected by Google and it is now subject to the privacy policy of Google such that you have no way of opting out of that, because it’s entirely separate from the website you went to,” Waldman said.

Users can install a web browser, such as Brave or Firefox, that offers privacy protections. They can also install browser extensions to block third-party trackers and adjust the privacy settings on their browsers. But these steps aren’t always foolproof. Tech companies can still subvert them using hidden tools that users cannot see, and they likely retain vast troves of data that are beyond users’ control.

“Individuals are not going to solve this problem; technical solutions aren’t going to solve this problem,” said Chris Kanich, associate professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “These trillion-dollar companies of the economy aren’t going anywhere. So we need policy solutions.”

Congressional lawmakers have spent years discussing a national data privacy standard. The bill that has made the most progress is the American Data Privacy and Protection Act. Introduced last June by a bipartisan group of lawmakers who intended to strengthen consumer data protections, the bill limited companies from using any sensitive data, including precise geolocation information or browsing histories, for targeted advertising or other purposes. Companies would have been required to get consumers’ express consent before sharing sensitive data with third parties. The legislation passed out of its assigned House committee in July.

Another bill, the My Body, My Data Act, also introduced last summer, would limit the reproductive health data that companies are allowed to collect, keep and disclose.

But neither bill has passed. The My Body, My Data Act had few, if any, Republican supporters. Plus, legislators couldn’t reach an agreement over whether the American Data Privacy and Protection Act should supersede state privacy laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, which provides data privacy protections for consumers in the state.

Privacy experts say the most effective way to protect users’ data is for online pharmacies that sell abortion medication to stop collecting and sharing health-related data.

Companies selling abortion pills should immediately stop sharing data with Google, said Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“Web developers may not have thought they were putting their users at risk by using Google Analytics and other third-party trackers,” Quintin said. “But with the current political climate, all websites, but especially websites with at-risk users, need to consider that helping Google, Facebook and others build up records of user behavior could have a potentially horrific outcome. You can't keep acting like Roe is still the law of the land.”

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

Update, Jan. 20, 2023: This story has been updated with additional comment from Google provided after publication.

by Bryant Furlow, New Mexico In Depth

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

Are you part of the Gallup-McKinley County Schools community? We’d like to hear from you.

Over the four academic years ending in spring 2020, Gallup-McKinley County Schools reported to New Mexico officials that it had expelled students at least 211 times, far more often than school districts in the rest of the state.

Yet on Jan. 9, the district’s superintendent told school board members it had expelled just over a dozen students over the past seven years. He called a New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica analysis spotlighting the district’s high expulsion rates, published in December, “completely false.”

“Being expelled from school is very, very rare in Gallup-McKinley County Schools,” Superintendent Mike Hyatt told the five elected board members. “Only 15 students have actually been expelled from GMCS in the last seven years.” Those expulsions stemmed from serious infractions including possession of drugs, firearms and a knife, physical and sexual attacks, and a stabbing, he said.

Gallup-McKinley’s own discipline data, reported to the state Public Education Department each year, contradicts Hyatt’s assertions.

The district, which enrolls about a quarter of New Mexico’s Native students, was responsible for at least three-quarters of Native expulsions statewide during the four-year period, according to the analysis.

Hyatt’s figure was also much lower than what the district reported to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in recent years.

He didn’t explain how he arrived at the figure he cited or the racial or ethnic breakdown of the students involved. Nor did he respond to requests for comment or disclose written materials from his report to the board, which the news organizations requested.

School board members did not ask Hyatt any questions. They unanimously voted to approve his report as a show of their support.

Statewide, Native American students were expelled over the four-year period far more often than any other group and at least four times as often as white students. Gallup-McKinley was responsible for most of that disparity, according to the news outlets’ analysis. The district’s annual expulsion rate was 4.6 per 1,000 students — at least 10 times as high as the rest of the state.

Native Students Face Harsher Punishment Across New Mexico

Native students in New Mexico experience higher annual rates of expulsions and incidents involving police than white students. In Gallup-McKinley, students across the board are punished more harshly than those in the rest of the state, but the large Native student body is still disciplined at higher rates than white students.

(Source: ProPublica analysis of New Mexico Public Education Department STARS data. Chart by Joel Jacobs.)

About three-quarters of Gallup-McKinley’s roughly 12,000 students are Native American, most of them Navajo. It has the largest Native enrollment of any public school district in the United States, according to federal figures.

In his comments to the board, Hyatt distanced himself from disciplinary decisions, noting that the vast majority are handled by teachers and principals. “They’re falsely attacking our staff, our teachers, our administration,” he said of the news organizations. “They’re saying that they are making racial decisions when they implement discipline.”

Hyatt told the board that the district has “cut in half” its discipline referrals. He did not respond to the news outlets’ questions about what time period that was based on or the types of student discipline it included.

His claim that the district had expelled just 15 students in seven years could stem from a new definition of expulsion recently adopted by the district. Student behavior handbooks reviewed for recent academic years, including 2021-22, defined expulsion as the removal of a student from school for 90 days or longer.

The handbook for the current school year defines expulsion as a “permanent” removal. However, that change would not affect the number of expulsions the district reported in prior years.

The news outlets asked Hyatt in an email if the district had retroactively used the new definition to arrive at the lower figure. He did not respond.

School districts are free to develop their own discipline policies. But they all report infractions and punishments to the state via a centralized system. The state uses that data to track racial disparities among special education students, as required by federal law.

Most of the expulsions Gallup-McKinley reported to the state for the four years analyzed by the news outlets listed a duration of 90 days. More than 50 expulsions were longer than 90 days, including roughly two dozen with a duration of 365 days.

At the school board meeting, Hyatt suggested that discipline data reported to the state can be slipshod but said he “wouldn’t go into” the details other than to say errors sometimes happen. “As far as data, there’s no set, hard-and-fast way you have to submit something,” he said.

That’s not entirely true. The state Public Education Department provides a user’s manual that details what districts must report and how to do so. Asked about that, Hyatt did not reply.

He acknowledged at the board meeting that he had refused to speak with the news organizations about student discipline, though he also complained that he was not given a chance to respond before the story was published in the Gallup Independent.

New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica repeatedly sought interviews with Hyatt over most of the last year. He was copied on nearly 100 emails between the news organizations and his staff. More than a month before the story was published, he was provided with a detailed list of findings and invited to respond or correct any inaccuracies. He sought no corrections from the news organizations before or after the story’s publication.

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Students in Gallup-McKinley schools faced 735 disciplinary incidents involving law enforcement, according to the news organizations’ analysis. That amounts to a rate nearly four times as high as the rest of the state.

Hyatt said that was “outlandish.” He claimed the story “tries to paint the picture” that “we call the police all the time and have students arrested.”

He said schools involve the police only when there are “life and safety issues,” when officials need to turn over illegal drugs seized from students “or if there’s other types of things that we notice where there may be something else the police need to be notified about.”

The district’s reports to the state included cases in which law enforcement, including juvenile probation officers, were called for infractions such as disorderly conduct and tobacco use.

Law enforcement was involved in 193 incidents involving Native students accused of disorderly conduct from 2016-17 to 2019-20. About 9 in 10 of those incidents occurred at Gallup-McKinley schools, records show.

Hyatt also claimed that the disciplinary experience of a seventh grade student profiled in the article wasn’t accurately reported. The news organizations obtained the child’s records with permission of his grandmother to verify his account.

Hyatt suggested the child attended summer school in 2022, which his grandmother disputed. “I asked them if he could go online [during his expulsion period] and then asked if he could go to summer school,” she said. “We were denied.”

The child is now repeating seventh grade after missing too many days last year.

Joel Jacobs contributed reporting.

by Catherine Rentz

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Two years ago, ProPublica showcased the remarkable tale of a doctor who saved physical evidence from more than 2,000 rape exams starting in the 1970s, years before police began to preserve forensic DNA. Baltimore County police tested just a tiny portion of the samples decades later and solved more than 80 cold cases; they made dozens of arrests and exposed serial rapists, including a man who assaulted at least 25 women and murdered one. The evidence also exonerated an innocent man and gave survivors life-changing closure.

Baltimore County law enforcement could have prioritized testing such a fruitful trove. Instead, it falls through loopholes in laws meant to preserve rape kit evidence and expedite testing.

Each year, the evidence saved by the doctor in the form of glass slides has been excluded from a state-mandated inventory of untested rape kits. A police spokesperson said they did not list the evidence because they were not in possession of it at the time. The slides were collected and stored at the hospital where the doctor worked, the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, before the current standardized sexual assault examination system. The slides are also excluded from a 2019 state law that mandates testing for most newer kits.

Though the samples have been tested in fits and starts over the past two decades, those from about 1,800 cases remain untested and off the books.

Now, Maryland’s new attorney general and several other officials are looking for ways to safeguard the collection, incorporate it into yearly inventories and oversee its processing amid growing concerns of its vulnerability.

“I am concerned that evidence from approximately 1,800 sexual assault exams has not yet been processed and am committed to ensuring that this evidence is protected from destruction,” the recently sworn-in Attorney General Anthony Brown wrote in a statement.

Zenita Wickham Hurley, an attorney in Brown’s office who chairs the state committee overseeing Maryland’s untested rape kit inventory, said the group originally advised police to only catalog evidence they had collected. But she said her panel is in discussions with police officials regarding their progress in testing the hospital slides and “the appropriateness of increased state oversight of this evidence.”

She credited ProPublica’s reporting for helping to shed light upon the importance of the trove and said that going forward, the committee will be working to increase transparency and oversight of the testing and setting up legal agreements or legislative amendments to protect the slides.

Shelly Hettleman, a state senator from Baltimore County who has led major legislative efforts involving the preservation and testing of rape case evidence, is working to secure either legislation or a legal agreement with the hospital to make sure none of the remaining slides are destroyed. “I am very interested in making sure those slides have legal protection,” she said.

The law should be clarified either through amendment or regulation to protect the slides, and in the meantime, law enforcement and the hospital should commit to preserving them, said Lisae Jordan, executive director of the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault. “The slides are rape kits: They contain evidence collected from the bodies of sexual assault survivors and were retained to help determine who committed a rape. … Any destruction of the slides would be contrary to the spirit of the law and possibly the letter of the law.”

A Baltimore County police spokesperson wrote to ProPublica that once the slides are in their possession, they are handled under “the same investigative guidelines as other Sexual Assault biological evidence.”

Baltimore County Executive John A. Olszewski Jr., who has authority over the Police Department and just replaced its chief, said: “Our administration remains committed to doing everything we can to ensure victims of sexual assault receive the support they deserve and that law enforcement effectively utilizes every resource at their disposal to deliver justice. While we are proud to say that Baltimore County has made improvements, we know that we still have farther to go and welcome additional state support to expand and improve testing progress. Moving forward, we are focused on making sure Baltimore County’s next police chief makes this critical work a top priority for years to come.”

Nineteen states and Washington, D.C., have eliminated their rape kit backlog, according to the national advocacy group Joyful Heart. Maryland’s most recent audit of untested rape kits showed it had about 7,000 (not including slides from the 1,800 hospital cases that are not in the inventory). That would place it near the top in the nation behind California, Texas and North Carolina for untested rape evidence, though many states still have no public inventory.

The Maryland state legislature passed an audit law in 2015 because before that, many police departments refused to count and disclose rape kits. Getting police to comply with the law is still a challenge, Hurley said, despite the evidence being “one of our most critical tools for securing justice for survivors, holding perpetrators accountable and protecting public safety.”

The Baltimore County Police Department also has a long history of destroying rape case evidence. The department used to discard rape kits as early as a year after the exam, citing limited and costly storage space, though officials never put a dollar figure on such storage (a rape kit is the size of a legal envelope, and researchers have found that not testing kits is far more expensive and harmful to public safety). The state legislature mandated a 20-year retention of rape kits in 2017.

Dr. Rudiger Breitenecker had several thousand forensic samples he had saved from over 2,000 exams when he retired in 1997. His two-pronged preservation system of saving multiple glass slides and frozen glass tubes from each exam led to freezers and cabinets full of evidence. Each sample was carefully labeled and documented in logbooks.

The new rape kit system that replaced the doctor’s did not include frozen tubes or retaining the specimens stored at the hospital. Everything would henceforth be sent to the police.

The hospital sent all of the stored frozen tubes over to police headquarters, but it retained the glass slides. The police did not keep the tubes frozen, which the doctor later said would have ruined them. However the forensic lab director at the time said police transferred the frozen tubes to sterile material and stored them at room temperature.

It is unclear what was salvaged from the tubes. The police have been doing their own investigation of what remains from the doctor’s savings and what happened in its own lab decades ago. A Police Department spreadsheet documenting their findings from what the doctor had saved shows only about 50 cases with some vaginal wash material in police storage. Police have not responded to questions about what happened with the rest. Hettleman told ProPublica she did not know of the frozen tubes before our questions.

In 2019, the county police announced a renewed effort to test the doctor’s evidence thanks to private funding. But COVID-19-related delays and a deluge of DNA at private and local government labs have slowed the process.

The survivor community is making a renewed push to test the evidence now that the Attorney General’s Office has concluded a four-year investigation into the Archdiocese of Baltimore. The office identified 158 priests accused of sexually abusing and physically torturing more than 600 victims over the past 80 years.

Among the “credibly accused” is a late priest, Anthony Joseph Maskell, who worked as a counselor at Archbishop Keough High School and served as a Baltimore County police chaplain in the 1970s. The archdiocese has so far paid $462,000 to 16 of Maskell’s abuse victims, according to the Baltimore Banner. As chronicled in the 2017 Netflix series “The Keepers,” former Keough students said they were also abused by police officers he brought into the school.

The doctor’s slides stand as the last remaining evidence from sexual assault going back to the 1970s. Many of the victims did not get rape exams or report to law enforcement. Most victims of sexual assault do not report to police, and many clergy survivors said their lives were threatened. Now, survivors wonder whether other victims of their same predators went to the rape care center at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center while Breitenecker was collecting evidence.

Recent research shows sex offenders are far more serial than previously thought; they also often switch victim types between strangers and acquaintances, young and old and Black and white more than previously assumed.

Though it would require genealogy testing, as the vast majority of the accused men were never arrested, survivors wonder whether the slides might identify former clergy and Baltimore County police.

“I am starting to question whether the Baltimore County police, who have jurisdiction over this DNA evidence, is the right place to be deciding whether or not these cases actually get investigated,” Laura Neuman, a survivor whose attacker has shown up 11 times so far in the hospital slide cases, said in a recent WBAL radio show discussing clergy abuse. Neuman has lobbied local and state officials for quicker DNA testing for survivors, some of whom have since died. “Because we know when we investigate them, we get resolution. We know that cases get solved.”

Former Keough student and survivor Jean Hargadon Wehner spoke about the abuse she suffered by Maskell and police officers in “The Keepers.” Of the Police Department, she asked: “How are they choosing which ones they are going to be testing? And who is observing that decision? I think it is important that there is no bias.”

In response to concerns of bias, Erica Palmisano, a Baltimore County spokesperson, said, “Investigations can and will be based on cases no matter who may be involved, and the county is willing to utilize outside support where appropriate.” She added that the county executive’s current search for a permanent chief of police will be driven in part by a commitment to sustained progress in sexual assault investigations.

Baltimore County police released on Wednesday their first website detailing their sexual assault kit workflow and statistics. The site does not include the evidence saved by the doctor. A spokesperson said police are considering doing so in the future.

Survivors seeking more information about their untested rape kit in Maryland can call the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault at 833-364-0046 or email notification@mcasa.org. The Baltimore County Police Department Special Victims Unit Cold Case Squad can be reached at 410-887-2223.

by Richard A. Webster, Verite

This article was produced for Verite by Richard A. Webster, who covered the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office as part of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2021-22. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana has been unlawfully destroying its deputies’ disciplinary records for at least 10 years, according to records provided by state officials responsible for overseeing the retention of records by state, parish and local agencies.

The finding comes at a time when the sheriff’s office is facing multiple lawsuits involving allegations of excessive force, racial discrimination and wrongful death at the hands of Jefferson Parish deputies. Attorneys have accused Sheriff Joe Lopinto of failing to discipline deputies and a lack of transparency when it comes to releasing records that might shed light on their history of complaints and disciplinary action.

The illegal destruction of disciplinary records can make it harder to hold deputies accountable in a court of law or track problem officers moving from department to department, said Sam Walker, emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

The sheriff’s office was recently the subject of a year-long investigation by ProPublica and WWNO/WRKF, which found that JPSO rarely sustains complaints against its deputies. The sheriff’s office refused to provide the news organizations with copies of unsustained complaints, calling it overly burdensome and an invasion of privacy. The agency said it couldn’t even provide the number of complaints filed, stating such a number “does not exist.”

Like all public agencies, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office is required by law to secure approval from the Louisiana State Archives, a division of the Secretary of State’s Office, before destroying its public records. It also is required to secure approval for policies, or schedules, dictating how long public records are to be retained before they are eligible for disposal.

The sheriff’s office failed to do either, records show. The only JPSO records retention policy on file with the state concerns body-worn and vehicle-mounted cameras. That was approved in November. The sheriff has not sought approval for retention policies concerning any other public record, including disciplinary files, according to the state archives.

As for securing permission to destroy public records, state archivist Catherine Newsome said, “We do not have any disposal requests on file for JPSO.” The state archives maintains records of disposal requests for 10 years.

Newsome said the archives conduct “ongoing outreach” with agencies throughout the state regarding records retention policies, but there is little more they can do.

“We’re not a law enforcement or compliance agency. We don’t have any stick,” Newsome said. “There’s nothing in any of the statutes that say, ‘If an agency doesn’t do this within 30 days, the secretary can fine them $500 or penalize them.’ It is incumbent upon the agencies themselves to comply with these statutes.”

There are more than 4,000 state, parish and local agencies that must comply with state retention records law. The state archives have only four data analysts and a supervisor to handle the workload, making it extremely difficult for them to ensure every agency is following the law, Newsome said.

Destroying, damaging, altering or removing public records “required to be preserved in any public office or by any person or public officer” is punishable by up to a year in prison, a fine of up to $1,000 or both.

JPSO attorney Danny Martiny said the agency could not comment because of pending litigation. The sheriff’s office has denied all wrongdoing in court filings.

“Because They Are Expunged”

The records retention issue was recently raised as part of a federal civil rights lawsuit filed against Lopinto and seven deputies, among others, by the family of 16-year-old Eric Parsa in New Orleans federal court. The teenager died in January 2020 after sheriff’s deputies attempted to restrain him outside the Westgate Mall in Metairie. Parsa had a violent meltdown caused by his severe autism, according to the lawsuit. The suit asserted that one of the deputies, who weighed more than 300 pounds, sat on him for at least nine minutes.

The coroner ruled the teen’s death an accident as a result of excited delirium, with “prone positioning” as a contributing factor.

When attorneys for the family deposed Deputy Nick Vega, one of two deputies accused in the lawsuit of sitting on Parsa prior to his death, they asked him about his disciplinary history. Vega referred to several complaints that had not been revealed to the family’s attorneys during discovery, as required by law.

JPSO’s standard operating policy states that disciplinary records will be maintained for three years. After that period has expired, they will be “automatically expunged on a monthly basis from the date of complaint” for internal affairs cases and “citizen complaints and the date of occurrence” for disciplinary reports. The records will not be deleted if litigation has been filed against an employee, or if a court orders certain records to be preserved, according to the policy.

Though the sheriff’s office has an internal policy, the law requires it to submit that policy to the state for approval, which it has not done. And as the plaintiffs later noted in a court filing, automatic expungement — without first seeking state approval — is also against the law.

In October, Andrew Clarke and William Most, attorneys representing the Parsa family, filed a motion seeking court sanctions against the sheriff’s office for the destruction of disciplinary records. Beyond the apparent state law violations, they claim the sheriff’s office also violated a 2020 state court order the family secured mandating that it maintain all records relevant to the case.

“But despite all this, JPSO did not stop the destruction of officer disciplinary records. It was not until nearly a year later — after the January 2021 filing of this lawsuit — that JPSO began preserving disciplinary records,” the attorneys wrote.

The lawsuit claims the sheriff’s negligence in handling public records speaks to a more systemic problem of failing to “properly supervise, discipline or otherwise hold accountable deputies who failed to comply with the law.”

“Their disciplinary history may show a history of excessive restraint or force, or episodes casting doubt on credibility,” the attorneys wrote. “That history is now unavailable because JPSO destroyed it.”

In a response filed with the court, JPSO claimed it was not ordered or obligated to stop destroying disciplinary records prior to the lawsuit being filed in January 2021. Further, the agency said “to ensure that any relevant deputy was not subject to” Internal Affairs complaints, “the Sheriff had an officer review attendance records to confirm that none was absent due to suspension, which he argues proves no significant disciplinary action near or after the incident.”

The sheriff’s office accused the family of filing the motion for “harassment purposes.”

U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna Phillips Currault in a November ruling found that JPSO should have known that “evidence regarding the disciplinary and training histories of the officers involved in the incident” leading to Parsa’s death “would be relevant to potential future litigation” and had the “duty to preserve that evidence” by March 2020 at the latest. However, the family failed to prove JPSO destroyed evidence in “bad faith” or with a “desire to suppress the truth.” They also failed to prove that evidence relevant to the case had been lost, she stated in denying the request for sanctions.

Ashonta Wyatt, a leader in Jefferson Parish’s Black community who has pushed for reforms of the sheriff’s office, said the real problem with the agency is that it operates free of oversight.

“Who governs them? Who holds them to account?” Wyatt said of the sheriff’s office. “It’s not like you can go to a mayor, like you can in New Orleans, where the mayor is the governing person for the chief of police. There’s no governing body for them. They operate on an island.”

Other Large Agencies Keep Records for Far Longer

The New Orleans Police Department’s disciplinary records are “effectively retained forever,” according to NOPD’s Public Affairs Division.

“Our state-approved record retention states ‘active + 10 years,’ defining ‘active’ to be as long as the department exists, meaning these records should be kept until 10 years after NOPD no longer exists,” the division stated in an emailed response. NOPD secured approval from the state for its policy, along with the destruction of any documents.

The Louisiana State Police doesn’t dispose of disciplinary records until one year after the end of someone’s employment, according to a September report by the Louisiana Legislative Auditor entitled “Louisiana State Police: Comparison with Law Enforcement Agencies in Southern States.” The Texas Highway Patrol keeps them for five years after the end of a person’s employment, the Alabama Highway Patrol for six years and the South Carolina Highway Patrol for 15.

Emily Dixon, a coauthor of the auditor’s report, said securing state approval for the preservation and disposal of disciplinary records is vital to public safety given deputies or officers might move from parish to parish.

by Asia Fields, Mary Hudetz, Logan Jaffe and Ash Ngu

Museums and other American institutions hold the remains of more than 100,000 Native American individuals and several hundred thousand funerary objects, despite a 1990 law requiring that they be “expeditiously” returned to tribes.

ProPublica reported on how institutions amassed these remains in the context of violent colonization and created a tool allowing readers to explore the data.

We’d like to hear from you to further our reporting. We’re interested in learning:

• If institutions have reported incorrect data on human remains or funerary objects subject to NAGPRA.
• What’s happened behind the scenes at institutions, especially private ones, that has prevented repatriation.
• How institutions are responding to reporting from ProPublica and other outlets.

We’re also interested in hearing from our Indigenous readers, whether it’s feedback about our project, personal stories about repatriation or ideas for future reporting.

If you have a story to share or question to ask, we invite you to fill out our form.

by Asia Fields, Mary Hudetz, Logan Jaffe and Ash Ngu

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our other stories about repatriation.

When ProPublica set out to report on Native American remains and cultural items held by U.S. institutions, we knew we would need to listen closely to Indigenous people and gather feedback.

Repatriation can be a sensitive topic. Museums, universities and agencies in the United States hold the remains of more than 100,000 people and several hundred thousand funerary objects, a legacy of looting and the displacement of Native Americans during North America’s violent colonization.

“In life, they were not respected. They were forced to march. Removed,” said Danelle Gutierrez, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Big Pine Paiute Tribe of the Owens Valley. “Even in death, they aren’t respected.”

We heard similar sentiments from many Indigenous people. In May, we published a post inviting people to share what they knew, and sent it to hundreds of tribal leaders and historic preservation officers, as well as museum workers. We also showed tribal representatives an early version of our interactive tool and collected their feedback.

We heard some common questions about our reporting process, so we’ve created this post to answer them. If you have additional feedback, we’d like to hear from you. If you want to learn more about our specific efforts, we’re also happy to answer questions.

Why did ProPublica decide to report on repatriation?

ProPublica journalists Mary Hudetz (Apsaalooke/Crow), Logan Jaffe and Ash Ngu were interested in investigating whether the promises of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, considered landmark human rights legislation, had been fulfilled.

Answering this question was consistent with ProPublica’s mission to investigate issues and hold powerful institutions and people accountable, with the goal of creating real-world impact. The journalists, along with others across ProPublica, spent almost two years working to understand the complexities and failures of NAGPRA. They plan to continue this reporting this year.

What are ProPublica’s intentions in reporting on repatriation?

From the outset of our reporting, it was clear that NAGPRA was not meeting its objectives. We wanted to understand why and what had happened in the 30-plus years since its passage. We’ve created an interactive tool that shows each institution’s progress — or lack of progress — on repatriation. The stories in this series and this tool reveal the scope of the failure of museums, universities and others to return human remains and objects.

We hope this tool is helpful to anyone interested in comparing institutions’ progress and to tribes and organizations seeking to facilitate repatriation. It also includes information about which institutions still have control of human remains that may be connected to specific tribes.

Like all of ProPublica’s journalism, the Repatriation Project does not advocate for specific reforms.

Why does ProPublica think its work can lead to change when Indigenous people have worked on repatriation for decades?

Tribal representatives, including some of those who informed our stories, advocated for the creation of NAGPRA and have pressured institutions to adhere to it since. For decades, they’ve testified in front of Congress, protested and worked with limited funding to reclaim their ancestors’ remains and dignity. We hope our reporting will encourage broader awareness of the slow progress of repatriation and those responsible for fixing it.

How did ProPublica incorporate community feedback in The Repatriation Project?

There are diverse viewpoints among and within the nearly 600 federally recognized Native American and Alaska Native tribes and villages, Native Hawaiian organizations and hundreds of tribes without federal recognition.

We received a wide range of feedback, especially after showing our interactive tool to 14 tribal representatives and several repatriation experts and museum officials. Some tribal leaders agreed the information should be published as a way to hold institutions accountable. Others regarded repatriation as a private matter within their communities.

We incorporated what we heard in ways that aligned with our journalistic mission. We also included important context and precise language, such as clarifying the limitations of the data — it’s reported by the institutions themselves — and what it means to “return” human remains.

We welcome additional feedback about the project.

How did ProPublica get access to the data on repatriation? Is this information public?

The data itself is not new, but the way we combined and visualized it is.

The inventory data that ProPublica used is public and is maintained by the National Park Service’s National NAGPRA Program. The program is only able to look up data by institution, rather than by tribe. We supplemented this data with information about tribes to which institutions made human remains available. We did this using notices that institutions publish in the Federal Register to notify tribes of human remains that they are making available for return.

You can read more about the data.

How accurate is the data on repatriation?

The inventory data was obtained from the National NAGPRA Program on Dec. 9. The amount of unrepatriated Native American remains reported by institutions is a minimum estimate of individuals, and institutions frequently adjust these numbers when they reinventory groups of remains. Some institutions that are subject to NAGPRA have also entirely failed to report the remains in their possession. As a result, the numbers provided are best taken as estimates.

If you work for an institution and believe any particular piece of data is incorrect, please email repatriation@propublica.org.

Is ProPublica profiting from The Repatriation Project?

No. ProPublica is a nonprofit organization, meaning that we are primarily supported by donations and grants. We don’t charge people to access our stories, which can be read for free on our website, or even republished at no charge under a Creative Commons license.

What do you plan to do next regarding repatriation?

ProPublica will publish additional stories about repatriation over the coming weeks, as well as a series of newsletters, which you can sign up for here. We plan to continue reporting on the topic.

If you have information about a particular institution or issues with repatriation, we’d like to hear from you. We’re especially interested in hearing Indigenous readers’ reactions to or personal stories about repatriation. We may feature these in future articles, but will make sure we have permission first.

How can I get in touch with ProPublica about repatriation?

You can reach us using this form or by contacting repatriation@propublica.org or 206-419-7338 (calls or Signal messages). If you would prefer to use an encrypted app, see our advice at propublica.org/tips. We won’t publish anything you write without getting your permission first.

We also welcome additional questions and may update this page as we receive more.

by Ash Ngu and Andrea Suozzo

In 1990, Congress passed a law recognizing the unequal treatment of Native American remains and set up a process for tribes to request their return from museums and other institutions that had them. The law, known as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act or NAGPRA, sought to address this human rights issue by giving Indigenous peoples a way to reclaim their dead.

But 33 years after the law’s passage, at least half of the remains of more than 210,000 Native Americans have yet to be returned. Tribes have struggled to reclaim them in part because of a lack of federal funding for repatriation and because institutions face little to no consequences for violating the law or dragging their feet.

Our database allows you to search for information on the roughly 600 federally funded institutions that reported having such remains to the Department of the Interior. While the data is self-reported, it is a starting point for understanding the damage done by generations of Americans who stole, collected and displayed the remains and possessions of the continent’s Indigenous peoples — and the work done by tribes and institutions to repatriate those Native ancestors since.

Search for institutions holding Native American remains and tribes seeking to reclaim them on our repatriation database.

by Logan Jaffe, Mary Hudetz and Ash Ngu, ProPublica, and Graham Lee Brewer, NBC News

As the United States pushed Native Americans from their lands to make way for westward expansion throughout the 1800s, museums and the federal government encouraged the looting of Indigenous remains, funerary objects and cultural items. Many of the institutions continue to hold these today — and in some cases resist their return despite the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

“We never ceded or relinquished our dead. They were stolen,” James Riding In, then an Arizona State University professor who is Pawnee, said of the unreturned remains.

ProPublica this year is investigating the failure of NAGPRA to bring about the expeditious return of human remains by federally funded universities and museums. Our reporting, in partnership with NBC News, has found that a small group of institutions and government bodies has played an outsized role in the law’s failure.

Sign up for ProPublica’s Repatriation Project newsletter to get the stories in this series as soon as they publish and learn more about our reporting.

Ten institutions hold about half of the Native American remains that have not been returned to tribes. These include old and prestigious museums with collections taken from ancestral lands not long after the U.S. government forcibly removed Native Americans from them, as well as state-run institutions that amassed their collections from earthen burial mounds that had protected the dead for hundreds of years. Two are arms of the U.S. government: the Interior Department, which administers the law, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest federally owned utility.

An Interior Department spokesperson said it complies with its legal obligations and that its bureaus (such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Land Management) are not required to begin the repatriation of “culturally unidentifiable human remains” unless a tribe or Native Hawaiian organization makes a formal request.

Tennessee Valley Authority Archaeologist and Tribal Liaison Marianne Shuler said the agency is committed to “partnering with federally recognized tribes as we work through the NAGPRA process.”

The law required institutions to publicly report their holdings and to consult with federally recognized tribes to determine which tribes human remains and objects should be repatriated to. Institutions were meant to consider cultural connections, including oral traditions as well as geographical, biological and archaeological links.

Yet many institutions have interpreted the definition of “cultural affiliation” so narrowly that they’ve been able to dismiss tribes’ connections to ancestors and keep remains and funerary objects. Throughout the 1990s, institutions including the Ohio History Connection and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville thwarted the repatriation process by categorizing everything in their collections that might be subject to the law as “culturally unidentifiable.”

Ohio History Connection’s director of American Indian relations, Alex Wesaw, who is also a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, said that the institution’s original designation of so many collections as culturally unidentifiable may have “been used as a means to keep people on shelves for research and for other things that our institution just doesn’t allow anymore.”

In a statement provided to ProPublica, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville spokesperson said that the university is “actively building relationships with and consulting with Tribal communities.”

ProPublica found that the American Museum of Natural History has not returned some human remains taken from the Southwest, arguing that they are too old to determine which tribes — among dozens in the region — would be the correct ones to repatriate to. In the Midwest, the Illinois State Museum for decades refused to establish a cultural affiliation for Native American human remains that predated the arrival of Europeans in the region in 1673, citing no reliable written records during what archaeologists called the “pre-contact” or “prehistoric” period.

Walter Echo-Hawk, a Pawnee attorney with the Native American Rights Fund, testifies at a congressional hearing in July 1989 on the issue of repatriation. At the time, Echo-Hawk said, “Desecration and expropriation of Native graves, dead bodies and associated burial goods is clearly the most grisly and frightening problem confronting American Indians today.” (Ed Lallo/Getty Images)

The American Museum of Natural History declined to comment for this story.

In a statement, Illinois State Museum Curator of Anthropology Brooke Morgan said that “archaeological and historical lines of evidence were privileged in determining cultural affiliation” in the mid-1990s, and that “a theoretical line was drawn in 1673.” Morgan attributed the museum’s past approach to a weakness of the law that she said did not encourage multiple tribes to collectively claim cultural affiliation, a practice she said is common today.

As of last month, about 200 institutions — including the University of Kentucky’s William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology and the nonprofit Center for American Archeology in Kampsville, Illinois — had repatriated none of the remains of more than 14,000 Native Americans in their collections. Some institutions with no recorded repatriations possess the remains of a single individual; others have as many as a couple thousand.

A University of Kentucky spokesperson told ProPublica the William S. Webb Museum “is committed to repatriating all Native American ancestral remains and funerary belongings, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony to Native nations” and that the institution has recently committed $800,000 toward future efforts.

Jason L. King, the executive director of the Center for American Archeology, said that the institution has complied with the law: “To date, no tribes have requested repatriation of remains or objects from the CAA.”

When the federal repatriation law passed in 1990, the Congressional Budget Office estimated it would take 10 years to repatriate all covered objects and remains to Native American tribes. Today, many tribal historic preservation officers and NAGPRA professionals characterize that estimate as laughable, given that Congress has never fully funded the federal office tasked with overseeing the law and administering consultation and repatriation grants. Author Chip Colwell, a former curator at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, estimates repatriation will take at least another 70 years to complete. But the Interior Department, now led by the first Native American to serve in a cabinet position, is seeking changes to regulations that would push institutions to complete repatriation within three years. Some who work on repatriation for institutions and tribes have raised concerns about the feasibility of this timeline.

Our investigation included an analysis of records from more than 600 institutions; interviews with more than 100 tribal leaders, museum professionals and others; and the review of nearly 30 years of transcripts from the federal committee that hears disputes related to the law.

D. Rae Gould, executive director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University and a member of the Hassanamisco Band of Nipmucs of Massachusetts, said institutions that don’t want to repatriate often claim there’s inadequate evidence to link ancestral human remains to any living people.

Gould said “one of the faults with the law” is that institutions, and not tribes, have the final say on whether their collections are considered culturally related to the tribes seeking repatriation. “Institutions take advantage of it,” she said.

View other stories in The Repatriation Project series here.

1. Amassing Remains

Some of the nation’s most prestigious museums continue to hold vast collections of remains and funerary objects that could be returned under NAGPRA.

Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, University of California, Berkeley and the Field Museum in Chicago each hold the remains of more than 1,000 Native Americans. Their earliest collections date back to the 19th and early 20th centuries, when their curators sought to amass encyclopedic collections of human remains.

Many anthropologists from that time justified large-scale collecting as a way to preserve evidence of what they wrongly believed was an extinct race of “Moundbuilders” — one that predated and was unrelated to Native Americans. Later, after that theory proved to be false, archaeologists still excavated gravesites under a different racist justification: Many scientists who embraced the U.S. eugenics movement used plundered craniums for studies that argued Native Americans were inferior to white people based on their skull sizes.

These colonialist myths were also used to justify the U.S. government’s brutality toward Native Americans and fuel much of the racism that they continue to face today.

“Native Americans have always been the object of study instead of real people.” —Shannon O’Loughlin, executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs and a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma

“Native Americans have always been the object of study instead of real people,” said Shannon O’Loughlin, chief executive of the Association on American Indian Affairs and a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

As the new field of archaeology gained momentum in the 1870s, the Smithsonian Institution struck a deal with U.S. Army Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to pay each of his soldiers up to $500 — or roughly $14,000 in 2022 dollars — for items such as clothing, weapons and everyday tools sent back to Washington.

“We are desirous of procuring large numbers of complete equipments in the way of dress, ornament, weapons of war” and “in fact everything bearing upon the life and character of the Indians,” Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian, wrote to Sherman on May 22, 1873.

The Smithsonian Institution today holds in storage the remains of roughly 10,000 people, more than any other U.S. museum. However, it reports its repatriation progress under a different law, the National Museum of the American Indian Act. And it does not publicly share information about what it has yet to repatriate with the same detail that NAGPRA requires of institutions it covers. Instead, the Smithsonian shares its inventory lists with tribes, two spokespeople told ProPublica.

Frederic Ward Putnam, who was appointed curator of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology in 1875, commissioned and funded excavations that would become some of the earliest collections at Harvard, the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum. He also helped establish the anthropology department and museum at UC Berkeley — which holds more human remains taken from Native American gravesites than any other U.S. institution that must comply with NAGPRA.

For the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Putnam commissioned the self-taught archaeologist Warren K. Moorehead to lead excavations in southern Ohio to take human remains and “relics” for display. Much of what Moorehead unearthed from Ohio’s Ross and Warren counties became founding collections of the Field Museum.

A few years after Moorehead’s excavations, the American Museum of Natural History co-sponsored rival expeditions to the Southwest; items were looted from New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon and shipped by train to New York. They remain premiere collections of the institution.

As of last month the Field Museum has returned to tribes legal control of 28% of the remains of 1,830 Native Americans it has reported to the National Park Service, which administers the law and keeps inventory data. It still holds at least 1,300 Native American remains.

In a statement, the Field Museum said that data from the park service is out of date. (The museum publishes separate data on its repatriation website that it says is frequently updated and more accurate.) A spokesperson told ProPublica that “all Native American human remains under NAGPRA are available for return.”

The museum has acknowledged that Moorehead’s excavations would not meet today’s standards. But the museum continues to benefit from those collections. Between 2003 and 2005, it accepted $400,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve its North American Ethnographic and Archaeological collection — including the material excavated by Moorehead — for future use by anthropologists and other researchers. That’s nearly four times more than it received in grants from the National Park Service during the same period to support its repatriation efforts under NAGPRA.

In a statement, the museum said it has the responsibility to care for its collections and that the $400,000 grant was “used for improved stewardship of objects in our care as well as organizing information to better understand provenance and to make records more publicly accessible.”

Records show the Field Museum has categorized all of its collections excavated by Moorehead as culturally unidentifiable. The museum said that in 1995, it notified tribes with historical ties to southern Ohio about those collections but did not receive any requests for repatriation or disposition. Helen Robbins, the museum’s director of repatriation, said that formally linking specific tribes with those sites is challenging, but that it may be possible after consultations with tribes.

The museum’s president and CEO, Julian Siggers, has criticized proposals intended to speed up repatriation. In March 2022, Siggers wrote to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland that if new regulations empowered tribes to request repatriations on the basis of geographical ties to collections rather than cultural ties, museums such as the Field would need more time and money to comply. ProPublica found that the Field Museum has received more federal money to comply with NAGPRA than any other institution in the country.

Robbins said that among the institution’s challenges to repatriation is a lack of funding and staff. “That being said,” added Robbins, “we recognize that much of this work has taken too long.”

View the data here.

2. Excavating Burial Mounds

From the 1890s through the 1930s, archaeologists carried out large-scale excavations of burial mounds throughout the Midwest and Southeast, regions where federal policy had forcibly pushed tribes from their land. Of the 10 institutions that hold the most human remains in the country, seven are in regions that were inhabited by Indigenous people with mound building cultures, ProPublica found.

Among them are the Ohio History Connection, the University of Kentucky’s William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the Illinois State Museum.

Archaeological research suggests that the oldest burial mounds were built roughly 11,000 years ago and that the practice lasted through the 1400s. The oral histories of many present-day tribes link their ancestors to earthen mounds. Their structures and purposes vary, but many include spaces for communal gatherings and platforms for homes and for burying the dead. But some institutions have argued these histories aren’t adequate proof that today’s tribes are the rightful stewards of the human remains and funerary objects removed from the mounds, which therefore should stay in museums.

Like national institutions, local museums likewise make liberal use of the “culturally unidentifiable” designation to resist returning remains. For example, in 1998 the Ohio Historical Society (now Ohio History Connection) categorized its entire collection, which today includes more than 7,100 human remains, as “culturally unidentifiable.” It has made available for return the remains of 17 Native Americans, representing 0.2% of the human remains in its collections.

“It’s tough for folks who worked in the field their entire career and who are coming at it more from a colonial perspective — that what you would find in the ground is yours,” said Wesaw of previous generations’ practices. “That’s not the case anymore. That’s not how we operate.”

For decades, Indigenous people in Ohio have protested the museum’s decisions, claiming in public meetings of the federal committee that oversees how the law is implemented that their oral histories trace back to mound-building cultures. As one commenter, Jean McCoard of the Native American Alliance of Ohio, pointed out in 1997, there are no federally recognized tribes in Ohio because they were forcibly removed. As a result, McCoard argued, archaeologists in the state have been allowed to disassociate ancestral human remains from living people without much opposition. Since the early 1990s, the Native American Alliance of Ohio has advocated for the reburial of all human remains held by Ohio History Connection. It has yet to happen.

Wesaw said that the museum is starting to engage more with tribes to return their ancestors and belongings. Every other month, the museum’s NAGPRA specialist— a newly created position that is fully dedicated to its repatriation work — convenes virtual meetings with leaders from many of the roughly 45 tribes with ancestral ties to Ohio.

“Since 1885, there have been a number of archaeologists that have made their careers on the backs of our ancestors pulled out of the ground or mounds. It’s really, truly heartbreaking when you think about that.” —Alex Wesaw, director of American Indian Relations at Ohio History Connection and a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians

But, Wesaw said, the challenges run deep.

“It’s an old museum,” said Wesaw. “Since 1885, there have been a number of archaeologists that have made their careers on the backs of our ancestors pulled out of the ground or mounds. It’s really, truly heartbreaking when you think about that.”

Moreover, ProPublica’s investigation found that some collections were amassed with the help of federal funding. The vast majority of NAGPRA collections held by the University of Kentucky’s William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology are from excavations funded by the federal government under the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration from the late 1930s into the 1940s. Kentucky’s rural and impoverished counties held burial mounds, and Washington funded excavations of 48 sites in at least 12 counties to create jobs for the unemployed.

More than 80% of the Webb Museum’s holdings that are subject to return under federal law originated from WPA excavations. The museum, which in 1996 designated every one of its collections as “culturally unidentifiable,” has yet to repatriate any of the roughly 4,500 human remains it has reported to the federal government. However, the museum has recently hired its first NAGPRA coordinator and renewed consultations with tribal nations after decades of avoiding repatriation. A spokesperson told ProPublica that one ongoing repatriation project at the museum will lead to the return of about 15% of the human remains in its collections.

In a statement, a museum spokesperson said that “we recognize the pain caused by past practices” and that the institution plans to commit more resources toward repatriation.

The University of Kentucky recently told ProPublica that it plans to spend more than $800,000 between 2023 and 2025 on repatriation, including the hiring of three more museum staff positions.

3. Establishing Connections to Tribes

In 2010, the Interior Department implemented a new rule that provided a way for institutions to return remains and items without establishing a cultural affiliation between present-day tribes and their ancestors. But, ProPublica found, some institutions have resisted doing so.

Experts say a lack of funding from Congress to the National NAGPRA Program has hampered enforcement of the law. The National Park Service was only recently able to fund one full-time staff position dedicated to investigating claims that institutions are not complying with the law; allegations can range from withholding information from tribes about collections, to not responding to consultation requests, to refusing to repatriate. Previously, the program relied on a part-time investigator.

Moreover, institutions that have violated the law have faced only minuscule fines, and some are not fined at all even after the Interior Department has found wrongdoing. Since 1990, the Interior Department has collected only $59,111.34 from 20 institutions for which it had substantiated allegations. That leaves tribal nations to shoulder the financial and emotional burden of the repatriation work.

The Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, a tribe in California, pressured UC Berkeley for years to repatriate more than a thousand ancestral remains, according to the tribe’s attorney. It finally happened in 2018 following a decade-long campaign that involved costly legal wrangling and travel back and forth to Berkeley by the tribes’ leaders.

“​​To me, there’s no money, there’s no dollar amount, on the work to be done. But the fact is, not every tribe has the same infrastructure and funding that others have,” said Nakia Zavalla, the cultural director for the tribe. “I really feel for those tribes that don’t have the funding, and they’re relying just on federal funds.”

A UC Berkeley spokesperson declined to comment on its interactions with the Santa Ynez Chumash, saying the school wants to prioritize communication with the tribe.

The University of Alabama Museums is among the institutions that have forced tribes into lengthy disputes over repatriation.

In June 2021, seven tribal nations indigenous to what is now the southeastern United States collectively asked the university to return the remains of nearly 6,000 of their ancestors. Their ancestors had been among more than 10,000 whose remains were unearthed by anthropologists and archaeologists between the 1930s and the 1980s from the second-largest mound site in the country. The site, colonially known as Moundville, was an important cultural and trade hub for Muskogean-speaking people between about 1050 and 1650.

An aerial photograph shows the Moundville site circa the 1930s (Alabama Department of Archives and History)

Tribes had tried for more than a decade to repatriate Moundville ancestors, but the university had claimed they were all “culturally unidentifiable.” Emails between university and tribal leaders in 2018 show that when the university finally agreed to begin repatriation, it insisted that before it could return the human remains it needed to re-inventory its entire Moundville collection — a process it said would take five years. The “re-inventory” would entail photographing and CT scanning human remains to collect data for future studies, which the tribes opposed.

“Our elders tell us that the Muskogean-speaking tribes are related to each other. We have a shared history of colonization and a shared history of rebuilding from it.” —Ian Thompson, tribal historic preservation officer with the Choctaw Nation

In October 2021, leaders from the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Chickasaw Nation, Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, and Seminole Tribe of Florida brought the issue to the federal NAGPRA Review Committee, which can recommend a finding of cultural affiliation that is not legally binding. (Disputes over these findings are relatively rare.) The tribal leaders submitted a 117-page document detailing how Muskogean-speaking tribes are related and how their shared history can be traced back to the Moundville area long before the arrival of Europeans.

“Our elders tell us that the Muskogean-speaking tribes are related to each other. We have a shared history of colonization and a shared history of rebuilding from it,” Ian Thompson, a tribal historic preservation officer with the Choctaw Nation, told the NAGPRA review committee in 2021.

The tribes eventually forced the largest repatriation in NAGPRA’s history. Last year, the university agreed to return the remains of 10,245 ancestors.

In a statement, a University of Alabama Museums spokesperson said, “To honor and preserve historical and cultural heritage, the proper care of artifacts and ancestral remains of Muskogean-speaking peoples has been and will continue to be imperative to UA.” The university declined to comment further “out of respect for the tribes,” but added that “we look forward to continuing our productive work” with them.

The University of Alabama Museums still holds the remains of more than 2,900 Native Americans.

4. Changing Institutional Will

Many tribal and museum leaders say they are optimistic that a new generation of archaeologists, as well as museum and institutional leaders, want to better comply with the law.

At the University of Oklahoma, for instance, new archaeology department hires were shocked to learn about their predecessors’ failures. Marc Levine, associate curator of archaeology at the university’s Sam Noble Museum, said that when he arrived in 2013, there was more than enough evidence to begin repatriation, but his predecessors hadn’t prioritized the work. Through collaboration with tribal nations, Levine has compiled evidence that would allow thousands of human remains to be repatriated — and NAGPRA work isn’t technically part of his job description. The university has no full-time NAGPRA coordinator. Still, Levine estimates that at the current pace, repatriating the university’s holdings could take another decade.

“You either want to do the right thing or you don’t. It’s an issue of dignity at this point.” —D. Rae Gould, executive director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University and member of the Hassanamisco Band of Nipmucs of Massachusetts

Prominent institutions such as Harvard have issued public apologies in recent years for past collection practices, even as criticism continues over their failure to complete the work of repatriation. (Harvard did not respond to multiple requests for comment).

Other institutions under fire, such as UC Berkeley, have publicly pledged to prioritize repatriation. And the Society for American Archaeology, a professional organization that argued in a 1986 policy statement that “all human remains should receive appropriate scientific study,” now recommends archaeologists obtain consent from descendant communities before conducting studies.

In October, the Biden administration proposed regulations that would eliminate “culturally unidentifiable” as a designation for human remains, among other changes. Perhaps most significantly, the regulations would direct institutions to defer to tribal nations’ knowledge of their customs, traditions and histories when making repatriation decisions.

But for people who have been doing the work since its passage, NAGPRA was never complicated.

“You either want to do the right thing or you don’t,” said Brown University’s Gould.

She added: “It’s an issue of dignity at this point.”

Opening slideshow images: Works Progress Administration workers excavate a Native American burial mound in Kentucky (University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center); an 1891 excavation at the site of the Hopewell Mounds in Ohio (Field Museum Archives via University of Nebraska-Lincoln Center for Digital Research in the Humanities Ohio Hopewell Digitization Project); an archaeological expedition at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico (American Museum of Natural History Library); a crew at a 1938 WPA excavation at a site known as Chiggerville in Kentucky in 1938 (William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology, University of Kentucky).

Illustrations by Weshoyot Alvitre for ProPublica.

Institution images: The American Museum of Natural History (Ben Hider/Getty Images), Harvard University (Daderot via Wikimedia), University of California, Berkeley (Justin Katigbak for ProPublica), Illinois State Museum (Mike Linksvayer/Flickr), University of Tennessee, Knoxville (sframephoto/Getty), Indiana University (Susan Vineyard/Getty)

Design and development by Anna Donlan.

Asia Fields and Brooke Stephenson contributed reporting.

Update, January 12, 2023: This story has been updated to include a statement from the University of Alabama Museums.

by Debbie Cenziper, ProPublica, and Will Fitzgibbon, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

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

The story started in a bustling port city in West Africa, where a prominent Lebanese businessman was accused by the U.S. government of funneling money to the terrorist group Hezbollah.

In sanctioning Ibrahim Taher, the Treasury Department made a rare reference in the eighth paragraph of a press release to an obscure and largely unregulated diplomatic arrangement that allows private citizens in their home countries to represent the economic and cultural interests of foreign governments. In exchange for their service, these honorary consuls receive some of the same coveted legal protections and privileges provided to career diplomats, including the ability to move bags across borders without inspection.

The centuries-old arrangement is now used by a majority of the world’s governments — big and small, rich and poor — including those in Africa, where the Treasury said Taher levied his honorary consul credentials to travel with “minimal” scrutiny as a financier of the terrorist organization. Taher has denied the government’s allegations.

In 2022, ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, in collaboration with dozens of media partners, investigated this shadowy world, finding corrupt, violent and dangerous consuls — including accused terrorist financiers and Kremlin loyalists — who have threatened the rule of law in the United States and abroad.

The governments of seven countries have so far announced reforms, investigations or other changes. That includes Latvia, which last month launched an investigation into an honorary consul after revelations of domestic violence, and Jordan, which ended the appointment of a long-serving honorary consul whose prior arrest in a corruption scandal was described in the ProPublica and ICIJ investigation.

All told, the news organizations’ investigation identified at least 500 current or former consuls who have been accused of crimes or embroiled in controversies.

Here are nine key documents used by the reporters to produce the first comprehensive account of exploitation by consuls and breakdowns in the system that empowers them.

Kremlin-Backed Political Party Registration (Montenegro)

In December 2017, Russia’s then-honorary consul in Montenegro, Boro Djukic, signed a registration document to form a hard-line, Kremlin-backed political party that sought to force the country’s withdrawal from NATO. Djukic’s aggressive role in Montenegro’s politics drew criticism because honorary consuls are supposed to be benign representatives of foreign governments, championing cultural and economic ties. Djukic lost his post in 2018 after about four years as consul. He could not be reached for comment; he previously defended his tenure as an honorary consul.

Court Records (Egypt)

Though no longer an honorary consul, Ladislav Otakar Skakal in 2017 smuggled more than 21,000 Egyptian antiquities, including coins, pots and a wooden coffin, in a diplomatic container to the Italian port city of Salerno, according to court records. The container, Egypt’s public prosecution office said in court records obtained by ProPublica and ICIJ, ensured “that it would not be opened or searched by the specialized employees of the Egyptian Customs Authority.” Italian authorities searched the container and discovered the relics only after a paperwork mistake. Skakal, who had been appointed an honorary consul by Italy, was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison. He is believed to be in Italy and could not be reached for comment.

Court Records (Guinea)

Last year, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned two prominent businessmen in Guinea, including Taher, for allegedly financing Hezbollah. Among other things, the U.S. government accused the men of traveling in 2020 to Lebanon on a special flight with a “large amount of money” that they claimed was for COVID-19 relief. The coronavirus had been used before as a cover for transferring funds from Guinea to Hezbollah, authorities said. Prosecutors in Guinea opened an investigation but later closed the inquiry without filing charges, according to court records. Both businessmen have denied wrongdoing.

Police Records (Spain)

In 2019, as part of a wider drug trafficking probe, police in Spain filed a memorandum to a judge referencing three honorary consuls suspected of laundering money for an accused drug trafficker. “Consuls act completely autonomously and are not controlled by the State they represent. … The Spanish government has no chance of intervening in their affairs,” investigators wrote. Authorities included a diagram of suspected money flows. The report was obtained by El Periodico and shared with ProPublica and ICIJ. The consuls, who deny wrongdoing, have not been charged.

Transcript of Undercover Operation (U.S. and Ghana)

In 2012, international arms broker Faouzi Jaber told undercover informants pretending to seek missiles and grenades for use against American forces that he could help them obtain honorary consul appointments. Jaber said he could make them a “consul in your country,” according to a transcript of the conversation recorded by U.S. investigators and described in a subsequent indictment. Jaber was extradited to the United States, where he pleaded guilty in 2017 to conspiring to support a terrorist group and was sentenced to prison. Jaber said he was under the influence of drugs at the time and had made a “once-in-a-lifetime mistake.”

Archival Records (Europe)

In 1927, Gustavo Guerrero, an expert on diplomatic privileges, recommended that honorary consuls “should no longer exist,” according to a 1926 report to the League of Nations as it debated the first-ever international agreement on consuls. Archived records show that most countries at the time objected to the recommendation. Almost a century later, honorary consuls remain popular agents of diplomacy.

Public Records Request (El Salvador)

El Salvador, like dozens of other countries, does not publish information about its honorary consuls. Reporters obtained the names of honorary consuls appointed by El Salvador through a public records request to the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

U.S. Army Archives

Terrorist groups and leaders of corrupt regimes have long leveraged honorary consuls as agents of disruption. In 1946, the U.S. Army published a report on German intelligence during and after World War II. German spies were “usually built into the diplomatic staff accredited to a neutral government, their leaders being camouflaged as honorary consuls or other functionaries,” the report said.

Intelligence Report (North Macedonia)

In a 2017 report, intelligence authorities in North Macedonia named two honorary consulates as “bases” for Russian espionage aimed at creating conflict in the Balkans. “The honorary consulates in Bitola and Ohrid represent intelligence bases from which the politics of RF [Russian Federation] are implemented in the Republic of Macedonia,” the report noted. The two honorary consuls who oversaw those offices have denied wrongdoing.

Reporting was contributed by Benedikt Strunz, Jan Strozyk, Jesús Albalat, Akoumba Diallo, Hala Nasreddine, Saska Cvetkovska, Dejan Milovic, Jimmy Alvarado and Maggie Michael.

by Peter Elkind

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After six years of failed efforts by the IRS, Justice Department and lawmakers, new legislation is expected to prevent the worst abuses of a tax-avoidance scheme that has cost the U.S. Treasury billions of dollars. Tucked into the massive, $1.7 trillion government spending bill signed into law by President Joe Biden on Dec. 29, a provision in the law seems poised to accomplish what thousands of audits, threats of hefty penalties and criminal prosecutions could not: shutting down a booming business in “syndicated conservation easements,” which exploit a charitable tax break that Congress established to preserve open land.

Under standard conservation easements, landowners give up development rights for their acreage, often an appealing, bucolic space. In return, they receive a charitable deduction equal to the property’s development value, and the public benefits by the preservation of the land, which in some cases is made available as a park.

But as ProPublica first described in 2017, aggressive promoters built a lucrative industry through “syndicated” deals. These promoters snatched up idle land (a long-vacant golf course near a trailer park, in one example examined by ProPublica) and hired an appraiser willing to claim that it had huge, previously unrecognized development value — perhaps for luxury vacation homes or a solar farm — which they contended made it worth many times its purchase price. The promoters then sold stakes in a massive conservation easement deduction to rich investors, who made a quick profit by claiming charitable write-offs that were four to six times their investment. The promoters reaped millions in fees.

The new measure will limit taxpayers’ deduction to two and a half times their investment. That will effectively eliminate the profits that drive syndicated deals while allowing traditional conservation easements to continue. “I don’t know how the industry moves forward after the new law,” said Sean Akins, an attorney with Covington & Burling who represents multiple syndication promoters.

The path to the new law was lengthy and winding. For years, syndicated easements seemed impervious to attempts to rein them in. Since late 2016, the IRS has attempted to stymie the deals, branding them as “abusive” and among “the worst of the worst tax scams.” The agency has challenged $21 billion in deductions claimed by 28,000 syndicated-easement investors, pursued scores of tax court cases and collaborated with the Justice Department in targeting top promoters with criminal charges and civil lawsuits.

Prominent lawmakers from both parties weighed in against the abuse and, starting in 2017, introduced legislation, called the Charitable Conservation Easement Program Integrity Act, to halt the practice. According to estimates by Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation, applying these limits to deals struck since December 2016, when the IRS first branded the practice improper, would generate an additional $12.5 billion for the U.S. Treasury through 2031.

The syndicators fought back so furiously and so effectively over multiple years that ProPublica published not one, but two stories describing how bulletproof the industry seemed. The promoters and their investors were undaunted by IRS threats. Syndication partnerships were so profitable that they set aside special “audit reserves” of as much as $1 million to do battle with the agency in tax court. Syndication firms and their newly formed Washington trade group, called the Partnership for Conservation, or P4C, spent more than $11 million, by ProPublica’s calculations, on lobbyists to protect their business before Congress. At one point, they went on the attack, seeking to strip the IRS of funds used to enforce the December 2016 notice that flagged profit-making syndicated deals as abusive and required participants to file forms reporting their involvement to the IRS.

The agency’s efforts did little to slow the volume of syndicated deals, according to congressional testimony by then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig in May 2022. He sounded a bit desperate when he told lawmakers: “We need congressional help.”

As Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., chair of the Senate Finance Committee, told ProPublica last June, “There is a tax shelter gold mine here, and they’re fighting very hard to protect it.” He added, “This is a textbook case of the power of lobbyists.”

By that point, the legislation targeting syndicated deals had been introduced, in one legislative chamber or another, eight times. A late-2021 strategy to include the syndication-killer language in Biden’s Build Back Better bill had unraveled at the hands of Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, then a Democrat, who demanded that it be stripped out as a condition of her critical vote to win passage of the larger measure. (Sinema did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment at the time.)

The tide finally turned last summer — without attracting much notice at the time. During a June 22 Senate Finance Committee markup on retirement legislation, Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., a longtime sponsor of the Integrity Act, identified the projected windfall from a clampdown on syndicated easements as a way to pay for a popular proposal enhancing benefits for disabled police, firefighters, paramedics and EMTs. That bipartisan legislation, months later, got added to the massive, must-pass government funding bill, where no single lawmaker had the power to strip it out.

A big concession sealed support for the deal: Daines and other backers agreed not to apply the law to transactions that date back to when the IRS flagged syndicated easements as abusive in 2016 (though the IRS can still pursue cases from back then). Instead the new limits apply only to transactions that occur after the law’s enactment. Along with a much smaller change exempting the measure from applying to historic buildings, this reduced the projected Treasury windfall to about $6.4 billion.

As the measure neared final passage in late December, Daines issued a statement: “It’s about time — for too long bad actors have abused the conservation easement program and ripped off the American people, but this fraud will now come to an end. I’m glad to have worked with my colleagues across the aisle to stop scam artists, promote true conservation, and save taxpayers billions of dollars.”

In an email to ProPublica, Rettig, whose term as IRS commissioner expired in November, called the new legislation “critical to the ongoing efforts of the IRS to stem the tide of abusive syndicated conservation easements.” He said the measure, combined with $80 billion in new funding for the resource-starved agency, “will hopefully allow the IRS compliance and taxpayer education efforts to catch up on abusive syndicated conservation easement transactions as well as other similarly important service and compliance functions.”

The IRS, in a separate statement to ProPublica, said “we are working to implement the recent legislation aimed at some of the most egregious syndication conservation easement transactions” as part of the agency’s “commitment and efforts to combat abusive conservation easement transactions and all other abusive transactions.”

P4C President Robert Ramsay, who has said the profit motive produces “tremendous opportunities” for conservation, attributed the measure’s passage to the IRS’ “ability to win a war of attrition.” Ramsay told ProPublica that the new limits will have “a broad chilling effect” on all land conservation, even though it targets only syndicated deals. He also said its “broad brush” provisions would do nothing to stop inflated easement deductions by wealthy individuals and family partnerships. Ramsay added that he expects the measure to prompt “a number” of syndication promoters to exit the business entirely.

Efforts to shut down the syndication business had been pushed by the Land Trust Alliance, a Washington trade association whose 950 members administer traditional conservation easements. Fearful that exploitation of the charitable tax break by “brazen” profiteers could jeopardize the conservation deduction altogether, the group had prodded the IRS to undertake its crackdown and spent more than $2.5 million on lobbyists since 2017. “We kept this about ending the abuse, rather than discard the incentive,” said Andrew Bowman, the organization’s CEO. “We were relentless in trying to defend the integrity of a very important tax incentive.”

Bowman marveled that none of the IRS’ traditional measures to combat abusive tax transactions had worked. “All that just wasn’t stopping it,” he told ProPublica. “Congress could see it had to act. No one else was going to be able to fix this problem. The incentive to do the deals is now gone.” He praised Daines for masterminding the strategy to pass the legislation, calling him “a true hero for private conservation.” (He also said ProPublica’s coverage “put out there for the public how egregious this abuse was.”) Bowman added: “It’s a great victory for conservation. It took longer than it should have, but we’re certainly thrilled with the outcome.”

by Sebastian Rotella

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An exclusive news report dominated the headlines in Canada in recent weeks: Canadian intelligence had warned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about a vast campaign of political interference by China. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service had learned that Chinese consulate officials in Toronto had covertly funded a network of at least 11 political candidates in federal elections in 2019, the report said. The Chinese operation had also targeted Canadian political figures and immigrant leaders seen as opponents of the regime in Beijing, subjecting them to surveillance, harassment and attacks in the media, the report said. Trudeau responded with promises of action, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said they were investigating the alleged foreign interference. The Chinese foreign ministry denied the allegations.

Not surprisingly, the report’s author was Sam Cooper. An investigative journalist for Global News, a private Canadian media organization, the 48-year-old Cooper has done hard-hitting work about a surprisingly active criminal underworld rooted in a large diaspora from Hong Kong, a bastion of the mafias known as triads. His best-selling 2021 book, “Wilful Blindness: How a Network of Narcos, Tycoons and CCP Agents Infiltrated the West,” examines violent international gangs involved in drug trafficking, money laundering, corruption and, most alarmingly, Chinese espionage and influence activity in Canada.

Cooper and other experts (including U.S. national security officials interviewed by ProPublica) say Canadian political leaders have ignored or minimized the extent of the threat from China. Cooper has received criticism from pro-Beijing figures in the Chinese-Canadian community and is fighting two defamation lawsuits from subjects of his coverage. But his reporting has drawn praise from national security officials, dissidents of Chinese origin and academics in Canada, the United States and elsewhere. It helped spur a governmental inquiry known as the Cullen Commission, which recently concluded that organized crime had laundered billions of dollars in the province of British Columbia. And the latest revelations of Chinese interference are having a potentially dramatic impact on the political debate in Canada.

ProPublica’s conversation with Cooper has been edited for clarity and brevity.

I wanted to ask you first, in terms of your background, how you got involved in this topic.

I went to University of Toronto. I ended up traveling to Japan for some post-university work and culture. And so I really became enamored and fascinated with East Asian culture.

As a young reporter in Vancouver, and also a young family guy, there were things that I noticed. I started to break ground on how influential money from Hong Kong and mainland China was in Vancouver real estate, how it appeared to be driving prices incredibly high in comparison to local incomes. And that led to finally understanding or digging into the underground casino and underground banking nodes and networks that have been feeding Vancouver.

I recognized pretty early there was a huge, high-level pushback on the reporting to dig into the roots of what I eventually found were extremely high-level tycoons from Hong Kong with triad connections [who] had been developing big portions of Vancouver since the 1980s. And this led to a lot of discoveries.

What's remarkable about the history of this issue in Canada in the past decades is that there’s this prophecy that is rejected or ignored. What was your assessment of Project Sidewinder [a Canadian intelligence report leaked in 1999 that warned of the threat from China-connected tycoons, gangsters and spies] when you were looking at this stuff?

Sidewinder, for let’s just call it the Western or Canadian mind, it was too much too early to understand what they were alleging and pointing to. It just was hard to believe. And so … I took the report with a grain of salt. I didn’t swallow it as truth. And there had been a huge pushback on that report from Ottawa, so I was cautious. But you’re absolutely right. This was basically raw intelligence, it was leaked. So people were able to point to a few flaws, or maybe even the odd overreach. But it is absolutely confirmed and true based on my current work, and my book, that the basic elements of what's alleged — that is, that Chinese intelligence and foreign influence operations use high-level gang bosses to both send money abroad and to corrupt Western societies — is absolutely true and confirmed.

In U.S. press and politics, there’s this ongoing focus on Mexico: drugs in Mexico, corruption in Mexico. There’s very little attention paid to national security issues related to Canada. If you read your book, one has to wonder why there hasn’t been more focus on Canada and the extent to which there is a crisis in Canada that just doesn’t get the attention it should in the United States.

Yeah, that’s right. In some ways, Canada makes the perfect host for very sophisticated, powerful, transnational organized crime that doesn’t typically hang bodies from overpasses. The level of sophistication of Asian organized crime is that people that would appear to be gentleman bankers or stockbrokers can be the leaders of transnational drug trafficking gangs. And further than that, people that are respected officials in the Chinese Communist Party at the end of the day are the handlers and bosses of these elite, transnational Asian gangs. Canada as a G-7 nation, as a banking economy that is tied in at the highest levels of respect with the other leading industrial nations, makes a perfect disguise and host for very sophisticated transnational crime.

There is concern in the U.S. government about some of these structural weaknesses in Canadian legislation and the Canadian law enforcement and judicial culture. You give the example that it takes seven months to get a warrant for a wiretap on Sinaloa cartel guys that would take a couple of days in the U.S. or Australia.

I, like many Canadians, you know, just have the innate sense that Canada’s such a stable, well-ordered, law-abiding society. And often that’s true. But what is missed by so many people is that the laws that … prevent overreach into the lives of law-abiding citizens have been exploited, really, by transnational gangs that have so much cover in Canada.

The perfect example of this is Tse Chi Lop, the Canadian citizen who I and others have reported was at the top of this network of networks of the highest triad bosses, The Company. I reported that there clearly are interconnections with Chinese state police and intelligence agencies. This man, this Canadian, was about to fly from Asia to Toronto. And I understand there was some sort of international police operation to divert his flight away from Canada because Australian and United States police did not have the trust that if Mr. Tse landed in Toronto he would be able to be prosecuted and extradited. The concerns there are that Canada’s legal system is just full of holes. It is much too difficult to prosecute powerful criminals. One of the other issues is the lack of an anti-racketeering law to deal with real organized crime. [ProPublica note: During an extradition hearing in the Netherlands last year, Tse told a judge he was innocent of drug trafficking charges.]

But another huge one … is a growing sense that elite capture, and even corruption, within [the] Canadian government, could be an inhibition to tackling people like Mr. Tse. The questions are: Do Mr. Tse and his network, in a roundabout or even a direct way, have hooks into people like Cameron Ortis, the former Canadian RCMP intelligence boss, who fell in a massive corruption case that I wrote about? Beyond Mr. Ortis, could powerful politicians be linked to powerful triad members or triad leaders in Canada? [ProPublica note: Ortis is awaiting trial and has not yet entered a plea, according to press reports. His attorney did not return a request for comment.]

Cooper’s notebook and book "Wilful Blindness" (Shelby Lisk, special to ProPublica) Your book really lays out your focus on organized crime and the casinos. And that underworld then takes you into the question of political influence and how aggressive the People’s Republic of China has been in political influence operations in Canada, with organized crime as a weapon in that. Why do you think that the PRC has been able to do that?

Australia has been … pretty much a perfect analogue of the PRC methods of infiltration and corruption. Australia and Canada [are] very similar societies. Australia and Canada were in the same dire straits in 2015 when, as we know, [Chinese President] Xi Jinping elevated his United Front [the Communist Party’s overseas influence arm] interference networks. But the response since 2015 has been very different. Australia rightly responded with foreign interference laws around 2017, 2018. And we’ve seen some very, very powerful people now implicated in investigations.

In contrast, in Canada, nothing has been done for the similar threat. We have a bipartisan Parliament group of senior officials with access to intelligence reports, sensitive reports, they make recommendations to government. For several years now, they’ve been asking the Liberal government to follow Australia’s example. And there has really been no change.

And what justification do opponents of something as basic as a foreign agent registration act give for opposing it?

I can't find a good justification. Unfortunately, I think we can look at news circumstances such as when Canadian parliamentarians were debating whether to declare China’s actions in Xinxiang a genocide in 2021. Some Canadian senators … went on the record saying that these kinds of discussions would fan anti-Asian racism.

I probed very deeply [former Canadian legislator] Kenny Chiu’s case. The evidence at the time came from what he told me himself, what I had heard about Canadian intelligence’s deep concerns with what happened to Kenny Chiu and others in the 2021 federal election. And also open source reports at the time that said that clearly Mandarin-language media, which is influenced by the Chinese Communist Party and WeChat networks, attacked Kenny first and foremost ahead of the 2021 election, smearing him as an anti-Asian racist. Again, this is a Hong Kong-born Canadian. They call him a racist because he suggested a foreign influence registry. He did not even name China in the bill. He lost his seat.

So that’s what I call a two-pronged attack on Canadian democracy. Beijing is seeking, I have reported, based on Canadian intelligence, to in corrupt ways fund and advance its interests in candidates. And it is seeking to attack Canadian members of Parliament that it would see as threats to Chinese Communist Party objectives.

The response to your latest reports about a Chinese political influence campaign in Canadian politics seems to be unprecedented.

We can see there’s a very robust debate now about what is lacking in Canada’s foreign interference laws. How deep could this corruption go? How aggressive are China’s actions? Could they turn elections in their favor? These questions are now being debated almost every day in Canada’s Parliament. And I can say we’ve never seen that level of attention before.

And in your case, personally, there must be some sense of vindication.

Now I have access to the intelligence that can’t be refuted that exactly what I was reporting was happening. And not only do I believe, I’ve been told my reporting has been [the] subject of counternarratives from Chinese espionage and intelligence networks who are very uncomfortable and angry about my reporting. So I don’t know that vindication is the word more than I just, I deeply believe, and I’m told by a lot of people, that really this could be precedent-setting historic work for helping us support Canada's democracy.

People in Canadian police and intelligence, and in other countries, those communities are starting to share information because they see that I’ve got it right, because they see that it’s making a difference in areas where it needs to make a difference.

And even more importantly, my sourcing comes from the communities that are most directly impacted by these networks: Chinese-Canadian, Hong Kong-Canadian, Taiwanese, Uighur communities. And certainly not to suggest that they’re victims without agency. They have great agency, they are some of the best sources to police and intelligence themselves.

And I would add that people inside United Front criminal networks are some of my best sources. And how could that be? Well, China rules by fear, and also inducements and greed. And there are people that could fall out of favor, and people that have consciences, and yet maybe we could say they’re trapped within those networks, that are very eager to share information. They don’t want to see criminal thugs holding a lot of power in the broad community or just in the Asian community in Canada.

by Lynzy Billing

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In 2019, reporter Lynzy Billing returned to Afghanistan to research the murders of her mother and sister nearly 30 years earlier. Instead, in the country’s remote reaches, she stumbled upon the CIA-backed Zero Units, who conducted night raids — quick, brutal operations designed to have resounding psychological impacts while ostensibly removing high-priority enemy targets.

So, Billing attempted to catalog the scale of civilian deaths left behind by just one of four Zero Units, known as the 02, over a four year period. The resulting report represents an effort no one else has done or will ever be able to do again. Here is what she found:

• At least 452 civilians were killed in 107 raids. This number is almost certainly an undercount. While some raids did result in the capture or death of known militants, others killed bystanders or appeared to target people for no clear reason.
• A troubling number of raids appear to have relied on faulty intelligence by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence-gathering services. Two Afghan Zero Unit soldiers described raids they were sent on in which they said their targets were chosen by the United States.
• The former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency acknowledged that the units were getting it wrong at times and killing civilians. He oversaw the Zero Units during a crucial period and agreed that no one paid a consequence for those botched raids. He went on to describe an operation that went wrong: “I went to the family myself and said: ‘We are sorry. ... We want to be different from the Taliban.’ And I mean we did, we wanted to be different from the Taliban.”
• The Afghan soldiers weren’t alone on the raids; U.S. special operations forces soldiers working with the CIA often joined them. The Afghan soldiers Billing spoke to said they were typically accompanied on raids by at least 10 U.S. special operations forces soldiers. “These deaths happened at our hands. I have participated in many raids,” one of the Afghans said, “and there have been hundreds of raids where someone is killed and they are not Taliban or ISIS, and where no militants are present at all.”
• Military planners baked potential “collateral damage” into the pre-raid calculus — how many women/children/noncombatants were at risk if the raid went awry, according to one U.S. Army Ranger Billing spoke to. Those forecasts were often wildly off, he said, yet no one seemed to really care. He told Billing that night raids were a better option than airstrikes but acknowledged that the raids risked creating new insurgent recruits. “You go on night raids, make more enemies, then you gotta go on more night raids for the more enemies you now have to kill.”
• Because the Zero Units operated under a CIA program, their actions were part of a “classified” war, with the lines of accountability so obscured that no one had to answer for operations that went wrong. And U.S. responsibility for the raids was quietly muddied by a legal loophole that allows the CIA — and any U.S. soldiers lent to the agency for their operations — to act without the same level of oversight as the American military.
• Congressional aides and former intelligence committee staffers said they don’t believe Congress was getting a complete picture of the CIA’s overseas operations. Lawyers representing whistleblowers said there is ample motivation to downplay to Congress the number of civilians killed or injured in such operations. By the time reports get to congressional oversight committees, one lawyer said, they’re “undercounting deaths and overstating accuracy.”
• U.S. military and intelligence agencies have long relied on night raids by forces like the 02 unit to fight insurgencies around the globe. The strategy has, again and again, drawn outrage for its reliance on sometimes flawed intelligence and civilian death count. In 1967, the CIA’s Phoenix Program famously used kill-capture raids against the Viet Cong insurgency in south Vietnam, creating an intense public blowback. Despite the program’s ignominious reputation — a 1971 Pentagon study found only 3% of those killed or captured were full or probationary Viet Cong members above the district level — it appears to have served as a blueprint for future night raid operations.
• Eyewitnesses, survivors and family members described how Zero Unit soldiers had stormed into their homes at night, killing loved ones** at more than 30 raid sites Billing visited. No Afghan or U.S officials returned to investigate. In one instance, a 22-year-old named Batour witnessed a raid that killed his two brothers. One was a teacher and the other a university student. He told Billing the Zero Unit strategy had actually made enemies of families like his. He and his brothers, he said, had supported the government and vowed never to join the Taliban. Now, he said, he’s not so sure.
• Little in the way of explanation was ever provided to the relatives of the dead — or to their neighbors and friends — as to why these particular individuals were targeted and what crimes they were accused of. Families who sought answers from provincial officials about the raids were told nothing could be done because they were Zero Unit operations. “They have their own intelligence and they do their own operation,” one grieving family member remembered being told after his three grandchildren were killed in an airstrike and night raid. “The provincial governor gave us a parcel of rice, a can of oil and some sugar” as compensation for the killings. At medical facilities, doctors told Billing they’d never been contacted by Afghan or U.S. investigators or human rights groups about the fate of those injured in the raids. Some of the injured later died, quietly boosting the casualty count.

In a statement, CIA spokesperson Tammy Thorp said, “As a rule, the U.S. takes extraordinary measures — beyond those mandated by law — to reduce civilian casualties in armed conflict, and treats any claim of human rights abuses with the utmost seriousness.” She said any allegations of human rights abuses by a “foreign partner” are reviewed and, if valid, the CIA and “other elements of the U.S. government take concrete steps, including providing training on applicable law and best practices, or if necessary terminating assistance or the relationship.” Thorp said the Zero Units had been the target of a systematic propaganda campaign designed to discredit them because “of the threat they posed to Taliban rule.”

The Department of Defense did not respond to questions about Zero Unit operations.

With a forensic pathologist, Billing drove hundreds of miles across some of the country’s most volatile areas — visiting the sites of more than 30 raids, interviewing witnesses, survivors, family members, doctors and village elders. To understand the program, she met secretly with two Zero Unit soldiers over the course of years, wrangled with Afghanistan’s former spy master in his heavily fortified home and traveled to a diner in the middle of America to meet with an Army Ranger who’d joined the units on operations.

She also conducted more than 350 interviews with current and former Afghan and American government officials, Afghan commanders, U.S military officials, American defense and security officials and former CIA intelligence officers, as well as U.S. lawmakers and former oversight committee members, counterterrorism and policy officers, civilian-casualty assessment experts, military lawyers, intelligence analysts, representatives of human rights organizations, doctors, hospital directors, coroners, forensic examiners, eyewitnesses and family members — some of whom are not named in the story for their safety.

While America’s war in Afghanistan may be over, there are lessons to be learned from what it left behind. Billing writes:

“The American government has scant basis for believing it has a full picture of the Zero Units’ performance. Again and again, I spoke with Afghans who had never shared their stories with anyone. Congressional officials concerned about the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan said they were startled by the civilian death toll I documented.

As my notebooks filled, I came to realize that I was compiling an eyewitness account of a particularly ignominious chapter in the United States’ fraught record of overseas interventions.

Without a true reckoning of what happened in Afghanistan, it became clear the U.S. could easily deploy the same failed tactics in some new country against some new threat.”

Read her full report here.

by Peter Elkind

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To many people, the notion that cellphones or cell towers might present a health risk long ago receded into a realm somewhere between trivial concern and conspiracy theory. For decades, the wireless industry has dismissed such ideas as fearmongering, and federal regulators have maintained that cellphones pose no danger. But a growing body of scientific research is raising questions, with the stakes heightened by the ongoing deployment of hundreds of thousands of new transmitters in neighborhoods across America. ProPublica recently examined the issue in detail, finding that the chief government regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, relies on an exposure standard from 1996, when the Motorola StarTAC flip phone was cutting edge, and that the agency brushed aside a lengthy study by a different arm of the federal government that found that cellphone radiation caused rare cancers and DNA damage in lab animals. The newest generation of cellphone technology, known as 5G, remains largely untested.

Here’s what you need to know:

Do cellphones give off radiation?

Yes. Both cellphones and wireless transmitters (which are mounted on towers, street poles and rooftops) send and receive radio-frequency energy, called “nonionizing radiation.” The amount of this radiation absorbed by the human body depends on how close a person is to a phone and a cell transmitter, as well as the strength of the signal the phone needs to connect with a transmitter. Cellphones displaying fewer bars, which means their connection with a transmitter is weak, require stronger power to communicate and so produce more radiation. Wireless transmitters, for their part, emit radiation continually, but little of that is absorbed unless a person is very close to the transmitter.

What does the science say about this? Is it harmful?

That’s the multibillion-dollar question. Government-approved cellphones are required to keep radiation exposure well below levels that the FCC considers dangerous. Those safeguards, however, have not changed since 1996, and they focus exclusively on the unlikely prospect of “thermal” harm: the potential for overheating body tissue, as a microwave oven would. The government guidelines do not address other potential forms of harm.

But a growing body of research has found evidence of health risks even when people are exposed to radiation below the FCC limits. The array of possible harms ranges from effects on fertility and fetal development to associations with cancer. Some studies of people living near cell towers have also confirmed an array of health complaints, including dizziness, nausea, headaches, tinnitus and insomnia, from people identified as having “electromagnetic hypersensitivity.”

The most sensational — and hotly debated — health fear about wireless radiation is cancer. In 2011, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, cited troubling but uncertain evidence in classifying wireless radiation as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” In 2018, a study by the federal government that was nearly two decades in the making found “clear evidence” that cellphone radiation caused cancer in lab animals. A major study in Italy produced similar results.

Do cellphones pose any special health risks for kids?

Some experts say they do, citing studies suggesting children’s thinner, smaller skulls and developing brains leave them more vulnerable to the effects of cellphone radiation. The American Academy of Pediatrics embraces this concern and has for years urged the FCC to revisit its radiation standards, saying they don’t adequately protect kids. More than 20 foreign governments, as well as the European Environment Agency, urge precautionary steps to limit wireless exposure, especially for children.

What about risks in pregnancy?

A Yale study found hyperactivity and reduced memory in mice exposed to cellphone radiation in the womb, consistent with human epidemiological research showing a rise in behavioral disorders among children who were exposed to cellphones in the womb. Dr. Hugh Taylor, the author of the mouse study and chair of the obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences department at the Yale School of Medicine, told ProPublica: “The evidence is really, really strong now that there is a causal relationship between cellphone radiation exposure and behavior issues in children.”

What does the U.S. government say about cellphone radiation?

The key federal agencies — the FCC and the Food and Drug Administration — have echoed the wireless industry and a number of other groups in rejecting evidence of any “nonthermal” human health risk, saying it remains unproven. The government websites also reject the claim that children face any special risk.

In 2019, during the administration of President Donald Trump, the FCC shut down a six-year review of its 1996 wireless-radiation safety standards. The agency rejected pleas to make the standards more stringent, saying it had seen no evidence its safeguards were “outdated or insufficient to protect human safety.” In 2021, however, a federal appeals court ordered the FCC to revisit the issue, saying the agency had ignored evidence of an array of noncancer harms to humans, animals and the environment, and that its decision to uphold its exposure standard failed to meet “even the low threshold of reasoned analysis.” The FCC has taken no formal action since then.

Why is the issue not resolved?

Determining wireless radiation’s health effects with certainty is difficult. Researchers cannot ethically subject people to endless hours of cellphone radiation to gauge the results. Scientists have to rely on alternatives such as animal studies or epidemiological research, where challenges include getting subjects to accurately recount their wireless use and pinpointing the specific causes of disease or harm. Many health effects of toxic exposure, especially cancer, take years or decades to appear. And the mechanisms of how wireless radiation could affect the body at the cellular level are poorly understood.

Research funding on the issue has also been scarce in the U.S., despite frequent calls for more study. Research (and researchers) raising health concerns have come under sharp attack from industry, and government regulators have remained skeptical. A key FDA official, for example, dismissed the relevance of the federal study that found “clear evidence” of cancer in lab animals, saying it wasn’t designed to test the safety of cellphone use in humans, even though his agency had commissioned the research for that reason.

Linda Birnbaum, who led the federal agency that conducted the cellphone study, said that while proof of harm remains elusive, what is known means that precautions are merited. “Do I see a smoking gun? Not per se,” she told ProPublica. “But do I see smoke? Absolutely. There’s enough data now to say that things can happen. … Protective policy is needed today. We really don’t need more science to know that we should be reducing exposures.”

If I’m concerned about the risk, are there precautions I can take to protect myself and my family?

Because exposure varies dramatically with your proximity to the source of the radiation, experts say a key to minimizing risk is increasing your distance from the phone. This means keeping any cellphone that’s turned on away from direct contact with your body. Don’t keep it in your bra, in your pocket or (especially if you’re pregnant) against your abdomen, they say. And instead of holding the phone against your head when you talk, use a speaker or wired earphones. (Wireless headsets, such as AirPods, also emit some radiation.) Try to avoid making calls when the phone is telling you the signal is weak because that boosts the radiation level. You can also limit exposure by simply reducing how much time you spend talking on your cellphone and texting instead, they say. Using an old-fashioned landline avoids the problem altogether.

by Daniel Golden

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This story is exempt from our Creative Commons license until May 3.

Jonathan Cox faced an agonizing decision. He was scheduled to teach two classes this past fall at the University of Central Florida that would explore colorblind racism, the concept that ostensibly race-neutral practices can have a discriminatory impact. The first, “Race and Social Media,” featured a unit on “racial ideology and color-blindness.” The second, “Race and Ethnicity,” included a reading on “the myth of a color-blind society.” An assistant sociology professor, Cox had taught both courses before; they typically drew 35 to 40 undergraduates apiece.

As recently as August 2021, Cox had doubted that the controversy over critical race theory — which posits, among other things, that racism is ingrained in America’s laws and power structure — would hamstring his teaching. Asked on a podcast what instructors would do if, as anticipated, Florida restricted the teaching of CRT in higher education, he said that they would need to avoid certain buzzwords. “What many of us are looking at doing is just maybe shifting some of the language that we’re using.”

But a clash with state law seemed inevitable, once Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, proposed what he called the strongest legislation in the nation against “the state-sanctioned racism that is critical race theory.” Last April, DeSantis signed the Individual Freedom Act, also known as the “Stop Woke Act,” into law. It bans teaching that one race or gender is morally superior to another and prohibits teachers from making students feel guilty for past discrimination by members of their race. And it specifically bars portraying racial colorblindness — which the law labels a virtue — as racist. A DeSantis spokesperson, Jeremy Redfern, told me in an email that the law “protects the open exchange of ideas” (italics in the original) by prohibiting teachers from “forcing discriminatory concepts on students.”

Whatever one thinks of critical race theory, the state’s interference limits the freedom of professors who are experts in their fields to decide what to teach their students. Cox worried, not without reason, that the law effectively banned him from discussing his ideas in class, and that teaching the courses could cost him his livelihood. Cox, who is the only Black professor in the sociology department, will not be considered for tenure until this fall. His salary was his family’s only income while his wife stayed home with their baby.

A month before the fall 2022 semester was set to start, he scrapped both courses. Students scrambled to register for other classes. “It didn’t seem like it was worth the risk,” said Cox, who taught a graduate course on inequality and education instead. “I’m completely unprotected.” He added, “Somebody who’s not even in the class could come after me. Somebody sees the course catalog, complains to a legislator — next thing I know, I’m out of a job.”

Books in Cox’s office (Tara Pixley, special to ProPublica and The Atlantic)

Cox’s decision, along with another professor’s cancellation of a graduate course because of similar apprehension, created an unusual gap in the sociology curriculum at UCF, which, with almost 69,000 students, is Florida’s largest university.

Cox’s department chair, Elizabeth Mustaine, said she went along with the professors’ wishes because “I thought: ‘I’m not going to stress anyone out about this. It’s crazy.’” Still, she added, “it’s an absolute tragedy that classes like this get canceled.” Of the 39 courses offered this past fall by a department that specializes in the study of human society, none focused primarily on race.

In just over two years, critical race theory has gone from a largely obscure academic subject to a favorite bogeyman for Republican candidates. Activists such as Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, conceived of targeting CRT to foment a backlash against measures enacted following George Floyd’s murder in May 2020. At that time, Rufo told me in an email, “school districts across the country suddenly started adopting ‘equity statements,’ hiring ‘diversity and inclusion’ bureaucrats, and injecting heavily partisan political content into the curriculum.” Black Lives Matter and the left were riding high, said Rufo, who denies that structural racism exists in America. In our email exchange, Rufo described “the fight against critical race theory” as “the most successful counterattack against BLM as a political movement. We shifted the terrain and fought on a vector the Left could not successfully mobilize against.”

The anti-CRT campaign quickly expanded from sloganeering to writing laws. Seven states, including Florida, have passed legislation aimed at restricting public colleges’ teaching or training related to critical race theory. Those laws face impediments. On Nov. 17, 2022, a federal judge temporarily blocked enforcement of the higher-education provisions of Florida’s Individual Freedom Act. “The First Amendment does not permit the State of Florida to muzzle its university professors, impose its own orthodoxy of viewpoints, and cast us all into the dark,” Judge Mark Walker wrote. The DeSantis administration filed a notice of appeal on Nov. 29 and is seeking to stay the injunction pending that appeal. The 11th Circuit, where most of the judges are Republican appointees, will hear the appeal, with briefs to be filed in the next few months and oral arguments potentially this coming summer.

Additionally, with DeSantis’ landslide reelection — after a campaign in which he repeatedly denounced “woke” education — and Republicans gaining a supermajority in both chambers of the state’s Legislature, they are likely to look for new ways to crack down on CRT and what they perceive as higher education’s leftist tilt. And at the federal level, conservatives are drafting a “potential suite of executive orders in 2024,” in case the next presidential election goes their way, to “disrupt the national network of left-wing ideological production and distribution,” according to Rufo.

It’s easy to dismiss the conservative crusade against critical race theory as political theater without real consequences. But most colleges and universities offer social science and humanities courses that address racial inequality and systemic racism, and the anti-CRT laws are already having repercussions for people who teach or take these classes in red states. Moreover, the push against CRT is hitting academia after decades of declines in the proportion of professors protected by tenure, meaning that most faculty members are not in positions secure enough to resist political pressure. Now, forced to consider whether they face any legal or career risk, some are canceling courses or watering down content, keeping quiet rather than sharing their expertise with students.

“When you implement a law like this, you’re asking professors to leave out things that clearly happen or have happened in the past,” Grace Castelin, a UCF undergraduate who plans to introduce a resolution in the student senate condemning the law, told me. “It’s making us more ignorant in this generation and generations to come.”

Fearful that legislators will retaliate by cutting their budgets, few top university administrators have publicly criticized the laws, which put institutions as well as individual teachers at risk. Indeed, UCF Provost Michael Johnson told faculty last July that the university would “have to take disciplinary action” against any faculty member who repeatedly violated the Individual Freedom Act because it couldn’t afford to lose a “catastrophic amount” — $32 million — in state funding linked to graduation rates and other metrics. (Johnson declined an interview request.)

Other states have left professors similarly undefended. In Tennessee, which passed a law much like Florida’s, the provost of the state university’s flagship Knoxville campus made clear to professors that the administration wouldn’t necessarily help them. If they were sued under the law, Provost John Zomchick told faculty, Tennessee’s Republican attorney general would decide whether the university would represent them in court. “People freaked out,” said Anne Langendorfer, a senior lecturer at UT Knoxville and the president of a union for campus workers at the state’s public universities.

A university spokesperson, Kerry Gardner, said that the attorney general makes the final decision in “any situation” where individuals are sued in their capacity as university employees. Administrators “wanted to be fully transparent about how the process works,” while assuring faculty that “we will take every step to defend them,” Gardner said. Zomchick, she added, “does not agree with the view of some faculty” that the law “infringes on the First Amendment or academic freedoms.”

With uncertain support from above, most full and associate professors at least enjoy the protection of tenure, which shields scholars whose insights or research are politically unpopular. Tenured professors can’t be fired without cause and a hearing by their peers. Other faculty typically work on contracts, which the university can decide not to renew without specifying a reason.

Some tenured professors in Florida have resisted anti-CRT pressure. The historian Robert Cassanello, the president of the UCF chapter of United Faculty of Florida, was comfortable becoming a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits contending that the Individual Freedom Act violates free speech. Cassanello, who keeps a life-size cutout of Karl Marx in his office window, told me that he’s less threatened by the law than his untenured colleagues are.

Robert Cassanello, a tenured professor, teaches history at the University of Central Florida and became a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging a state law that restricts the teaching of critical race theory. (Tara Pixley, special to ProPublica and The Atlantic)

By contrast, Juan Salinas, an assistant sociology professor at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, declined to be a plaintiff. “For me to stick my name out, I didn’t feel comfortable,” Salinas said. “If I had tenure, I would be more active.”

But even having tenure didn’t feel like “adequate protection” to Scott Carter, the other UCF sociologist who scrapped a course on race in the fall semester. “It’s very sad for students,” Carter told me. “They won’t get the experience of hearing from scholars on contemporary race relations.”

Perhaps the surest indication that tenure helps safeguard critical race theory and other controversial curricula is that conservatives are trying to jettison it. In 2021, Georgia’s public-university system made firing tenured faculty easier. After the University of Texas’ faculty council adopted a resolution last February supporting professors’ right to teach critical race theory, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called for abolishing tenure for new hires at the state’s public universities. Last April, DeSantis signed a bill authorizing reviews of tenured professors every five years.

The tenure divide has a racial dimension. At many state universities, tenured faculty are overwhelmingly white. Untenured faculty are more likely to be people of color. In the fall of 2018, 7.4% of full professors and 10.9% of associate professors — the two ranks most likely to be tenured — were Black or Hispanic, compared with 11.8% of assistant professors and 17% of instructors, lecturers and others, according to the American Association of University Professors. Women are also disproportionately concentrated in untenured positions.

Besides having less job security than their tenured colleagues, many untenured faculty have less say in which courses they teach. One visiting assistant professor of sociology at an Oklahoma university, who requested anonymity to speak about her workplace, specializes in gender research; her dissertation was on urban women’s experiences with menstrual practices in Kathmandu, Nepal. She wasn’t familiar with critical race theory. But after Oklahoma in 2021 banned “any orientation or requirement” in higher education “that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or a bias on the basis of race and sex,” she found herself assigned to teach a course on racial and ethnic relations.

“I have consistently seen this course taught by nontenured professors,” she told me. “That’s been the trend,” perhaps because of “tenured professors not wanting to do the dirty work.”

Universities themselves helped create the vulnerability that conservatives are exploiting, saving money — and, in the case of public institutions, offsetting budget cuts — by shifting to a less tenured teaching force. Tenured professors have declined from 39% of faculty in 1987, the earliest year for which comparable figures were available, to 24% in 2020, according to an AAUP analysis of federal data. There has been a corresponding increase in the proportion of what are known as contingent faculty, who aren’t tenured or on a path to it — instructors, lecturers, teaching faculty who don’t do research and adjuncts — from 47% in 1987 to 67% in 2020. The remaining 9% are tenure-track faculty like Cox. Two of Florida’s youngest public universities — Florida Gulf Coast University and Florida Polytechnic University, which opened in 1997 and 2014, respectively — do not currently grant tenure at all.

This past fall, Florida Gulf Coast’s social and behavioral sciences department offered one race-focused course, “Race and Culture.” The former FGCU sociologist Ted Thornhill had stirred conservative protests by teaching courses on “Racism and Law Enforcement” and “White Racism,” and by founding a Center for Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. Since Thornhill left in June 2022 for a tenure-track post in the Pacific Northwest, no one has been teaching those courses. (Another instructor is scheduled to teach “Racism and Law Enforcement” this summer.) The university refashioned the center to focus on “the Study of Race, Gender, Ethnicity and Culture,” dropping the word “critical.”

“I knew it had a short life expectancy,” Thornhill told me.

FGCU President Michael Martin said that the center was renamed not to appease conservatives but to encompass groups such as Latinos, Native Americans and Jews. Still, Martin acknowledged that academia has become “overly politicized,” and that Florida “has been out in front of some of this.”

In the past, when academic freedom was threatened, tenure proved to be one of its most effective defenses. During the McCarthy era, when tenured professors were accused of having Communist sympathies, “their institutions had to go through the motions of a formal investigation,” the historian Ellen Schrecker wrote in “No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism & the Universities.” “Non-tenured teachers had no such rights.” The Cornell physicist Philip Morrison, an ex-Communist who remained politically active, “could not be quietly dropped from the faculty” in the early 1950s, at the height of the Red Scare, because he had tenure, and he was eventually promoted to full professor.

The sociologist Shantel Buggs is hoping to become a rarity: a tenured Black woman in Florida State’s College of Social Sciences and Public Policy. In 2021, the college had one tenured Black woman. Overall, it had two tenured Black faculty and 59 white faculty.

Shantel Buggs is hoping to receive tenure at Florida State’s College of Social Sciences and Public Policy. (Tara Pixley, special to ProPublica and The Atlantic)

The daughter of two Marines, Buggs was the first college graduate in her family. She has won teaching awards, published book chapters and articles in refereed journals, developed new courses and helped establish an anti-racism task force on campus. When UCF offered her a tenured associate professorship in 2021, Florida State gave her a raise to stay.

“Your work is powerful, timely, and extremely socially relevant, and you have quickly gained national recognition in your areas of expertise,” Buggs’ department chair at Florida State, Kathryn Tillman, wrote in 2021. Tillman also called her a “fantastic teacher and mentor.”

As the Individual Freedom legislation was being enacted, Buggs detected a subtle recalibration of her prospects. In April 2022, Buggs told me, Tillman urged her to take advantage of a COVID-19 extension and delay her candidacy for tenure by a year. Buggs protested. “I thought it was unfair that I be asked to wait to go up for promotion in this political climate because what I teach and what I research will place a target on me,” she said. But she agreed, she said, after Tillman expressed concern that higher-ups might deem her publication record insufficient for tenure. (Tillman told me via email that she can’t comment on personnel issues.)

One course that Buggs had developed and taught was “Critical Race Theory.” She last offered it in the spring of 2021. The following September, she learned that it was the only Florida State course listed on the Critical Race Training in Education website, which has been featured on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and describes CRT as a “radical ideology” that challenges “the very foundations” of American democracy. Buggs discovered that the website was a project of something called the Legal Insurrection Foundation.

The term “insurrection” alarmed her. Anxious that she might be trolled or harassed, Buggs was receptive in May 2022 to another Tillman request — to change the name of the course. Tillman told me that she and Buggs had discussed whether another title would help avoid “potential misperceptions about the course’s intent. Together, we agreed to give it a try.” The course, which Buggs plans to teach in the upcoming semester, was relisted as “Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.”

The purpose of the Critical Race Training in Education website is to “document what students can expect at a particular campus,” according to William Jacobson, a Cornell University law professor and the president of the Legal Insurrection Foundation. Jacobson told me that, because he had criticized the Black Lives Matter movement, Cornell alumni petitioned to have him fired, a faculty statement denounced him and a student group called for boycotting his courses. “Considering what I have gone through, I am very sympathetic to left-leaning faculty who come under attack, but it also is clear that the overwhelming campus cancel culture is from the left towards the right, not the other way around,” he said.

A Florida State spokesperson told me critical race theory scholars should have no concern that their specialty will hurt their tenure chances. But Katrinell Davis, the director of the university’s African American Studies program and the only tenured Black woman in the college of social sciences, says she is “saddened” by Buggs’ predicament. “Her trajectory as a scholar may be impacted” by the Individual Freedom Act “and because of the doubts that might arise around the value of CRT,” Davis told me.

For her part, Buggs said she is open to leaving Florida for another state where she can teach critical race theory without legal consequences, but she doesn’t want to. “I have enjoyed working here,” she told me. “I’m a stubborn person. I don’t want to give DeSantis the satisfaction.”

Buggs also worries that the political climate is rubbing off on students. In the past year or two, Buggs said, some students have begun to “ding” her in evaluations as judgmental or biased. Last spring, one called her a “misandrist” — a man-hater. “Part of what pissed me off is, he got an A,” she said. She has added a disclaimer provided by the faculty union to her syllabi: “No lesson is intended to espouse, promote, advance, inculcate, or compel a particular feeling, perception, viewpoint, or belief.”

Florida State University’s campus in Tallahassee (Tara Pixley, special to ProPublica and The Atlantic)

Other untenured teachers at Florida State are tweaking their pedagogy. When the doctoral candidate Taylor Darks taught a section of Buggs’ “Race and Minority Group Relations” course this past fall, she invited students to suggest questions for discussion — but told me that she generally weeded out queries that mentioned “white privilege.” And Tyler McCreary, an assistant geography professor, made what he calls a “strategic adjustment” in his fall 2022 honors course on environmental justice. For a class project on a pipeline in northern Canada that affects Indigenous people, McCreary told me he’s been “much more cautious of not just critiquing the development but making sure to include the company’s perspective.”

McCreary, who is up for tenure this year, has also shifted his teaching method from lecturing to class discussion. He wants to avoid complaints under another new Florida law that allows students to record professors’ lectures for evidence of political bias. The law doesn’t apply to class discussion, because students must consent to be recorded.

Parked one October afternoon on the Florida State campus was a minibus covered in graffiti of various political persuasions. One commentator had scrawled “Socialism Sucks,” only to have another cross out “Sucks” and replace it with “Is Sexy.” Outside, a field rep for Turning Point USA, a conservative campus network, invited passersby to a speech by the group’s founder, the talk show host Charlie Kirk. Turning Point USA, which has spent millions of dollars through its advocacy and political arms backing Donald Trump and candidates he endorsed, has what it calls a “watchlist” dedicated to “unmasking radical professors.”

Turning Point USA, a conservative campus network, had a minibus on campus that invited passersby to write whatever they wanted on it. (Tara Pixley, special to ProPublica and The Atlantic) Florida State University students protest outside a Tallahassee speech by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA. (Tara Pixley, special to ProPublica and The Atlantic)

The minibus was intended to signify Kirk’s opposition to censorship. But when I asked him at his talk that night in Tallahassee’s civic center whether he supports laws restricting the teaching of critical race theory, he said he does, and that it’s not a free-speech issue. “It’s a matter of curriculum, right?” he said. “Should we teach the flat-Earth theory in physics, right? Should we teach bloodletting in biology? … There are some ideas that are so reprehensible and provably wrong, they shouldn’t be anywhere close to an academic environment.” (Kirk bridles at the very notion of systemic racism: In his talk, he referred to the aftermath of George Floyd’s death as “Floydapalooza, when we decided to destroy our entire country around a lie that America is systemically racist, which of course we’re not; we’re the least racist country ever to exist in the history of the world.”)

Kirk’s denial of systemic racism is at odds with the experience of students half a mile away, across the railroad tracks, at the public, historically Black Florida A&M University. Founded in 1887, and located since 1891 on a former plantation, FAMU has long been slighted by the state. When Nathan B. Young, the school’s president from 1901 to 1923, supplemented its agricultural and vocational programs with liberal arts, state officials feared that too much learning might make Black students dissatisfied with manual labor, and dismissed him. After World War II, hoping to avoid desegregating white law schools, Florida opened a law school at FAMU. In 1966, the state prohibited FAMU from enrolling a new law school class and transferred funding to Florida State, which wanted its own law school. FAMU’s law school reopened in 2002 in Orlando, where it wouldn’t compete with Florida State’s.

This past September, a group of FAMU students sued the state of Florida, accusing it of discriminating by underfunding FAMU compared with traditionally white schools. Among the disparities cited: In 2015, the state moved the almost $13 million budget for a joint FAMU-Florida State engineering college from FAMU’s general operating revenues to a separate line under Florida State’s authority. (A Florida State spokesperson said that presidents of both universities had agreed to the shift.) Also, the lawsuit says, linking funding to measures such as four-year graduation rates hurts FAMU and other universities that primarily serve low-income students.

In November, the state moved to dismiss the lawsuit, contending that the benchmarks used to determine funding are “wholly neutral,” and that the goal is to “reward institutions who have better student outcomes,” not to “diminish the performance of historically black institutions.”

In contrast to Florida State’s lush, impeccably maintained campus, FAMU’s shows signs of neglect, including cracked walkways and rusted pipes. Interviewed on campus, plaintiffs in the lawsuit described more indignities: beds with broken frames, a dormitory infested with rats and cockroaches, computers so old that current professors had used them when they were undergraduates.

One of those plaintiffs, FayeRachel Peterson, a first-year graduate student in chemistry, told me that some of the labs she worked in as a FAMU undergraduate lacked vital equipment. She and her classmates frequently had to finish their lab work at Florida State. “FAMU tries its best to give us what it can with what’s given to them,” she said. “What’s given to them is less than what’s given to others.”

Another student, Nyabi Stevens, a third-year psychology major, told me that the state’s treatment of FAMU illustrates the importance of discussions that the Individual Freedom Act is trying to silence. “That’s what the lawsuit is about — pointing out the systemic racism we see,” she said. “I came to an HBCU so I can learn about my history. I am very proud to be in the lawsuit and be a voice for people who don’t have a voice.”

First image: FayeRachel Peterson. Second image: Nyabi Stevens. (Tara Pixley, special to ProPublica and The Atlantic)

UCF students who wanted to learn about critical race theory this past fall had few options. Not only had the three sociology courses been canceled, but an anthropology course on racism was nixed because not enough students signed up for it.

One course that did survive has “flown under the radar,” Christian Ravela, an associate humanities professor, told me. His 18 students learned “how colorblindness has become the dominant racial ideology” and examined the anti-CRT movement, including the Individual Freedom Act, he said. Ravela received tenure in 2022. If he hadn’t, “I would have been most likely to just request to cancel the course.”

The preliminary injunction against the Individual Freedom Act pleased untenured faculty who teach critical race theory, but it hardly allayed their concerns. “There is still an ongoing battle,” Jonathan Cox, the UCF professor, told me. “It seems just as likely that if a more conservative appeals judge reviews this, they will simply reinstate the law. Regardless, DeSantis and his conservative majority in the Florida Legislature will probably continue working to keep this law and others in place.”

After canceling his two fall courses on race, Cox has committed to teaching “Race and Ethnicity” in the semester that’s about to begin. His wife has returned to work, so the family could get by on her income if he were to lose his job. Beyond that, he said: “I just decided, ‘I’m not going to run from it.’ This is what I teach. This is what I study. There’s tremendous value in students learning about these things.”

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Kirsten Berg contributed research.

by Eli Hager

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Arizona Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs is taking the state’s child protective services agency in a radically different direction in the wake of a ProPublica-NBC News investigation into the racial disparities that have plagued the child welfare system here.

This week, Hobbs, a Democrat, announced that she has selected Matthew Stewart, a Black community advocate, as the new head of Arizona’s Department of Child Safety. Stewart previously worked at DCS as a case manager and training supervisor for a decade before quitting in 2020, later saying he was ashamed by the racial disproportionality he was seeing in his work.

Stewart, who is the son of the longtime senior pastor of Phoenix’s most prominent Black church, will be the first Black leader of the department, replacing its current director, Mike Faust. Faust had been appointed by outgoing Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican.

Arizona’s child welfare system has long disproportionately investigated Black families. According to the ProPublica-NBC News investigation, which highlighted Stewart’s role, 1 in 3 Black children in metro Phoenix faced a DCS investigation in just a recent five-year period. Faust said the department had made progress over that time, but the news organizations found that while the overall number of investigations has gone down, the racial disparity between white and Black families has only increased.

After leaving DCS, Stewart formed the community organization Our Sister Our Brother, which has fought the department for more equitable treatment of Black and also low-income parents.

Matthew Stewart (Screenshot from an NBC News interview)

This fall, he told ProPublica and NBC News that generational poverty and the resulting trauma within families, which in some cases can lead to parenting problems and in turn DCS investigations, have been “centuries in the making.” Are parents supposed to believe, he asked, that after the department takes custody of their children, “these things will be solved?”

“I simply don’t think DCS is the agency to do this,” he said.

Stewart will now run that very agency.

Stewart was not immediately available for an interview. But he said in a statement that he will strengthen the state’s partnerships with community organizations and hopes that under his team’s leadership, the department will “become a place for encouraging and facilitating community healing” in part by providing more resources to families in need.

In a separate statement, the governor-elect said that Stewart knows how to keep children safe based on his experience working at DCS, but also how to get families help and keep them united. “He is a leader who will ensure that we can continue to transform our public systems so they are responsive to the communities that we serve,” Hobbs said.

Child welfare experts in the state and families affected by the system praised Stewart’s selection, though some wondered how much change he could bring about even in DCS’ top position.

“Matthew Stewart has been singularly focused on keeping families safely together,” said Claire Louge, executive director of Prevent Child Abuse Arizona, an organization that provides services and training to prevent child maltreatment. But, she pointed out, like all DCS directors he “will face the challenge of leading an agency that is perpetually criticized — either for removing children from their families too much or too little.”

Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, an advocacy group, noted that “Arizona’s incredibly tough to fix.” He pointed to a previous Democratic governor of the state, Janet Napolitano, whose reform-minded pick to lead DCS’ forerunner agency couldn’t fix the system’s racial disproportionality two decades ago. “We’ll see how much times have changed,” Wexler said.

Tyra Smith, a Phoenix-area parent who has personal experience with the child welfare system and has worked directly with Stewart as a parent advocate, said she is hopeful about Stewart’s leadership but worries that when given a new role, people can change.

“I just don’t want to be forgotten about,” she said.

Stewart’s first order of business likely will be selecting new senior staff; he has been critical of several of DCS’ current top officials.

He also has expressed excitement about installing a new Cultural Brokers program that will ensure that a trusted community member of the same race is present when DCS caseworkers show up at a family’s door.

But Stewart will be partially hamstrung by the fact that the Legislature, still in Republican hands, is unlikely to adjust its anti-poverty agenda to get more economic assistance and support services to struggling families in order to prevent child maltreatment cases before they happen. Currently, Arizona spends a majority of its welfare budget not on direct assistance to low-income parents but on DCS investigations of them, as ProPublica reported in 2021.

Stewart also will have to focus on more than the racial disparity issue: DCS has been plagued by other scandals in recent years, as well as child fatalities. In one example, the outgoing director, Faust, was grilled by legislators about reports of violence and drug use in the state’s foster system, leading to one teenager at a group home being shot and killed.

But for the dozens of Black families across metro Phoenix who spoke with ProPublica and NBC News this year, there is finally a sense that someone who looks like them, who has actually interacted with them and who will listen to them is now in a position of power in a state where only two of 90 state legislators are Black. Many said in interviews that they know Stewart understands the constant, communitywide dread they feel, given that in Maricopa County, 63% of Black children will go through a DCS investigation by the time they turn 18.

After Hobbs defeated Kari Lake in the governor’s race, Stewart told ProPublica and NBC News that “I believe this will work to our benefit.” He noted that Hobbs’ background as a social worker might provide her with “a values frame and openness to change that will help guide her administration and choice of advisers.”

Stewart said he “can’t predict the future,” but “I am optimistic, and I believe it is never too soon for hope.”

by Debbie Cenziper, ProPublica, and Will Fitzgibbon, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

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In 1942, as Nazi Germany began to send hundreds of thousands of Jews to killing centers, Brazilian police swooped into a port city in the South American country and arrested a wealthy landowner.

To locals, he was Otto Uebele, a Brazilian manager of a prominent coffee trading company. He also served as honorary consul for Germany — and was an accused Nazi spy.

“One of the leaders of German espionage in South America,” Allied intelligence agents wrote in a secret document, later released by the CIA.

A local newspaper at the time called Uebele a man of “respectable appearance, who enjoyed the greatest prestige and influence in social and commercial circles.”

“Nobody,” the paper wrote, “could imagine him a spy. The fact went off like a bomb, such was the surprise.”

Historians have long chronicled the clandestine use of ambassadors and other professional diplomats by Nazi intelligence services. Far less attention has focused on the activities of honorary consuls, who for centuries have worked from their home countries to represent the interests of foreign governments.

ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists used declassified intelligence documents, media accounts and other reports to identify about 20 honorary consuls who were suspected of supporting the Third Reich through espionage and other illicit activities.

The consuls included a social hall vice president, a fertilizer merchant and a chemist. They largely lived and worked in neutral countries in Latin America, Europe and Africa, where Nazi Germany sought to cultivate allies or gain an advantage at critical ports and other strategic locations. A majority of the honorary consuls were appointed directly by Germany; some were named by other countries.

The use of honorary consuls by the Third Reich to cultivate power and influence is not a historical anomaly.

An ongoing investigation by ProPublica and ICIJ has exposed widespread exploitation of the largely unchecked honorary consul system, now embraced by most of the world’s governments. In exchange for their service, honorary consuls receive some of the same privileges and protections provided to career diplomats: They can move bags across borders without inspection and their offices and correspondence are protected from searches.

Terrorist groups and leaders of corrupt regimes have leveraged the volunteer diplomats as agents of disruption, part of a strategy to advance political and ideological agendas, the ProPublica and ICIJ investigation found.

Honorary consuls tied to the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah have stood accused of moving drugs and money. The intelligence service in North Macedonia alleged that two honorary consuls appointed by the Kremlin allowed their offices to be used as Russian “intelligence bases.” Other honorary consuls have supported President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasions of Ukraine.

The names of honorary consuls suspected of supporting the Nazi regime appear in a series of declassified reports that describe a broader intelligence-gathering effort run out of German embassies.

Nazi spies were “usually built into the diplomatic staff accredited to a neutral government, their leaders being camouflaged as honorary consuls or other functionaries,” according to a 1946 U.S. Army report on German intelligence during the war.

(Declassified U.S. Army report)

In Brazil, Uebele was captured and imprisoned. The U.S. ambassador at the time told officials in Washington that Uebele had provided fuel for Nazi boats and helped supply submarines, archival records show.

“I am a consul and our espionage will have to be entrusted to the shadow of the consulate,” Uebele said, according to a transcript of an interview with another accused spy published in Brazilian media in 1949 under the headline “Diplomacy and Espionage in Hitler's Germany.”

Uebele was ultimately acquitted in Brazil after a lengthy legal case, but the government refused to return his seized property, according to one media report. He died in 1956.

“That is the way the Germans did things,” said Priscila F. Perazzo, a history professor at Universidade Municipal de São Caetano do Sul Municipal in Brazil and author of a book on wartime espionage that described Uebele. “The center of espionage in Brazil ran through rich and powerful men in the private sector with connections to the embassy.”

In Spain, Germany appointed as honorary consul onetime brewery manager Wilhelm Leissner, who also used the name Gustav Lenz. He reportedly oversaw a large spy network in Europe, intercepting communications and forwarding information to Berlin in a diplomatic pouch, declassified records show.

“He is officially described as ‘Honorary Attache’ to the Germany embassy, but is in reality the controller of a large network of officers, agents and sub-agents,” according to a 1942 declassified document titled “Enemy intelligence activity in Spain.”

(Declassified U.S. Army report)

In 1944, Leissner approved a payment to an American who had agreed to provide the Germans information about the Allied invasion of southern France, according to interrogation records in a U.S. military intelligence report.

The Germans “would have guys like that who would take care of certain regions. They’re the ones contacting other Germans and bringing other people into their espionage networks,” said historian David A. Messenger, who authored a book about Nazi spies in Spain. “A low-level diplomat has contacts in the Spanish governments, knows people in economics, people in industry.”

Records show Leissner was sent back to Germany in U.S. custody in 1946, but it is unclear what happened after that.

Elsewhere, at least two honorary consuls who worked for a well-known shipping company were suspected of providing intelligence from the coast of West Africa. In Argentina, a furrier who had served as honorary consul became one of the most notable spies in South America.

German espionage networks in Central and South America were a significant concern for the FBI, which by 1946 identified nearly 900 Nazi spies, according to the agency.

Honorary consuls supported Nazi Germany in other ways, archival records show. One in Sweden gave money to a Nazi party member and to the German “winter help” fund. Another in Spain was suspected in late 1945 of arranging to move jewels and a valuable collection of postage stamps out of Germany.

In 2005, Germany’s then-foreign minister called for an investigation of the Foreign Ministry, commissioning four historians. They found that the office, which had previously distanced itself from Nazi genocide, had been actively involved in the mass murder of Jews.

This year, Germany’s foreign minister publicly recognized the role that diplomats played during the Holocaust. The statements by Annalena Baerbock were made on the 80th anniversary of the 1942 Wannsee Conference, when high-ranking Nazi Party and German officials gathered in a Berlin suburb to plot what they called the “final solution of the Jewish question.”

“We remember the murdered Jewish women, men and children, and those who survived the Holocaust,” Baerbock said.

Foreign Ministry officials “who put themselves at the service of the crimes and genocide of the Nazi regime also bear responsibility for their suffering,” she said.

by Anjeanette Damon

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

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to churn, Medicare spending on testing for the virus continued to increase in 2022 and is outpacing the two prior years.

Through Oct. 31, Medicare had spent $2 billion on COVID-19 tests in 2022, an amount that will surpass last year’s total as claims are filed, according to new data provided to ProPublica by CareSet, a research organization that works to make the health care system more transparent.

That compares to $2 billion for all of 2021 and $1.5 billion in 2020, a recent analysis by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General shows.

Fraud and overspending are contributing to the increases, experts say, because federal money for COVID-19 testing is not subject to some of the same financial and regulatory constraints as other tests covered by Medicare, the government insurance program for people 65 and older and the disabled.

The growing costs concern some of these experts, who say the need for financial incentives to expand the availability of testing has passed.

Early in the pandemic, testing was both critical to slowing the spread of the virus and in short supply. So the federal government enacted measures to make it more profitable to get in the COVID-19 testing business. Good for the duration of the public health emergency, which has not yet expired, the measures include a generous Medicare reimbursement rate, requirements for private insurance to cover testing — even compelling insurance plans to pay whatever cash price is demanded by out-of-network labs — and a hefty fund for testing those people who didn’t have insurance.

The measures succeeded in drawing new and existing labs into the COVID-19 business and helped ensure most people had access to testing, even if some faced excessive waits to get their results. But the incentives also attracted price-gougers, fraudsters and people with no experience in the laboratory business. The result was a chaotic approach that ranged from bungled testing programs and confusion over new requirements to outright fraud.

“It was an unprecedented wave of fraud,” said Michael Cohen, an operations officer with the HHS Inspector General, which investigates crimes involving federal health care programs.

This year, ProPublica detailed how one Chicago-based lab, Northshore Clinical, used political connections in Nevada to speed its licensing and generated tremendous volume through agreements with school districts, universities and local governments. The story also detailed questionable billing practices that one insurance expert described as fraudulent. A study of Northshore’s testing on the University of Nevada Reno campus found the company missed 96% of COVID-19 cases during December 2021.

The company submitted 600 pages of documentation to state regulators to support its claim that it fixed deficiencies noted by inspectors, but it ultimately asked the state to close its license and pulled out of Nevada before the investigation was finished. Northshore repeatedly declined to comment to ProPublica.

The OIG, which had been investigating Northshore in Illinois, expanded its probe to Nevada after ProPublica published its report.

Cohen said OIG investigators have faced challenges responding to the onslaught of suspected fraud — from a lack of additional resources to constantly evolving policies.

In April, the Department of Justice announced criminal charges against people in eight states who allegedly submitted more than $149 million in COVID-19 false billings to federal programs. The OIG has also performed analyses on Medicare data, including for a report released this month that found 378 labs had billed Medicare for expensive add-on tests at “questionably high levels” after testing individuals for COVID-19.

Attorneys general in a handful of states have taken action against labs for forging results, charging fees for “expedited results” that arrived days later and deceptive marketing practices.

Programs to pay for COVID-19 testing aren’t the only pandemic assistance funds that have attracted people seeking to profit. Paycheck Protection Program loans went to fake businesses or were spent on luxury goods instead of keeping people employed, ProPublica and other news outlets have reported. Expanded state unemployment programs also saw unprecedented fraud that a partial accounting estimates is $57.3 billion.

Tolerating some fraud is a necessary trade-off to attain legitimate public policy goals, said Loren Adler, associate director of the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy. But once the incentives and loose regulations boosted the availability of testing, they could have been revised to prevent abuse and overspending, he argued.

“We were in a very different world in April 2020,” Adler said. “We needed to overpay because we needed more capacity. Once we scaled up, it was no longer necessary. We could’ve saved a lot of taxpayer money.”

According to the data provided by CareSet, more than 2,300 new labs have enrolled as Medicare providers since the pandemic began and have been billing for COVID-19 testing, evidence of the increased capacity generated by the federal measures.

Total Medicare spending on COVID-19 testing is a small fraction of the $4 trillion federal response to the pandemic. That figure includes not only testing and treatment but also direct support for individuals, businesses, schools and local governments. Adler said that may be why lawmakers haven’t revisited the incentives.

Still, testing — as funded by Medicare, private insurance and other federal assistance programs — was a lucrative corner of the pandemic response for many providers.

Labs with troubled operations reaped millions from Medicare, the CareSet data shows.

Northshore Clinical, for example, submitted $6.2 million in Medicare claims for COVID-19 testing between Jan. 1, 2021, and Nov. 30, 2022. Doctors Clinical Laboratory, which is facing lawsuits filed by attorneys general in three states, billed $252,000 in 2021. Doctors Clinical did not respond to requests for comment.

Curative Labs, one of the largest COVID-19 testing providers in the country, has billed Medicare $32 million for testing since Jan. 1, 2021. Curative, launched in California by a 25-year-old college dropout, tapped political connections to land a no-bid contract to test in Colorado’s nursing homes, according to the Colorado Springs Gazette. But the state’s decision to use Curative tests on individuals without symptoms — a use the tests had not been authorized for — led to unreliable results, as Colorado’s nursing home death rate was the highest in the nation, according to CPR News. The FDA later revoked authorization for Curative tests and the state canceled its contract with the company.

“During the pandemic, Curative provided millions of Americans with a safe, accessible and reliable way to test for the virus, including when it was extremely difficult to obtain a COVID-19 test,” a Curative spokesperson said. “Our teams deployed tests in an efficient manner, helping to prevent the spread of outbreaks in communities across the state of Colorado and throughout the country.”

The spokesperson also pointed to a Colorado legislative committee’s decision not to audit the procurement process as an exoneration of Curative’s operations in the state. The request for the audit failed in a tied vote along party lines after a state official testified she made the decision to use Curative based on the best science available at the time.

Nomi Health, a lab startup in Utah, launched troubled testing programs in five states, according to a USA Today investigation. The Salt Lake Tribune detailed significant problems with Nomi’s operations in Utah. The company has billed Medicare a total of $1.9 million in 2021 and 2022. Nomi has challenged USA Today’s findings.

“Nomi Health was one of the first partners to provide open accessible testing at scale on behalf of our partners,” Nomi’s co-founder and chief operations officer Joshua Walker said in a statement. “We remain one of the few providers in the markets we serve providing important access to this needed service.”

Walker said Nomi continues to provide free tests for uninsured individuals despite the end of the federal program that paid for those tests. “We still feel strongly that open and easy access is an important part of keeping our communities safe and helping to drive our economy forward.”

The OIG’s Cohen said the most common crime investigated by his agency was identity theft. Nefarious labs would snag Medicare beneficiaries’ information and use it to bill for services not provided or expensive and unnecessary add-on tests.

“They would take it all. ‘We need your Medicare number. We need your Social Security number. Oh, we need credit card information.’ People were giving up just tons of information because people were understandably clamoring for tests,” Cohen said.

Medicare wasn’t the only government program targeted for laboratory fraud.

Health care providers found quick access to money in the federal fund for testing people without insurance. The program, run by another federal agency, the Health Resources and Services Administration, was designed to get money out fast and with few restrictions. “Bad actors bled the program for as much as they could,” Cohen said.

The program was initially funded by Congress with $2 billion. It ended up paying out $11 billion in testing claims. Congress opted not to allocate any more money into it and HRSA stopped accepting claims in March 2022 — leaving many uninsured individuals on the hook for COVID-19 care.

An HHS official said safeguards against fraud were put in place and any providers caught abusing the program could be subject to enforcement measures.

“The COVID-19 Uninsured Program was designed to ensure that every person in the United States had access to COVID-19 testing, treatment and vaccines — regardless of insurance status — and has been successful in getting care to the most vulnerable among us,” the official said.

As the pandemic has evolved, how people test for the virus has changed too. Now, instead of getting lab tests, many patients opt to use at-home rapid tests. And that has opened up another opportunity for fraud, experts say.

While the public health emergency is underway, Medicare is covering up to eight over-the-counter COVID-19 tests per member each month. Some providers are trying to design “subscription” services in which they mail eight tests every month whether the beneficiary needs them or not, Cohen said.

Indeed, the CareSet data shows a dramatic shift in spending for over-the-counter tests and away from PCR laboratory tests beginning in April.

And as investigators try to stay atop new scams, they’re busy investigating the old ones.

“We are still finding entities that defrauded us of just enormous amounts of money,” Cohen said.

How to Avoid Testing Scams

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services offers the following tips to protect yourself from COVID-19 testing scams:

• Be cautious of any COVID-19 testing site that requires your financial or medical information in order to receive a free test.
• Be mindful of advertisements for COVID-19 testing, treatments or other health care services on social media platforms. If you make an appointment for a COVID-19 test online, make sure the location is an approved testing site. Check official government websites for a list of approved COVID-19 testing sites.
• Be careful! Scammers are selling fake and unauthorized at-home COVID-19 test kits in exchange for your personal or medical information. Make sure to purchase FDA-approved COVID-19 test kits from legitimate providers.
• As volunteers go door to door to inform communities across the country about COVID-19 vaccines or other health care services, be sure to protect yourself from criminals who are seeking to commit fraud. Do not provide personal, medical or financial details to anyone in exchange for COVID-19 services. Obtain vaccinations from trusted providers.
• Be cautious of COVID-19 survey scams. Do not give your personal, medical or financial information to anyone claiming to offer money or gifts in exchange for your participation in a COVID-19 vaccine survey.
• Medicare or Medicaid beneficiaries should be cautious of unsolicited requests for their personal, medical and financial information. Federal health care programs will not call beneficiaries to offer COVID-19-related products, services or benefits reviews.
• Be suspicious of any unexpected calls or visitors offering COVID-19 tests or supplies. If you receive a suspicious call, hang up immediately.
• Do not respond to, or open links in, text messages about COVID-19 from unknown individuals.
• Do not give your personal or financial information to anyone claiming to offer HHS grants related to COVID-19.
• Be aware of scammers pretending to be COVID-19 contact tracers. Legitimate contact tracers will never ask for your medical or financial information or attempt to set up a COVID-19 test.

If you think you may have been a victim of a scam:

• If you’re a Medicare beneficiary, contact the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (800-MEDICARE) to report that your card or Medicare number may have been compromised (your state’s Senior Medicare Patrol can help with this process). If you’re a Medicaid enrollee, contact your state-administered Medicaid office. If you are enrolled in a private commercial insurance plan, contact its customer service department.
• Medicare or Medicaid enrollees can also report the fraud by contacting the HHS OIG hotline at 800-HHS-TIPS or online.
• If you believe your Social Security number may have been compromised, you can report the scam with the Social Security Administration.
• Contact your local authorities if you believe you’ve been scammed by a COVID-19 testing pop-up site.
• Other avenues to pursue include notifying the Federal Trade Commission about the scam.

by Eli Hager

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

Every year, child protective services agencies across the nation investigate the family lives of roughly 3.5 million children, or about 1 out of every 20 American kids.

In these cases, government officials frequently accuse parents of wrongdoing. They enter homes to conduct searches and interrogations, and what they find can be used against the parent by a state attorney in court. And the accused will face punishment — including, often, having their children removed from them indefinitely.

Child welfare cases, that is, operate a lot like criminal ones.

Yet the mostly low-income families who are ensnared in this vast system have few of the rights that protect Americans when it is police who are investigating them, according to dozens of interviews with constitutional lawyers, defense attorneys, family court judges, CPS caseworkers and parents.

“You get more due process protections when facing a couple months in jail than you do when you’re facing losing your kids forever,” said Josh Gupta-Kagan, founder and director of the Family Defense Clinic at Columbia Law School and an expert on civil liberties as they apply to child protective cases.

The right to remain silent, the right to a public jury trial, the right to face your accuser and so on are not recognized and enforced by the courts in the child welfare system, according to our interviews and a review of case law. Neither is the related ideal of “innocent until proven guilty” or the standard that guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

A look at several of the amendments in the Bill of Rights reveals this disparity.

The Fourth Amendment, for example, says that citizens must be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, and that a warrant to conduct a search should be based on “probable cause” that specific evidence will be found. Yet as ProPublica and NBC News reported this fall, child protective services agencies conduct millions of warrantless home searches every year, rifling through refrigerators and closets and inspecting children’s bodies without going to court first to say what they are looking for. (In New York City, child welfare workers obtain a warrant fewer than 94 times a year, on average, while conducting at least 56,000 searches annually.)

The Fifth Amendment, meanwhile, allows criminal defendants to remain silent to avoid self-incrimination, commonly called pleading the Fifth. But in a child welfare case, which is a civil proceeding, courts are legally permitted to assume the worst of a parent who has decided not to talk.

Then there’s the Sixth Amendment, which says that defendants have the right to a public trial by jury as well as the right to an attorney, among other protections. But if an accused parent in this system even gets a trial, it likely will not be public: Child welfare cases are heard in closed courtrooms in at least 30 states, according to a ProPublica survey of statutes.

Fewer than a dozen states offer the option of a jury trial in these cases.

As for a lawyer, while some states provide one for some types of child welfare hearings, the Supreme Court has found that even people facing permanent termination of their parental rights have no constitutional right to legal counsel — because they are ostensibly not at risk of losing their own physical liberty by going to jail.

Yet evidence gathered by CPS workers without a warrant can be passed to police and prosecutors for use in criminal prosecutions of parents, who may be locked up as a result, according to attorneys, caseworkers and police as well as cases we found in which this has happened.

Parents interviewed by ProPublica also felt that having a son or daughter taken from them forever is a far more severe punishment than spending time in prison, and therefore viewed these cases as equally deserving of due process.

Finally, double jeopardy, or prosecuting a person twice for the same offense, is also allowed in child welfare cases, even though it is otherwise prohibited by the Constitution. Some parents even have their rights to a newborn baby terminated because their rights to a previous child had been terminated, even if there hasn’t been any new allegation.

To be sure, constitutional rights are far from perfectly protected in the criminal justice system. Talk to public defenders and they will tell you that police routinely get away with unconstitutional home searches by using coercive tactics to avoid having to get a warrant, or by saying that something they found in a drawer was actually in “plain sight” and therefore could be collected without a warrant. The right to a trial in criminal court, too, is undermined by prosecutors dangling extreme prison sentences over defendants to get them to plead guilty before there’s a full hearing of the evidence; this plea bargaining process accounts for about 95% of felony convictions.

The right to an attorney in the criminal system is also hardly absolute, with underfunded public defender offices struggling to keep up with caseloads and lawyers facing rampant conflicts of interest.

Still, the rights themselves have been firmly upheld by the Supreme Court and other federal courts — and are therefore part of how police are trained — which is not true in child welfare.

Why Fewer Rights?

One clear reason for this mismatch in rights is that there was no formal child welfare system when the Constitution was written, so some amendments in the Bill of Rights were worded to apply only to criminal matters.

More broadly, child welfare proceedings occupy a nebulous space between criminal and civil justice.

In the very few instances when the Supreme Court or federal circuit courts have addressed whether such rights should apply in child protection investigations, the rulings have largely said that if law enforcement is involved (like a police officer with a badge and gun being in the room while a CPS worker is interviewing a child), the rights exist. Otherwise, maybe not.

This reflects, in part, the history of child welfare courts, which were set up to be “problem-solving” rather than adversarial — to serve kids rather than to litigate guilt. This was a progressive vision of a system where social services workers, families and judges would work together to improve the child’s situation, rather than a prosecutor-versus-defendant setup.

So when the 1960s brought a due process revolution in criminal justice — the Supreme Court institutionalizing the right to an attorney in Gideon v. Wainwright and the practice of being read your rights in Miranda v. Arizona — child welfare practitioners were not thinking in the same terms.

“We are a pathetic field, still in our infancy,” said Marty Guggenheim, a longtime New York University family law professor who in 1990 founded what was for years the only parental defense clinic in the nation. (There are now about a dozen, according to a ProPublica review of law school offerings and interviews with heads of clinics.)

The problem is perpetuated by law schools, where criminal and corporate defense are deemed essential but family defense is not, ProPublica’s reporting has found. In a review of the curricula of every Ivy League law program and a dozen major state schools around the U.S., almost none appear to provide a class that’s strictly about defending parents accused of child maltreatment. Many offer family law coursework, but it is focused on typically middle-class issues like divorce, custody and wills and trusts.

Zoe Russell, a Harvard Law School graduate who is going into the family defense field, said that the classes she was offered centered on families with money, and that to develop her understanding of her area of interest, she had to read the footnotes of academic papers and attend conferences of her own volition.

And then there’s the stigma, the idea that this kind of law — with children in potential danger — is morally dubious. (Russell notes that many lawyers who are skittish about her field will still defend clients accused of murder, or of serious white-collar crimes, types of work that she says she doesn’t judge but shouldn’t be seen as more valuable or important than her own.)

“I describe my upcoming job differently depending on who I’m talking to and their reaction,” she said. “This is an area that is trivialized, demeaned.”

What Is the Purpose of Rights?

When ProPublica and NBC News in October found that child welfare agents in New York were routinely conducting warrantless home searches, the city’s Administration for Children’s Services disagreed with some of the rhetorical framing of that reporting.

Perhaps most importantly, agency officials said that when caseworkers enter a home, it is not to conduct a “search” but rather an “evaluation” of the residence. Based on what the workers see, they can then connect families with services to provide food if the fridge is empty or window guards to keep kids safe.

But child welfare experts including Tarek Ismail, a law professor and civil rights attorney at the City University of New York School of Law, noted that what the Administration for Children’s Services does is “suspicion-based” and thus deserving of due process.

In other words, Ismail said, these are not building inspectors going to every apartment in a building and “evaluating” whether each one has a proper window guard so they can generally protect kids. Instead, these are investigators who have received a specific allegation of wrongdoing and are being sent to a specific apartment to look for evidence of it.

And these agents, along with the prosecutors who follow up on what they find, have the power to punish.

Some of this boils down to a question of language, said Guggenheim, who began his career five decades ago in a parallel field: juvenile justice.

Juvenile detention officials, Guggenheim said, often used terminology suggesting that in their line of work there were “no convictions, no prisons, no punishment at all.” Instead, he said, “there were juvenile delinquents, adjudications, placements, training schools.”

And as he worked on legal challenges to the solitary confinement of children in youth prisons, officials called such isolation cells “time-out rooms.”

But the Supreme Court, in a landmark case called In re Gault, ruled in 1967 that “it doesn’t matter what the system calls these things, what matters is the reality of what they are doing,” Guggenheim said.

This push to describe the harms of juvenile incarceration in clearer language, and to enumerate the rights that should therefore be provided to the kids facing it, helped bring about real reforms in that system.

Meanwhile, the child welfare field still leans on benevolent language and concepts such as “child welfare” instead of “family policing” (a phrase that activists have begun using recently); “caseworkers” instead of investigators or agents; and “court-appointed special advocates” filling the shoes of lawyers.

In turn, the rights that most U.S. citizens consider fundamental are hardly rights at all when it is a child protective services “caseworker” knocking on the door.