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by Alec MacGillis

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Tim Ryan is a “crazy, lying fraud.” That’s how J.D. Vance, the bestselling memoirist turned Republican Senate candidate from Ohio, opened his remarks at a September rally alongside Donald Trump in the middle of the congressional district Ryan has represented for two decades.

Ryan seems like an unlikely object of such caustic rhetoric. A 49-year-old former college-football quarterback, he is the paragon of affability, a genial Everyman whose introductory campaign video is so innocuous that it might easily be mistaken for an insurance commercial. His great passion, outside of politics, is yoga and mindfulness practice.

“We have to love each other, we have to care about each other, we have to see the best in each other, we have to forgive each other,” he declared when he won the Democratic Senate primary in May.

He isn’t just preaching kindness and forgiveness. For years, he has warned his fellow Democrats that their embrace of free trade and globalization would cost them districts like the one he represents in the Mahoning River Valley — and lobbied them to prioritize domestic manufacturing, which, he argued, could repair some of the damage.

His efforts went nowhere. Ryan failed in his bid to replace Nancy Pelosi as House minority leader in 2016. His presidential run in 2020 ended with barely a trace. And his opponent, Vance, was expected to coast to victory this year in a state that Trump carried twice by 8 points.

But things haven’t gone as predicted. Ryan is running close enough in the polls that a political action committee aligned with Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, has had to commit $28 million to keep the seat (now held by Rob Portman, who is retiring), and Vance has had to ratchet up his rhetorical attacks against this “weak, fake congressman.”

After years of being overlooked, Tim Ryan is pointing his party toward a path to recovery in the Midwest. On the campaign trail, he has embraced a unifying tone that stands out from the crassness and divisiveness that Trump and his imitators have wrought. A significant number of what he calls the “exhausted majority” of voters have responded gratefully.

And his core message — a demand for more aggressive government intervention to arrest regional decline — is not only resonating with voters but, crucially, breaking through with the Democratic leaders who presided over that decline for years. The Democrats have passed a burst of legislation that will pave the way for two new Intel chip plants in the Columbus exurbs, spur investment in new electric vehicle ventures in Ryan’s district and benefit solar-panel factories around Toledo, giving him, at long last, concrete examples to cite of his party rebuilding the manufacturing base in which the region took such pride.

In short, the party is doing much more of what Ryan has long said would save its political fortunes in the Midwest. The problem for him — and also for them — is that it may have come too late.

Tim Ryan was not always so alone in Congress. Manufacturing regions of the Northeast and Midwest used to produce many other Democrats like him, often with white-ethnic Catholic, working-class backgrounds and strong ties to organized labor. (Ryan’s family is Irish and Italian, and both his grandfather and great-grandfather worked in the steel mills.) One particularly notorious example of the type was James Traficant, who represented the Mahoning Valley in highly eccentric fashion and‌ served seven years in prison after a 2002 conviction on charges that included soliciting bribes and racketeering‌‌. That le‌‌ft his young former staff member — Tim Ryan — to win the seat at age 29.

A few stalwarts remain: Marcy Kaptur, whose mother was a union organizer at a spark plug plant, will likely hold her Toledo-area House seat after her MAGA opponent lied about his military record. And Sherrod Brown, whose upbringing in hard-hit Mansfield and generally disheveled affect has lent authenticity to his own progressive populism (never mind the fact that he’s a doctor’s son and has a Yale degree), has survived two Senate reelections thanks to his personal appeal and weak opponents.

But nearly all the rest have vanished. Many of them fell victim to the Democratic wipeout in 2010. Others succumbed to the extreme Republican gerrymandering that followed. But central to their disappearance was the economic decline of the communities they represented, which was on a scale that remains hard for many in more prosperous pockets of the country to grasp.

In the first decade of this century, after Bill Clinton signed NAFTA in 1993 and ushered China into the World Trade Organization in 2000, so many manufacturing businesses closed in Ohio — about 3,500, nearly a fifth of the total — that its industrial electricity consumption fell by more than a quarter. Ryan’s district was among the most ravaged. By 2010, the population of Youngstown had fallen 60% from its 1930 peak, and it ranked among the poorest cities in the country.

For the Democrats representing these devastated areas, the fallout was enormous. “We were always supposed to be the party of working people, and so those rank-and-file union members kept getting crushed, and jobs kept leaving, and their unions and the Democrats weren’t able to do anything for them,” said Ryan, when I met with him in August, after an event he held at a substance abuse treatment program in Zanesville. Democratic candidates were also putting their attention elsewhere, on social issues, and voters noticed.

Ryan is determined not to make the same mistake. “You want culture wars?” he asks in one TV ad, while throwing darts in a bar. “I’m not your guy. You want a fighter for Ohio? I’m all in.”

In the 2000s, as Ryan saw his band of like-minded Democrats dwindle, he started looking for answers, and he found some of them at the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a small advocacy group founded in 2007 to promote American manufacturing and agriculture.

The group’s theory is fairly straightforward: The “free trade” that has been so ruinous to manufacturing regions like the Mahoning Valley has been anything but free, given all the various forms of support that other nations provide their own industries. The group has been lobbying members of both parties to consider explicit support for U.S. producers, whether in the form of tariffs or subsidies, even if it means brushing up against World Trade Organization rules.

For years, the Coalition for a Prosperous America and its allies in Congress ran up against free-trade orthodoxy. But growing alarm over climate change, the breakdown of global supply chains during the pandemic and Russia’s war against Ukraine have brought a stunning turnaround. The Inflation Reduction Act includes many of the kinds of policies that Ryan and CPA have championed, including refundable tax credits for solar-panel production, a 15% alternative minimum tax for corporations and requirements that electric vehicles have North American-made parts to qualify for consumer tax credits. This month, the Biden administration announced major new tech-export controls aimed at China, with the U.S. trade representative, Katherine Tai, declaring that free trade “cannot come at the cost of further weakening our supply chains.”

It’s a vindication for Ryan and his former House allies, such as Tom Perriello, who represented south-central Virginia between 2009 and 2011.

“The elite echo chamber assumed away all the human costs” of globalization, said Perriello, instead of realizing industries needed to be helped to save middle-class jobs.

Still, the shift has come only after tremendous economic losses for places like the Mahoning Valley and political losses for the Democrats. In the 2020 presidential election, Democrats lost white voters without college degrees by 26 percentage points nationwide, and their margins among working-class Black and Hispanic voters shrank, too. They lost Mahoning County, once a Democratic stronghold, for the first time since 1972.

“For the most part, people lost jobs here and Washington wasn’t doing anything for them,” said David Betras, the former chairman of the Mahoning County Democratic Party. “And then Trump came along and he said, ‘Hey, they screwed you.’ People thought: ‘At least he sees me. He’s giving me water.’” It might be contaminated water, as Betras noted, “but at least it’s water.”

Ryan’s attempt to point his party in a different direction in the Midwest is still running up against resistance, even as he has drawn close to Vance in the polls. The first ad released by Ryan’s campaign, in April, is Exhibit A.

Wearing an untucked shirt, he delivers a barrage against the threat presented by China: “It is us versus China and instead of taking them on, Washington’s wasting our time on stupid fights. … China is out-manufacturing us left and right. … America can never be dependent on Communist China. … It is time for us to fight back. … We need to build things in Ohio by Ohio workers.”

By the standards of the Ohio Senate race of 2022, it was pretty mild stuff. At an April rally with Trump, after completing his extreme pivot from Trump critic to acolyte, Vance lashed out at “corrupt scumbags who take their marching orders from the Communist Chinese.” But the Ryan ad nonetheless got opprobrium from Asian Americans, who said it risked fueling anti-Asian sentiment.

Irene Lin, a Democratic strategist based in Ohio, found that remarkable. “It’s so weird that he runs an ad attacking China, and people say, ‘You sound like Trump.’ Tim’s been attacking China for decades! Trump co-opted it from us and we need to take it back, because Trump is a complete fraud on this.”

Still, the episode underscored Ryan’s conundrum: how to match Trump and Vance when it comes to the decline of Ohio manufacturing without offending allies within the liberal Democratic coalition.

When I asked Ryan in Zanesville how he would distinguish his own views from those of Vance, he insisted it would not be difficult. For one thing, he noted, Vance has attacked a core element of the industrial policy that Ryan sees as key to reviving Ohio: electric vehicle subsidies. At the Mahoning rallies, Vance ridiculed them as giveaways for the elites, which, as Ryan sees it, overlooks the hundreds of workers who now have jobs at the old Lordstown General Motors plant in the Mahoning Valley, building electric cars, trucks and tractors as part of a new venture led by the Taiwanese company Foxconn, and at a large battery plant across the street.

“He’s worried about losing the internal-combustion auto jobs — dude, where’ve you been?” Ryan asked. “Those jobs are going. That factory was empty.”

Less than two months after Ryan’s anti-culture war ad, the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs ruling on abortion, bolstering Democrats’ prospects with moderate voters of the sort who help decide elections in places like suburban Columbus — and making it harder for Ryan to avoid hot-button social issues. He calls the ruling “the largest governmental overreach into personal lives in my lifetime,” but his continued focus on economic issues shows that he believes that’s not enough to win an election. Recent polls suggest he may be right.

Ryan was in the Columbus suburbs on the evening after we spoke in Zanesville, but he was there to discuss the China ad, not abortion. At an event hosted by local Asian American associations, a few women told Ryan how hurtful they had found the ad. He answered in a conciliatory tone but did not apologize.

The ad, he said, was directed at the Chinese government, not Asian or Asian American people, and the things in it needed saying. “I got nothing but love in my heart. I have no hate in my heart,” he said, but the United States needed to rise to meet China’s aggressive trade policies. In Youngstown, Chinese steel would “land on our shore so subsidized, that it was the same price as the raw material cost for an American company before they even turn the lights on. That is what they have been doing.”

“That is not in your ad,” said one of the women. “You need to put those things in your ad.”

“I just want to make a point,” Ryan said. “One is, I love you. Two is, I will always defend you and never let anyone try to hurt you, never. Not on my watch. But we have got to absolutely and decisively defeat China economically. And if we don’t do that, you’re going to have these countries dictating the rules of the road for the entire world and continuing to try to displace and weaken the United States.”

Watching Ryan, I was struck by what a delicate balancing act he was trying to pull off. He was, on the one hand, the last of a breed, a son of steel country with two public college degrees (Bowling Green State University and the University of New Hampshire) in a party increasingly dominated by professionals with elite degrees.

But he was trying to adapt to today’s liberal coalition, too, with his soft-edged rhetoric and, yes, the mindfulness stuff, which Vance has lampooned. (“You know Tim Ryan has not one but two books on yoga and meditation?” he said at the September rally with Trump.)

There were other models on the ballot this fall for how Democrats might seek to win in the Midwest: Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan running for reelection on abortion rights, John Fetterman running for Senate in Pennsylvania on his unique brand of postindustrial authenticity, Mandela Barnes running for Senate in Wisconsin as an avatar of youthful diversity.

But Ryan’s bid may have the most riding on it, because it is based on substantive disagreements within the party about how to rebuild the middle class and the middle of the country. For years, too many leading Democrats stood by as the wrenching transformation of the economy devastated communities, while accruing benefits to a small set of highly prosperous cities, mostly on the coasts, that became the party’s gravitational center. It was so easy to disregard far-off desolation — or to take only passing note of it, counting the dollar stores as one happened to traverse areas of decline — until Trump’s victory brought it to the fore.

With its belated embrace of the industrial policy advocated by Ryan, the Democratic Party seems finally to be reckoning with this failure. It means grappling with regional decline, because not everyone can relocate to prosperous hubs, and even if they did, it wouldn’t necessarily help the Democrats in a political system that favors the geographic dispersal of party voters.

It means recognizing the emotional power of made-in-America patriotism, which can serve to neuter the uglier aspects of the opposition’s anti-immigrant appeals. And it means transcending the culture-war incitements offered up by the likes of Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.

The approach may well fall short this time in Ohio, because Ryan’s party has let so much terrain slip out of its hands. But even so, it showed what might have been, all along, and might yet be again, if a region can begin to recover, and the resentment can begin to recede.

by Kavitha Surana

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Last month, an Australian traveler who’d been briefly detained at an airport by U.S. Customs and Border Protection provided several news organizations with a recording, which she said showed that while she was in custody, an agency official asked her several times whether she was pregnant or had recently had an abortion.

In the six-minute audio, a CBP representative, who appeared to be reading from a script, explained to the 32-year-old traveler, Madolline Gourley, that the agency is required to collect medical information of people they detain. For women of childbearing age, the agent said, that includes whether they’re pregnant, postpartum or have recently experienced “termination of pregnancy.” In sharing the audio with ProPublica, Gourley wrote in an email, “I think a lot of your readers will be shocked to hear CBP confirms it is OK to ask detained travelers about their pregnancy and abortion status.”

The audio and Gourley’s allegations set off a brief but blistering media storm because they came at a time when new abortion bans are taking effect in more than a dozen states, including Texas and Arizona along the border. Several news outlets published stories echoing Gourley’s outrage that border officials, who work for an agency with a track record of abuses against immigrants, might use such information to deny entry to asylum-seekers or tourists.

But among immigrant advocates, the allegations lent new urgency to long-standing concerns that have less to do with what happens when border agents question immigrants about their health conditions, and more with what happens when they don’t — or when they ignore pleas for help.

The advocates’ larger concern is about CBP facilities, particularly those on the U.S.-Mexico border — overcrowded holding cells known as hieleras, or iceboxes, because they are kept at freezing temperatures. They’re designed to process immigrants and asylum-seekers, not to hold them for extended periods. On Thursday, a coalition of 83 advocacy organizations and 51 medical professionals led by the American Civil Liberties Union issued a new demand that CBP adopt a policy to limit the time pregnant, postpartum and nursing individuals and infants spend in detention to less than 12 hours, absent exceptional circumstances.

“There’s simply no way for people to obtain adequate reproductive health care in CBP custody,” said Esmeralda Flores, senior policy advocate at the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties, which is part of the coalition. “We’re talking about facilities that are notorious for degrading conditions and medical neglect across the board.”

The advocates point to a report last year by the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General that found that up to 274 babies may have been born between 2016 and 2020 while in the custody of the Border Patrol, whose agents aren’t trained and whose facilities are not equipped for such emergencies. In one case, a pregnant Guatemalan woman gave birth in her pants while leaning on a trash can after agents took her to a Border Patrol station instead of the hospital. She and her infant were kept in a holding cell without a crib overnight.

The report found other instances when newborns were held overnight or for days in inadequate facilities. It said that CBP relied on women to self-report their pregnancies and that it failed to regularly collect data tracking pregnancies and childbirths in custody.

In response to the report, CBP issued guidelines in 2021 that required agents to identify, document and tend to the health needs of women and infants in custody. The agency insists that questions like the ones posed to Gourley are not part of a political agenda but intended to make sure detainees get appropriate medical care and accommodations. CBP spokesperson Jaime Ruiz said in an email to ProPublica he would not comment on Gourley’s case. However, he said that while agents are required to ask about “pregnancy loss,” including miscarriages and stillbirths, they “don’t use the word abortion, nor ask about it.”

He added that answers are voluntary and such questions are not meant to be “an intrusion into someone’s privacy or rights. It is for the well-being of those in our temporary custody — their health is our priority.”

Advocates assert that even with the guidelines, agents do not always ask immigrants those questions. And even when they do, the advocates say, there’s no way for pregnant immigrants or infants to get appropriate care in CBP sites because agents and facilities are not equipped to provide it. In their view, the only way to minimize the harm that happens to pregnant immigrants and infants in CBP custody is to reduce the time they spend there. Without a firm policy, they say, the issues will continue.

In their Thursday letter to CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus, advocates pointed to a case from last March: A mother from Nicaragua told the ACLU that while she was in CBP custody, her 6-month-old son went four days without medical attention for pneumonia, despite repeated requests. She reported that agents yelled at her when she tried to breastfeed her baby. Though the new guidelines for families with infants require a medical intake process, welfare checks every 15 minutes and offering snacks, she told the ACLU that none of that happened.

“Each day that passes without such a policy places more families at risk,” said Monika Langarica, an attorney at UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy.

CBP did not respond to questions about whether the agency is considering an expedited release mandate for pregnant immigrants and infants or the examples in the coalition’s letter. Their current guidelines say “generally” no one should be held longer than 72 hours and that “every effort must be made to hold detainees for the least amount of time required.” But with the enormous number of people they process, agents have acknowledged difficulty upholding those standards.

In Gourley’s case, she was detained at Los Angeles International Airport because agents suspected she had worked as a cat-sitter in exchange for housing, in violation of the visa-waiver program, which doesn’t permit compensation. She said she was surprised when during her detention, an agent twice pressed her about whether she’d had an abortion and she filed a complaint after she was deported to Australia. Months later, she said, she received a phone call from a CBP official who investigated her case. She recorded the call and shared it with the media, sounding an alarm that brought attention to cases that often don’t get enough of it.

Referring to Gourley, Dana Sussman, the acting director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, said: “I think what’s remarkable here, and important to recognize, is this person appears to be coming from a well-resourced, privileged position and she feels safe enough generating her own outrage to speak publicly about this. That’s very different than the way many folks arrive in this country.”

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by Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi, photography by Rich-Joseph Facun, graphics by Haisam Hussein

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Also: Have you worked with hazardous chemicals? Our reporters want to hear from you.

Henry Saenz remembers when he first learned what even the tiniest bit of asbestos could do to his body. He was working at a chemical plant where employees used the mineral to make chlorine, and his coworkers warned him about what could happen each time he took a breath: Tiny fibers, invisible to the eye, could enter his nose and mouth and settle into his lungs, his abdomen, the lining of his heart. They could linger there for decades. Then, one day, he might develop asbestosis, a chronic disease that makes the lungs harden, or mesothelioma, a vicious cancer that ends the lives of most who have it within a few years.

By then, in the early 1990s, the dangers of asbestos were already irrefutable. The United States had prohibited its use in pipe insulation and branded it so risky that remediators had to wear hazmat suits to remove it. But unlike dozens of other countries that banned the potent carcinogen outright, the United States never did. To this day, the U.S. allows hundreds of tons of asbestos to flow in each year from Brazil, primarily for the benefit of two major chemical companies, OxyChem and Olin Corp. The companies say asbestos is integral to chlorine production at several aging plants and have made a compelling argument to keep it legal: Unlike in the horrific tales of the past, their current protocols for handling asbestos are so stringent that workers face little threat of exposure.

But at OxyChem’s plant in Niagara Falls, New York, where Saenz worked for nearly three decades, the reality was far different, more than a dozen former workers told ProPublica. There, they said, asbestos dust hung in the air, collected on the beams and light fixtures and built up until it was inches thick. Workers tramped in and out of it all day, often without protective suits or masks, and carried it around on their coveralls and boots. They implored the plant’s managers to address the conditions, they said, but the dangers remained until the plant closed in late 2021 for unrelated reasons.

It was hard for Saenz to reconcile the science that he understood — and that he believed OxyChem and government leaders understood — with what he saw at the plant every day. He did his best not to inhale the asbestos, but after a short time, he came to believe there was no way the killer substance was not already inside him, waiting, perhaps 30 or 40 or even 50 years, to strike.

Now, too late for Saenz, the Environmental Protection Agency appears poised to finally outlaw asbestos in a test case with huge implications. If the agency fails to ban a substance so widely established as harmful, scientists and public health experts argue, it would raise serious doubts about the EPA’s ability to protect the public from any toxic chemicals.

To fight the proposed ban, the chemical companies have returned to a well-worn strategy and marshaled political heavyweights, including the attorneys general of 12 Republican-led states who say it would place a “heavy and unreasonable burden” on industry.

Lost in the battle is the story of what happened in the decades during which the U.S. failed to act. It’s not just a tale of workers in hardscrabble company towns who were sacrificed to the bottom line of industry, but one of federal agencies cowed again and again by the well-financed lawyers and lobbyists of the companies they are supposed to oversee.

It’s the quintessential story of American chemical regulation.

OxyChem’s Niagara Falls facility, the longest-standing asbestos-reliant chlorine plant in America

For decades, the EPA and Congress accepted the chlorine companies’ argument that asbestos workers were safe enough, and regulators left the carcinogen on the list of dangerous chemicals that other countries ban but the U.S. still allows. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration even let OxyChem and Olin into a special program that limited the frequency of inspections at many of their plants. Along the way, the two companies proved that they didn’t need asbestos to make chlorine: They built some modern facilities elsewhere that didn’t use it. But they balked at the cost of upgrading the older facilities where it was still in use — even as they earned billions of dollars from chemical sales and raked in record profits this year.

OxyChem, owned by one of the country’s largest energy companies, Occidental Petroleum, declined requests for an interview. After ProPublica sent a summary of its reporting, company officials said the accounts from the Niagara Falls plant were “inaccurate” but declined to say what specifically was incorrect. In a statement, the company said it complies with federal regulations on asbestos and that workers who handle it are “trained, work in restricted areas of our plant, protected by personal protective equipment and are offered annual medical examinations.” The company also said it authorizes employees to stop work if they feel unsafe. “The health and safety of every plant worker and the people in our surrounding communities is our top priority,” the company said.

Olin did not respond to calls and emails sent over the course of a month.

It has been easy to minimize the toll asbestos takes on workers. Workers’ compensation cases are often confidential, and employees may fear speaking out and jeopardizing their livelihood. ProPublica reporters, however, found a unique opportunity to explore what it was really like to work at an asbestos-reliant plant after America’s longest-standing facility, the one run by OxyChem in Niagara Falls, shuttered last November. With their jobs no longer on the line, Saenz and 17 other former workers, some with institutional knowledge dating back to the 1960s and others with memories less than a year old, said they felt free to talk. They agreed to hours of interviews and dug through their homes for documentation to reconstruct their work lives in the decades they spent at the plant.

Former OxyChem worker Mike Spacone shows a photo of himself sweeping near boilers at the plant in 1982.

What they recounted — ever-present asbestos dust with scant protection — stunned six experts in industrial hygiene and occupational health who were consulted by ProPublica.

“Totally unacceptable,” said Rachael Jones, professor and chair of the Environmental Health Sciences Department at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Fraught with danger,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, a public health physician trained in occupational medicine and epidemiology who leads Boston College’s program for Global Public Health and the Common Good.

“It sounds like something that maybe would happen in the 1940s or the 1950s,” said Celeste Monforton, a lecturer in public health at Texas State University who studies occupational health and safety practices.

“It’s just so counter to everything that they put in the record about using [asbestos] safely,” Monforton said.

For more than a century, OxyChem’s plant on the Niagara River, just 3 miles upstream from the world-renowned falls, was a small city unto itself. It buzzed with workers day and night, and, in its heyday, had its own cafeteria, credit union and health clinic. A job there carried a certain cachet. Workers could make six figures, even without college degrees. But the plant had a dark legacy. Its previous owner, Hooker Chemical, had buried toxic waste in an unfinished aqueduct called Love Canal, then turned the property over to the city for development in the 1950s. After contaminated groundwater sickened the people who lived there, it became known as one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.

Unlike many of the other workers who grew up in the shadow of the plant, following their fathers and uncles into jobs there, Saenz was originally from Northern California. But he fell in love with a woman from Niagara Falls and moved there to start a family with her, working at a hotel, delivering flowers and tending bar — anything to put food on the table, he said — before deciding OxyChem was the job he wanted to stay in.

Henry Saenz, left, and his son Henry Jr. The falls, which are within sight of the docks used by the plant on the Niagara River Some homes in Niagara Falls abut OxyChem’s property line.

He was hired in 1989 and soon after got a crash course in chemistry. A jolt of electricity, he learned, could turn a tank of salt water into three substances: chlorine, caustic soda and hydrogen. The chlorine could be sold for disinfecting water, the caustic soda for making paper, soap and aspirin. There was, however, a real danger: If the chemicals mixed, the tank could turn into a bomb. So each tank had a thick, metal screen inside to keep the chemicals apart.

The screen was coated with a layer of impenetrable asbestos. OxyChem used chrysotile, or white asbestos, the most common type. It showed up on trains in oversized bags that looked like pillows stuffed with down feathers. At OxyChem, there were about 200 tanks, called cells, each the size of a dining room table and containing a metal screen. When a screen needed to be recoated, a special team of workers removed it and brought it to the cavernous cell-maintenance building. There, they blasted it with a high-pressure water cannon until the old asbestos fell off. Then, they dipped the clean screen into a wet mixture containing new asbestos and cooked it in an oven until the asbestos hardened. They worked on one or two screens each day.

The asbestos job was one of the most hazardous at the plant, requiring special training. But it also provided a rare benefit. Unlike most positions, which forced workers to take afternoon and midnight shifts, the asbestos job was days only. Saenz, who initially worked in a different department, waited years for an opening on the team, eager to spend more time with his growing family. After his fourth child was born, a spot opened up.

A sign for JD’s Restaurant and Lounge, where the asbestos team often met after shifts

The team was a small fraternity of eight or so men who ate lunch together in a special trailer. Some days, when their shift ended at 2 p.m., they would meet at JD’s, a dive bar near the plant. Other days, it was the wing joint down the street or the bar in Terry Cheetham’s basement. Cheetham was the big brother of the group; the guys called him Soupie. Reserved and shaggy-haired, garrulous only with a beer in hand, he’d dropped out of high school after his father’s death and gone to work for OxyChem. He wanted to help his mom support their family. Soon after Saenz joined the team, Cheetham tapped him on the shoulder. “We’re going for a ride after work,” he said. Later, they pulled up outside the local liquor store. As the new guy, Saenz had to carry the keg.

The guys raised their kids together, helped each other’s families through difficult times. At the plant, they always had each other’s backs. Certain hazards, like fires, were hard to miss. Others, like chlorine leaks, were more subtle. Then, there was the asbestos. As Saenz spent more time on the job, he began noticing just how much of it surrounded him.

Federal workplace safety standards require keeping asbestos fibers wet to prevent them from going airborne, having workers wear protective equipment and containing the asbestos inside certain areas. OxyChem had rules in place to meet those standards. But protocols failed to match reality at the Niagara Falls plant, according to more than a dozen workers.

Water-blasting the screens was like washing a car with a high-powered hose. Asbestos splattered everywhere. It wasn’t a problem when the asbestos was wet. But it would dry overnight, and the next morning, it would be stuck to the ceiling and the walls. Clumps would roll across the floor like tiny tumbleweeds. Floating particles would catch the light when the sun poured in. There was so much asbestos in the cell-maintenance building that it was impossible to keep it all wet, said Robert Cheff, who worked at the plant from 1981 to 2007. “We were constantly swimming in this stuff.”

Cheff A coat issued to Saenz hangs in his basement.

Workers wore protective gear for certain tasks, like pressure washing and screen dipping. But they went into the building to carry out other tasks without special suits or anything protecting their faces, despite company requirements. One worker said managers enforced those rules. But a dozen others interviewed by ProPublica recalled that the bosses looked the other way. Suiting up was impractical, those workers said. It took time away from the tasks that needed to get done and was uncomfortable, especially on hot days, when the temperature inside could reach 100 degrees.

In the summer, the windows and doors were left open to keep the workers from overheating, allowing asbestos to escape outside. Wet asbestos splashed on their uniforms, coats, helmets and boots. One guy seemed to always have some on his mustache. It would dry and flake off their clothes wherever they went, they said. Saenz remembered walking into safety meetings in the administrative building with asbestos drying on his coveralls. The guys carried so much asbestos into the trailer where they ate lunch and took breaks that it needed to be replaced, former union leaders said.

Workers used pressure washers to blast asbestos off large screens called diaphragms, splattering asbestos everywhere.

Their uniforms sat in the laundry, caked with dry asbestos. When the union raised the problem in 2010, managers responded by giving the team its own hamper with a lid to contain the asbestos, said longtime union officer Mike Spacone. Only after union leaders threatened to call federal authorities did the company give the team its own laundry facilities, Spacone said.

On occasion, workers who handled asbestos would leave without showering in the plant’s locker room or wear their work clothes home. “My kids played sports,” recalled Dave Helbig, an employee from 1980 through 2021. “Sometimes I had to leave to get to their games.”

The company would have known employees were being exposed; workers with a high risk of exposure sometimes clipped a small monitor to their bodies to measure the amount of asbestos in the air around them. At least five times in 2001 and 2002, the levels around team member Patrick Nowak exceeded OSHA’s exposure limit, his company records show. “I failed so many times, they quit testing me,” he said. The records do not indicate if Nowak was wearing a protective mask known as a respirator, as some other employees’ records do.

Tony Garfalo wore a monitor seven times in 2001, and, on four occasions, the results exceeded OSHA’s limit, his records show. Once, the asbestos level was more than five times the allowable limit. The records say he was wearing a half-face respirator. Garfalo said his bosses promised to address the situation, but “nothing changed.”

How Workers Said They Were Exposed to Asbestos at the OxyChem Plant

He and the others knew all too well the damage asbestos could cause. Garfalo said his father, who worked the asbestos job at the plant, developed asbestosis. Employees in other departments got sick from a type of asbestos-containing pipe covering that once insulated the plant, longtime employees said and court records show. Cheff said his uncle died from asbestosis at 59. A millwright named Teddy Skiba was diagnosed with mesothelioma and later died.

In addition to those signature diseases, which are rare even among asbestos workers, the tiny strands can harm the body in other ways. They can put people at increased risk of heart disease by scarring the lungs, forcing the heart to work harder to pump blood through them to pick up oxygen. Some scientific evidence suggests an association between asbestos exposure and stroke. And battling all kinds of illnesses with damaged lungs can weaken the body’s ability to fight them; that damage can mean the difference between life and death.

One retired member of the team, Umberto Bernardone, died from an aneurysm in 2004 at age 77. He had long had trouble breathing, said his son, Mario, who also worked at the plant. X-rays showed that asbestosis had scarred his lungs. “The asbestos was with him all the time,” Mario said.

Not long after, another retired team member, Salvatore “Buddy” Vilardo, died from a blood clot, his son said. He was 62.

Asbestos Wreaks Havoc on the Body

Cheetham, the group’s big brother, had just retired when he fell ill in 2004. A doctor in Buffalo said it was cancer. Cheetham told his daughter Keri that he was certain the asbestos was responsible and asked her to consult a lawyer after he died. When the guys found out he was sick, they showed up at his house. They found their friend in a bed in his living room, under the care of a hospice nurse, struggling to breathe.

Cheetham died five months before his 56th birthday. His autopsy surprised his family — it wasn’t asbestos after all; an aggressive form of skin cancer had killed him. His former co-workers weren’t told about the autopsy. For years, they believed his cancer had been brought on by asbestos exposure. The memory of Cheetham’s last gasps haunted the guys like a ghost, a harbinger of what their own futures might hold.

A photograph of Terry Cheetham that was kept by his ex-wife, Peggy.

Elsewhere in the world, governments were taking action to protect their people. Saudi Arabia banned asbestos in 1998, Chile and Argentina did so in 2001, Australia in 2003. By 2005, asbestos was outlawed across the European Union. “It was a no-brainer,” said Tatiana Santos, head of chemical policy at the European Environmental Bureau, a network of environmental citizens’ groups.

America’s EPA could have banned asbestos. Congress could have banned it. But over and over, they crumpled in the face of pressure from OxyChem and its peers in the chlorine industry.

The EPA tried to enact a ban in the late 1980s, but the companies got ahead of it. Records from the time show corporations testified that removing asbestos from chlorine plants would not yield significant health benefits because workers were only minimally exposed; they also argued it would require “scrapping large amounts of capital equipment” and thus would “not be economically feasible.”

Under federal law at the time, the EPA was obligated to regulate asbestos in the way that was “least burdensome” to industry. That forced the EPA to make a cold calculation: Banning asbestos in chlorine plants would prevent “relatively few cancer cases” but increase the companies’ costs. So when the agency enacted an asbestos ban in 1989, it carved out an exemption for the mineral’s use in the chlorine industry.

The EPA made it clear that the companies should begin using alternatives to asbestos screens; in fact, according to company records made public through litigation and published as part of Columbia University and the City University of New York’s Toxic Docs project, OxyChem had already developed screens that didn’t need an asbestos coating. Still, the companies celebrated their immunity from regulation.

“WE HAVE A WIN,” a lobbyist declared in an internal communication included in the Toxic Docs project.

An industry lobbyist’s reaction to an EPA rule that did not ban using asbestos in chlorine manufacturing (Via the Toxic Docs project by Columbia University and the City University of New York)

In the end, asbestos was never banned. The asbestos industry challenged the ban in court, and in 1991, a panel of federal judges deemed the rule too onerous and overturned it. The decision was a stinging blow to the EPA, several current and former employees told ProPublica. “I still remember the shock on the managers’ faces,” said Greg Schweer, an EPA veteran who ran its new-chemicals management branch before he retired in 2020. The office “was full of energized people wanting to make their mark. But things changed after that.” The agency shelved efforts to regulate other dangerous substances and wouldn’t attempt a similar chemical ban for 28 years.

Most industries stopped using asbestos anyway, a phenomenon experts largely attribute to a wave of lawsuits from people with asbestos-related diseases. But the chlorine industry kept using its asbestos screens. It continued importing hundreds of tons of the substance every year, more than the weight of the Statue of Liberty.

In 2002, Sen. Patty Murray a Democrat from Washington, tried to get a ban through Congress. She tried again in 2003 and again in 2007. That year, with Democrats in control of the Senate and House, her effort found some traction. OxyChem was keenly aware how much an asbestos ban would hurt its bottom line. Chlorine and caustic soda were the focus of its chemical operation, financial statements show, driving more than $4 billion in annual sales. Most of OxyChem’s plants still used asbestos; if they had to close, production would tumble.

Occidental Petroleum, OxyChem’s owner, was a force on Capitol Hill, with lobbyists that spent millions influencing policy and a political action committee that pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into campaigns each election cycle. OxyChem was also a member of the American Chemistry Council, an influential trade organization that made campaign contributions of its own.

The industry had an ally in then-Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana; at the time, at least a quarter of the 16 asbestos-dependent plants in the country were located in the Republican senator’s home state, records show. At a hearing in June 2007, Vitter echoed the chlorine industry’s standby talking point, that its manufacturing process involved “minimal to no release of asbestos and absolutely no worker exposure.”

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“Now, if this were harming people or potentially killing people, that would be the end of the argument, we should outlaw it,” he added. “But there is no known case of asbestos-related disease from the chlor-alkali industry using this technology.”

Then-Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat in favor of the ban, pushed back, saying the chlorine manufacturing process was “not as clean as one would think.” But to build support for the bill, proponents ultimately agreed to exclude products that might contain trace levels of asbestos, such as crushed stone, as well as the asbestos used in the chlorine industry.

The bill passed out of the Senate on a unanimous vote. But many of the public health advocates who championed the initial measure opposed the watered-down version, saying it had been practically gutted, and it failed to find support in the House. Vitter, who later went on to lobby for the American Chemistry Council, did not respond to requests for an interview.

In the 15 years that followed, congressional attempts to ban asbestos would continue to fall short.

The bar at JD’s

Yet another federal entity had the power to protect the OxyChem workers. There was once a time when OSHA inspectors visited the Niagara Falls plant about every year. That ended in 1996, when the plant won coveted admission into an OSHA program that exempted it from such scrutiny.

The Star Program, created during the Reagan administration as part of OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Programs, allows plants that can prove they are model facilities to avoid random inspections. The theory behind the program is that motivating companies to adhere to best practices on their own is more effective than having underfunded government inspectors punish them.

At the Niagara Falls plant, former union leaders believed the program would protect jobs and make the facility safer, they told ProPublica. They worked with management on the application — a monthslong process that entailed updating the plant’s safety practices and submitting to a rigorous inspection. But what actually changed, the union leaders said, was that OSHA inspectors came far less frequently and announced their visits well in advance. When OSHA came to re-evaluate the plant, usually every three to five years, management spent months preparing, said Spacone, the union officer. “They would clean the hell out of the place. Everything would be spotless.” Work in certain areas came to a halt. Plant representatives tried to limit what the evaluators saw.

Spacone Engineering and safety offices were housed in a red brick building next to OxyChem’s main gate. The building where OxyChem produced caustic soda, which drove billions in annual sales, alongside chlorine.

Even still, in 2011, evaluators found asbestos “scattered in certain areas of the floor” and covering much of the mechanical equipment, records show. “This contamination can spread easily when dry,” they wrote in a report. “Appropriate clean up procedures must be instituted to prevent airborne asbestos.” The evaluators did not give the plant an official citation. In the end, they applauded the plant’s “commitment to safety and health” and recommended it for continued participation in the program.

Three years later, evaluators identified another issue related to hygiene: Although the plant tested the air for hazards like asbestos, it wasn’t using the data to spot problems. What’s more, the person in charge of the program wasn’t properly trained. OSHA let the plant remain in the program on the condition that it fixed the problems within a year. The plant updated its software and the department leader took a 56-hour course, records show.

Apart from the re-evaluation visits, OSHA made just two other trips to the plant between 1996 and 2021, records show. Only one included a full inspection. On that visit, inspectors cited the plant for failing to protect workers from falls. The other visit did not result in any citations.

With OSHA largely out of the picture, the plant’s managers became more lax about safety, Spacone said. “I started thinking [that joining the Star Program] was a mistake,” he said. Debbie Berkowitz, a former chief of staff and senior policy adviser at OSHA during the Obama administration, said that, in her experience, it was possible for plants to stay in the program long after their commitment to safety had lapsed. “Once they’re in, they’re in,” she said. “In most cases, it is a total ruse.”

OSHA declined to make an official available for an on-the-record interview or comment on ProPublica’s findings at the Niagara Falls plant. A Department of Labor spokesperson said that plants can be terminated from the program and that unions can withdraw their support.

In the absence of government intervention, union leaders tried to tackle the asbestos problem themselves, four former union presidents told ProPublica. The union repeatedly asked management to expand the asbestos team and have certain people dedicated to cleaning. Plant leaders refused, they said. “It was a never-ending battle,” said Vincent Ferlito, one of the former presidents. “It always came back to the same thing: money.”

Fed up with the mess, Garfalo grabbed a roll of red caution tape one day in 2007 and wrapped it around the asbestos-soiled building where his team worked, to the amazement of his colleagues. He barricaded each doorway, then hung as many danger signs as he could find. The protest prompted his managers to hire professionals for a one-time clean, but they also warned him to never do it again, he said.

By 2011, a year after he’d retired, Garfalo couldn’t ignore a lingering cough that would occasionally startle him out of sleep. His doctor couldn’t tell whether his breathing difficulties were caused by asbestos or his smoking habit, but said that smokers who are exposed to the substance have an even higher risk of serious illness. Garfalo’s mind traveled back to a day, a dozen years earlier, when he climbed atop the cell-maintenance building to fix a fan, only to discover that the entire roof was coated in asbestos. Train cars parked beside the building were covered, too. He thought about the homes less than a half-mile away and wondered how far the fibers had traveled.

Garfalo

In August 2021, OxyChem announced it was closing the Niagara Falls plant, blaming “unfavorable regional market conditions” and rising rail costs in New York state. Over time, its workforce had dwindled from more than 1,300 to about 150. OxyChem’s chlorine operation was now mostly in Gulf Coast states with lower taxes and less regulation.

And a law that had once protected it from “burdensome” environmental rules had changed.

In 2016, Congress had updated the Toxic Substances Control Act, removing the requirement that the EPA choose regulations that burdened industry as little as possible. Though the change gave the agency another chance to ban asbestos, it wasn’t going to happen during the Trump administration; the former president once alleged that the movement against asbestos was “led by the mob” and had his face featured on the packaging of Russian-produced asbestos. Under the Biden administration, however, the EPA determined that all workers in asbestos-dependent chlorine plants faced an “unreasonable risk” of getting sick from it, citing a review of the companies’ own exposure-monitoring data. This April, EPA Administrator Michael Regan proposed a ban for the first time in more than three decades.

It could be eight months or more before the rule is finalized. Two trade associations, the American Chemistry Council and the Chlorine Institute, are imploring the EPA to reconsider. They are once again arguing that the companies use asbestos safely — and they’ve turned to industry-friendly scientists and consulting firms to accuse the EPA of overestimating the risk to workers.

When given a summary of ProPublica’s reporting on the Niagara Falls plant and asked to respond, Chlorine Institute Vice President Robyn Brooks said her organization had no knowledge of the situation and referred reporters to OxyChem. The American Chemistry Council pointed to the plant’s participation in the Star program as proof of its “record of performance.”

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., speaks this summer at a hearing to amend the Toxic Substances Control Act to ban asbestos. (Shuran Huang for ProPublica)

The industry groups have also made the case that a ban would jeopardize the country’s supply of chlorine and could even create a drinking water shortage. But the EPA and public health advocates contest those claims. They point out that only a small fraction of the chlorine produced by asbestos-dependent plants is used to clean drinking water and that OxyChem and Olin have voluntarily closed or reduced capacity at several of those plants in recent years without catastrophically disrupting the supply chain. In fact, OxyChem told investors in August that its plans to upgrade the asbestos-reliant technology at its largest chlorine facility next year would have “no impact on customers,” a transcript shows. For at least eight years, the company has been slowly upgrading some plants to a newer technology that uses a polymer membrane to separate the chemicals; it built a completely asbestos-free plant in 2014.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has come to the companies’ defense, saying asbestos is “tightly regulated” and “used safely every day” in the chlor-alkali industry. So have 12 Republican attorneys general, including Ken Paxton of Texas and Jeff Landry of Louisiana. In a letter, they questioned whether the EPA has the authority to pursue a ban, signaling a readiness to take the agency to court like the asbestos industry did in 1989. (The Chamber and most of the attorneys general declined to comment or did not respond to inquiries from ProPublica. A spokesperson for Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson called the situation at the Niagara Falls plant “very concerning” and said that it would be “completely misleading” to suggest that the letter implied approval of such circumstances.)

Industry leaders are confident they will prevail. “We’ve been engaged in this activity for quite a while and have pushed back on it,” Olin CEO Scott Sutton told shareholders on a July 29 earnings call. “I think you’re not likely to see a final rule come out that is as proposed.”

Michal Freedhoff, the EPA’s top chemical regulator, said she could not comment on what the final rule-making decision would be. But she said the agency was not backing down on the science and that ProPublica’s reporting underscores the need for decisive action.

Given the potential for litigation, lawmakers are renewing their effort to pass a law banning asbestos, which would be more difficult to challenge in court. “It is a brutal and painful fight,” said Linda Reinstein, a leading advocate who co-founded the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization after her husband, Alan, died of mesothelioma in 2006. “We’re not going away.”

Hanging in the balance is the health of hundreds of workers at the eight remaining asbestos-dependent chlorine plants in Louisiana, Texas, Alabama and Kansas. ProPublica reached out to current and former employees at those facilities. At the OxyChem plant in Wichita, union president Keith Peacock said he was comfortable with the way asbestos was handled. “I don’t know of anyone who sees this as a health issue,” he said. “There are rules in place for it and everyone adheres to those safety guidelines.” But Chris Murphy, a former union president at Olin’s plant in Alabama, said the conditions there mirrored the ones described by the workers in Niagara Falls. He said he himself had seen asbestos caked on beams and cranes in recent years and been told to remove it with a putty knife. “There ain’t nothing to it,” he remembered his managers saying. “You’ll be all right. It ain’t that bad.” He wasn’t told to wear protective gear, he said, so he didn’t.

The former OxyChem workers who still live in Niagara Falls gather once a month to reminisce over Buffalo wings and beef piled high on salty kummelweck rolls. They can only wait and see if they develop symptoms as they enter the post-exposure time frame in which asbestos-related disease is commonly diagnosed.

Saenz left the plant with a bad back in 2016. Now a 64-year-old grandfather of two, he’s been having lung trouble and considering X-rays to see if there are signs of asbestos-related damage. “I’m wondering if I’m not headed down that road,” he said.

He sees the burden he now carries as a tradeoff for the lifestyle he was once afforded. “It was a great place to work. I was able to raise four children and buy a house and live the American dream.” He even gave his son Henry Jr. his blessing to start a job at OxyChem in 2013, so long as he stayed far away from asbestos. Saenz now wonders how much more time he has left with his family.

“It’s a nightmare,” he said. “It’s a price you pay, I guess.”

Saenz with his two young sons on a tour of the OxyChem plant in the early 2000s. Henry Jr., right, later took a job there.

Do You Work With These Hazardous Chemicals? Tell Us About It.

Reporting was contributed by Sarah Boden of NPR, and by Bernice Yeung and Danielle Ivory. Derek Willis contributed data analysis.

Art direction and visual editing by Jillian Kumagai. Design and development by Lena V. Groeger and Jillian Kumagai.

by Maya Miller, Neil Bedi and Kathleen McGrory

Workplaces use thousands of dangerous chemicals in manufacturing, production and construction. Many of these substances have been banned or restricted in other countries but are still allowed here in the United States.

Our latest investigation into the continued use of raw asbestos in the U.S. showed that OxyChem exposed workers to unsafe levels of the carcinogen for decades. Workers asked for additional protection, but the company and federal government agencies looked the other way, even as dozens of other countries banned asbestos. (OxyChem said the accounts from the Niagara Falls plant were inaccurate, but declined to say what specifically was incorrect. The company said it complies with federal regulations and prioritizes the health and safety of its workers.)

Now, we’re looking into other chemicals that may be hurting workers, their families or people who live near similar manufacturing plants. Some have slow effects and can cause cancers or other diseases after many years. Others are immediately toxic and can lead to death and injuries. We want to hear from people who have worked with these chemicals and people who may have been hurt by them.

We’re especially interested in:

• Asbestos, a silicate mineral.
• Methylene chloride, also called dichloromethane, a chemical used in paint thinners and manufacturing.
• Trichloroethylene (TCE), a metal degreaser used in manufacturing plants.
• 1-Bromopropane, a chemical used in manufacturing, dry cleaning and other applications.
• Dibutyl phthalate, a plasticizer used in adhesives, paints, furniture and more.
• Tris(2-chloroethyl) phosphate (TCEP), a flame retardant used in manufacturing.

If you know about harmful working conditions, community exposure to these chemicals, or other problems we should investigate, please fill out the brief questionnaire below. We’re also interested in speaking to people who have worn exposure-monitoring devices at their workplaces and would be willing to share the results of those tests.

OUR COMMITMENT TO YOUR PRIVACY: We appreciate you sharing your story, and we take your privacy seriously. ProPublica is gathering this information for our reporting and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.

We are the only ones reading what you submit. If you would prefer to use an encrypted app, see our advice at propublica.org/tips. You can message Neil Bedi on the Signal messaging app at 202-304-0825. Send questions to neil.bedi@propublica.org.

by Asia Fields and Kengo Tsutsumi

Sign up for ProPublica’s User’s Guide to Democracy, a series of personalized emails that help you understand the upcoming election, from who’s on your ballot to how to cast your vote.

In response to ProPublica’s reporting on voting barriers, readers have reached out asking how they can help.

Our reporters found that voting is a modern-day literacy test in many ways for the 48 million Americans who have trouble reading. Voters must navigate confusing ballots and registration processes, as well as attempts by some states to make voting more difficult, such as by putting restrictions on the assistance people can recieve. Misinformation and false claims about voting fraud have exacerbated the issue.

“We’ve seen that voters who need language assistance or who are disabled and need assistance are challenged with the assumption that they are not eligible and as a result, their votes are not legitimate,” said Marcia Johnson-Blanco, co-director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law’s Voting Rights Project.

There is no requirement that people be able to read or speak English in order to vote. The Voting Rights Act makes clear that people with disabilities and those who cannot read or write have the right to receive assistance casting a ballot.

Here are some ways you can help spread factual information about voting rights and resources ahead of the midterms.

Remember: Election Day is Nov. 8, and deadlines for voter registration and absentee ballot requests are quickly approaching in some states. Make sure to check the deadlines and procedures for your state.

Make sure your neighbors know about their rights and resources

We created an easy-to-read guide to voting that you can share with anyone who might find it useful. It’s available in multiple languages: English, Spanish, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Arabic, Korean, Urdu, Hindi and Bengali. (You can also check what languages are commonly spoken by voting-age citizens in your area.)

You can find a printable version on our website, in case you’d like to distribute copies in your community. You can also request physical copies through the form below.

Our guide includes numbers for voter hotlines in multiple languages. People can call if they need help checking their registration, finding a polling place or learning about state requirements. The hotlines are also available if voters need information on language assistance or if they encounter any issues.

These hotlines are run by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in conjunction with the NALEO Educational Fund, APIAVote and the Arab American Institute. All are nonpartisan, meaning they seek to provide voters with information about their rights rather than trying to get them to vote a certain way.

To contact the hotlines:

• English speakers can call or text 866-687-8683.

• Spanish speakers can call 888-839-8682 or text GOVOTE to 97779.

• Bangla, Cantonese, Hindi, Urdu, Korean, Mandarin, Tagalog or Vietnamese speakers can call 888-274-8683.

• Arabic speakers can call 844-925-5287.

You can help people navigate the voting process

It can be challenging to navigate elections, as there are different processes depending on where you live. Fortunately, there are resources like this website run by the federal government that lists official sources of information about voting by state.

Vote.org, another nonpartisan organization, has simple tools you can use to help someone check their registration status and register to vote. They also have a tool voters can use to request an absentee ballot, find their polling place and check if they need to bring ID.

If you know people who might benefit from voting early or via mail (also known as absentee voting), make sure they know the process in their area, as well as the deadline to request an absentee ballot. If you’d like to help someone request or turn in an absentee ballot, review your state’s specific laws, as some places have strict rules around who can help.

You can help your family, friends and neighbors vote

People who cannot read or write in English, or those with a disability, can select someone to help them vote, as long as it isn’t a representative from their employer or union.

If you help someone vote in person, let an election worker know when you sign in. They may have the person you’re helping sign a form attesting to their need for assistance. Voting locations are also required to have accessible machines available for people with disabilities. And some jurisdictions are required to provide election materials in languages commonly spoken in the area.

If you help someone vote, remember: You can read the ballot to them or translate it. However, you are not allowed to tell them whom to vote for or to look at the ballot unless asked.

Some states have tried to make it harder in recent years for people to help voters. For example, Texas prohibited voters’ assistants from answering their questions, but that prohibition was later struck down by a federal judge. If you’re not sure about the laws in your state, you can ask your local election officials or call the election protection hotlines.

Tell journalists what you’re seeing

Our reporters want to know if you or someone you know experiences accessibility issues when voting or if the right to voting assistance is challenged. We’ll use this information to help fuel our future reporting, although we’ll contact you before sharing details about your experience.

You can leave a message for ProPublica at 212-379-5781, email literacy@propublica.org or fill out an online tip form.

You can volunteer or become a poll worker

Some jurisdictions are still recruiting poll workers. You can find more information on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s website.

The nonpartisan election protection hotlines are staffed by volunteers and will run through Election Day. Some are still looking for volunteers. You can sign up for shifts answering hotlines in the following languages: English, Tagalog, Mandarin, Cantonese, Bangla, Hindi or Urdu, Korean and Vietnamese. You don’t need to have legal experience to sign up, and training is provided.

Get involved in your community

ProPublica held a virtual panel about literacy with advocates for voting accessibility. Based on reader-submitted questions, we asked the panelists what advice they have for people who want to help.

Faye Combs, a literacy and voting advocate in California who learned to read as an adult, recommended getting involved with literacy programs through public libraries. She also highlighted the need to focus on accessibility for voters with disabilities.

Olivia Coley-Pearson, a city commissioner in Douglas, Georgia, who faced charges for helping people vote, said people should become familiar with the laws in their state. She recommended letting neighbors know if you can offer rides or other support. She also highlighted the need for compassion, as having trouble reading can be stigmatized.

“Let them know that you care and it’s OK. Most of all, that it’s OK to soften that level of shame or embarrassment,” Coley-Pearson said.

by Lisa Song, ProPublica, and Lylla Younes, Grist

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

Louisiana must examine how polluters imperil the health of Black residents, the Environmental Protection Agency said in a letter it sent last week to state regulators in response to civil rights complaints about air pollution in the region known as Cancer Alley.

Black residents in southeastern Louisiana bear a disproportionate cancer risk from industrial air pollution, the agency found, with children at one predominantly Black elementary school having been exposed to a dangerous carcinogen at levels 11 times what the EPA considers acceptable.

ProPublica reported last year that the EPA does a poor job of regulating the combined risk from multiple sources of industrial air pollution. In parts of Cancer Alley, ProPublica estimated lifetime cancer risk is up to 47 times what the EPA deems acceptable.

The EPA letter urged Louisiana’s environmental and health agencies to analyze cumulative impacts for residents near a synthetic rubber plant owned by Denka Performance Elastomer in St. John the Baptist Parish and a proposed Formosa plastics facility in St. James Parish.

Wilma Subra, an environmental health expert who advises communities in the area, said ProPublica’s reporting “confirmed the importance of cumulative risk and made it a focus that could not be ignored.”

“What’s remarkable is that EPA, for the first time in a long time, is speaking the truth around environmental racism and willing to put civil rights enforcement tools out there,” said Monique Harden, assistant director of law and public policy at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. Federal civil rights protections predate the EPA, but they haven’t been enforced, she said: “There’s nothing new to any of this except that we have leadership at the EPA” that “wants to do something about it.”

The EPA urged state regulators to move students out of St. John the Baptist Parish’s Fifth Ward Elementary School, where air monitoring found high levels of chloroprene, a potent carcinogen. The letter, which summarizes the agency’s initial findings, cites years of data, studies and state policies to show how Black residents are disproportionately harmed by air pollution and how those disparities are baked into the region’s history. It explains how between the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and the Louisiana Department of Health, state officials have dismissed residents’ concerns about air quality, underplayed the dangers of chloroprene, conducted flawed health studies and mischaracterized air monitoring data.

“We take these concerns very seriously and are committed to health equity — which is why we are fully cooperating with the EPA’s investigation into Denka,” the state health department said in a statement.

In an email, an LDEQ spokesperson said the agency is “committed to working with EPA” and remains “confident that we are implementing our air permitting program in a manner that is fully consistent with” federal and state laws.

Local activists have fought for environmental protections for decades. Robert Taylor, executive director of Concerned Citizens of St. John, said he founded his organization after attending a 2016 EPA meeting that revealed chloroprene concentrations at the school. “I went from fear to anger to shock,” he said, that “the government was allowing people to do this.”

The public school is about 1,500 feet from the Denka facility, which produces neoprene, a form of synthetic rubber used to manufacture wetsuits. DuPont began making neoprene at the site in 1969 and sold the neoprene operation to Denka in 2015. It is the nation’s only industrial site that emits chloroprene.

EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan visited the nearby school last fall as part of his “Journey to Justice” trip that was announced two days after ProPublica’s investigation into pollution hot spots. He later sent a letter to Denka and DuPont that stated, “As a parent, I remain extremely concerned” about the “health and well-being of the students.” Three-quarters of Fifth Ward Elementary’s students are Black.

A DuPont spokesperson declined to comment on EPA’s letter to Louisiana regulators but shared a response it sent to Regan in March in response to his letter about the school. In its response, DuPont said that Denka, not DuPont, operates the neoprene facility, and that tens of thousands of residents have worked at DuPont’s adjoining facility. The workers’ children have attended Fifth Ward Elementary, the company said, and “we care deeply about its success.”

DuPont is “committed to continue to work with Denka,” regulators and the community “to maintain the strong ties and supporting efforts needed to keep St. John Parish a safe and great place to work and live,” the company added.

In 2010, the EPA released a report classifying chloroprene as a “likely human carcinogen.” Chloroprene is a mutagen, meaning it causes cancer by attacking and mutating DNA. Mutagens are particularly dangerous for children and infants, whose cells divide much more rapidly than those of adults.

Recent air monitoring data from Denka, collected about 1,000 feet from the school, showed average concentrations 11 times what EPA considers acceptable, according to the agency’s letter. At times over the past few years, air samples collected by the EPA on school grounds showed concentrations as high as 83 times the acceptable guideline.

Jim Harris, a spokesperson for Denka, said in a written statement that the EPA’s chloroprene limit is “based on a faulty and outdated exposure model.”

The company asked the EPA to revise its chloroprene guidelines last year, arguing that the model used was not “sufficiently rigorous.” The EPA refuted Denka’s conclusions this spring, stating that the company did not identify any errors with the agency’s analysis.

"There is simply no evidence of increased levels of health impacts near” the plant, Harris wrote. “Data compiled by the Louisiana Tumor registry (LTR) have repeatedly shown for decades there are no widespread elevated rates of cancer in the parish or in the census tracts neighboring the facility compared with state averages.”

Kim Terrell, a research scientist at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, argued that the registry’s census-tract-level data obscures health effects in the communities closest to industrial facilities. The tumor registry, too, has said that its data should not be used to represent cancer rates in smaller populations, such as neighborhoods near industrial fence lines.

“The cancer rates Denka cited are not specific to the people who have been most exposed to chloroprene,” Terrell said.

Harris, the Denka spokesperson, said the company has “invested over $35 million to reduce its emissions by over 85 percent” since purchasing the facility in 2015 and conducted community air monitoring that showed similar reductions.

The EPA’s letter acknowledged the reduced concentrations, which resulted from an enforcement order from LDEQ. “There is no question, however,” the EPA wrote, “that elevated cancer risk for residents of all ages and school children still exists and has existed as a result of breathing air polluted with chloroprene and that this risk has impacted and currently impacts Black residents disproportionately.”

Taylor, the community advocate, said the letter indicates the agency is “considering our humanity” and “doing what we consider is the right thing.” For too long, he said, residents have operated under the assumption that “our government has abandoned us — we are just sacrifice zones.”

A lifelong resident of St. John the Baptist Parish, Taylor recalled how his children used to run into the house to escape fumes that made their chests hurt. He lives five blocks from the Denka plant, close enough to hear announcements from the company’s loudspeakers. He has grandkids and great-grandkids who attended local schools, including a Catholic school next door to Fifth Ward Elementary.

The EPA letter is a response to civil rights complaints filed on behalf of Taylor’s organization, the Sierra Club and other groups. The complaints cite Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans the federal government from funding state agencies whose policies or actions discriminate based on race.

The act prohibits both intentional discrimination and disparate impact regardless of intent, said Deena Tumeh, an associate attorney at Earthjustice who helped file the complaints for Taylor’s group. The EPA’s letter noted that 93% of the residents within a mile of the Denka plant are Black, and the Formosa plant is slated for a census tract where 90% of the population is Black, compared to 50% in the overall parish. These demographic patterns can be traced back to the Reconstruction era, the letter said, as freed Black families were able to purchase small parcels of land near plantations. Over time, the plantations were replaced by large petrochemical facilities, while the descendants of those families continued to live in rural, unincorporated towns that became “fence line” communities.

Last month, a judge blocked progress on the Formosa plant by withdrawing its air permits. The judge’s decision cited the fact that state regulators failed to assess cumulative impacts from multiple sources, even though the location suffers from significant existing toxic air pollution that would be exacerbated by the proposed facility’s emissions. LDEQ has appealed the decision. Formosa didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“For years, Title VI letters went to a closet and died,” but this EPA is talking to people and investigating seriously, said Darryl Malek-Wiley, a senior organizing representative at the Sierra Club.

Malek-Wiley, who helped popularize the term “Cancer Alley” in the 1980s, said the real test of the EPA’s dedication to equity will come once it negotiates specific terms with the two Louisiana agencies. Tumeh said the agreement could include the recommendations from the EPA’s letter, as well as additional requirements. That process could take months.

by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden

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

Investigating cybercrime was supposed to be the FBI’s third-highest priority, behind terrorism and counterintelligence. Yet, in 2015, FBI Director James Comey realized that his Cyber Division faced a brain drain that was hamstringing its investigations.

Retention in the division had been a chronic problem, but in the spring of that year, it became acute. About a dozen young and midcareer cyber agents had given notice or were considering leaving, attracted by more lucrative jobs outside government. As the resignations piled up, Comey received an unsolicited email from Andre McGregor, one of the cyber agents who had quit. In his email, the young agent suggested ways to improve the Cyber Division. Comey routinely broadcast his open-door policy, but senior staff members were nevertheless aghast when they heard an agent with just six years’ experience in the bureau had actually taken him up on it. To their consternation, Comey took McGregor’s email and the other cyber agents’ departures seriously. “I want to meet these guys,” he said. He invited the agents to Washington from field offices nationwide for a private lunch. As news of the meeting circulated throughout headquarters, across divisions and into the field, senior staff openly scorned the cyber agents, dubbing them “the 12 Angry Men,” “the Dirty Dozen” or just “these assholes.” To the old-schoolers — including some who had risked their lives in service to the bureau — the cyber agents were spoiled prima donnas, not real FBI.

The cyber agents were as stunned as anyone to have an audience with Comey. Despite their extensive training in interrogation at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, many were anxious about what the director might ask them. “As an agent, you never meet the director,” said Milan Patel, an agent who attended the lunch. “You know the director, because he’s famous. But the director doesn’t know you.”

You also rarely, if ever, go to the J. Edgar Hoover Building’s seventh floor, where the executive offices are. But that day, the cyber agents — all men, mostly in their mid-30s, in suits, ties and fresh haircuts — strode single file down the seventh-floor hall to Comey’s private conference room. Stiffly, nervously, they stood waiting. Then Comey came in, shirt sleeves rolled up and bag lunch in hand.

“Have a seat, guys,” he told them. “Take off your coats. Get comfortable. Tell me who you are, where you live and why you’re leaving. I want to understand if you are happy and leaving, or disappointed and leaving.”

Around the room, everyone took a turn answering. Each agent professed to be happy, describing his admiration for the bureau’s mission.

“Well, that’s a good start,” Comey said.

Then sincerity prevailed. For the next hour, as they ate their lunches, the agents unloaded.

They told Comey that their skills were either disregarded or misunderstood by other agents and supervisors across the bureau. The FBI had cliques reminiscent of high school, and the cyber agents were derisively called the Geek Squad.

“What do you need a gun for?” SWAT team jocks would say. Or, from a senior leader, alluding to the physical fitness tests all agents were required to pass, “Do you have to do pushups with a keyboard in your backpack?” The jabs — which eroded an already tenuous sense of belonging — testified to the widespread belief that cyber agents played a less important role than others in the bureau.

At the meeting, the men also registered their opposition to some of the FBI’s ingrained cultural expectations, including the mantra that agents should be capable of doing “any job, anywhere.” Comey had embraced that credo, making it known during his tenure that he wanted everyone in the FBI to have computer skills. But the cyber agents believed this outlook was misguided. Although traditional skills, from source cultivation to undercover stings, were applicable to cybercrime cases, it was not feasible to turn someone with no interest or aptitude in computer science into a first-rate cyber investigator. The placement of nontechnical agents on cyber squads — a practice that dated to the 1990s — also led to a problem that the agents referred to as “reeducation fatigue.” They were constantly forced to put their investigations on hold to train newcomers, both supervisors and other cyber agents, who arrived with little or no technical expertise.

Other issues were personal. To be promoted, the FBI typically required agents to relocate. This transient lifestyle caused family heartache for agents across the bureau. One cyber agent lamented the lack of career opportunities for his spouse, a businesswoman, in far-flung offices like Wichita. The agents told Comey they didn’t have to deal with “the shuffle” around the country for professional advancement because their skills were immediately transferable to the private sector and in high demand. They had offers for high-profile jobs paying multiples of their FBI salaries. Unlike private employers worried about staying competitive, the FBI wasn’t about to disrupt its rigid pay scale to keep its top cyber agents. Feeling they had nothing to lose, the agents recommended changes. They told Comey that the FBI could improve retention by centralizing cyber agents in Washington instead of assigning them to the 56 field offices around the country. That made sense because, unlike investigating physical crimes like bank robbery, they didn’t necessarily need to be near the scene to collect evidence. Plus, suspects were often abroad.

Most important, they wanted the bureau’s respect.

Comey listened, asked questions and took notes. Then he led them to his private office. They glanced around, most of them knowing they were unlikely to be granted such access to power again. Comey’s desk featured framed photos of his wife and children, and the carpet was emblazoned with the FBI’s seal. The agents had such respect for the bureau that they huddled close so that no one had to step on any part of the seal.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the office was the whiteboard that sprawled across one of the walls. On it was an organizational chart of the bureau’s leadership with magnets featuring the names and headshots of FBI executives and special agents in charge of field offices. Many were terrorism experts who had risen through the hierarchy in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Comey was sympathetic to his visitors and recognized the importance of cyber expertise to the FBI’s future. At the same time, he wasn’t going to overhaul the bureau and alienate the powerful old guard to please a group of short-timers.

“Look, I know we’ve got a problem with leadership here,” Comey told the cyber agents as they studied the whiteboard, according to agents who were there. “I want to fix it, but I don’t have enough time to fix it. I’m only here for a limited amount of time; it’s going to take another generation to fix some of these cultural issues.” But the agents knew the FBI couldn’t afford to wait another generation to confront escalating cyberthreats like ransomware. Ransomware is the unholy marriage of hacking and cryptography. Typically, the attackers capitalize on a cybersecurity flaw or get an unsuspecting person to open an attachment or click a link. Once inside a computer system, ransomware encrypts the files, rendering them inaccessible without the right decryption key — the string of characters that can unlock the information — for which a ransom is demanded.

Although attacks were becoming more sophisticated, bureau officials told counterparts in the Department of Homeland Security and elsewhere in the federal government that ransomware wasn’t a priority because both the damages and the chances of catching suspects were too small. Instead of aggressively mobilizing against the threat, the FBI took the lead in compiling a “best practices” document that warned the public about ransomware, urged prevention and discouraged payments to hackers. Through an intermediary, Comey, fired from his FBI position by then-President Donald Trump in 2017, declined to comment on the meeting. The FBI acknowledged but did not respond to written questions.

To FBI leadership, ransomware was an “ankle-biter crime,” said an agent who attended the meeting with Comey.

“They viewed it as a Geek Squad thing, and therefore they viewed it as not important,” he said.

Many of the issues the FBI cyber agents raised during their meeting with Comey were nothing new. In fact, the bureau’s inertia in tackling cybercrime dated all the way back to a case involving the first documented state-sponsored computer intrusion.

In 1986, Cliff Stoll was working as a systems administrator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory when his boss asked him to resolve a 75-cent shortfall in the accounting system the lab used for charging for computing power. Stoll traced the error to an unauthorized user and ultimately unraveled a sprawling intrusion into computer systems of the U.S. government and military. Eventually, the trail led to German hackers paid by the Soviet Union’s intelligence service, the KGB. Stoll immortalized his crusade in the 1989 book “The Cuckoo’s Egg.” In the course of his investigation, he tried seven times to get the attention of the FBI but was rebuffed each time.

“Look, kid, did you lose more than a half million dollars?” the FBI asked him.

“Uh, no,” Stoll replied.

“Any classified information?”

“Uh, no.”

“Then go away, kid.”

Stoll later spoke with an Air Force investigator who summed up the FBI’s position: “Computer crimes aren’t easy — not like kidnapping or bank robbery, where there’s witnesses and obvious losses. Don’t blame them for shying away from a tough case with no clear solution.”

It wasn’t until almost a decade later that the federal government took its first significant step to organize against cyberthreats. After the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the Clinton administration called together a dozen officials from across the government to assess the vulnerability of the nation’s critical infrastructure. Since essential services such as health care and banking were moving online, the committee quickly turned its attention from physical threats, like Timothy McVeigh’s infamous Ryder truck, to computer-based ones.

The group helped establish what became known as the National Infrastructure Protection Center in 1998. With representatives from the FBI, the Secret Service, intelligence agencies and other federal departments, the NIPC was tasked with preventing and investigating computer intrusions. The FBI was selected to oversee the NIPC because it had the broadest legal authority to investigate crime.

Turf battles broke out immediately. The National Security Agency and the Pentagon were indignant about reporting to the FBI about sophisticated computer crimes that they believed the bureau was incapable of handling, said Michael Vatis, then a deputy U.S. attorney general who led the effort to launch the center.

“They said: ‘Oh, no, no, no. It can’t be the FBI,’” Vatis recalled. “‘All they know how to do is surround a crime scene with yellow tape and take down bad guys. And they’re notorious for not sharing information.’”

Meanwhile, infighting over resources roiled the FBI. “You had a lot of old-line people arguing about whether cybercrime was real and serious,” Vatis said. “People who came up through organized crime, or Russian counterintelligence. They were like: ‘This is just a nuisance from teenagers. It’s not real.’”

At the time, only a couple of dozen FBI agents had any experience or interest in investigating computer crime. There weren’t nearly enough tech-literate agents to fill the scores of new job openings in the NIPC. Needing warm bodies, the FBI summoned volunteers from within its ranks, regardless of background. Among them was the New Orleans-based agent Stacy Arruda. During her first squad meeting in 1999, as her supervisor talked about “Unix this, and Linux that,” she realized she was in over her head.

“Arruda, do you have any idea what I’m talking about?” the supervisor asked her.

“Nope.”

“Why are you nodding and smiling?”

“I don’t want to look stupid.”

It was an easy admission because most of the new NIPC agents were similarly uninformed about the world they would be investigating.

When the bureau ran out of volunteers to join the NIPC, agents were “volun-told” to join, Arruda said. That’s what happened to Scott Augenbaum. He said he was assigned to the NIPC because he was the only agent in his Syracuse, New York, office “who had any bit of a technology background,” meaning he “could take a laptop connected to a telephone jack and get online.” He was disappointed by the assignment because it was “not the cool and fun and sexy job to have within the FBI.” His friends in the bureau teased him. “They told me, ‘This cyber thing is going to hurt your career.’”

Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller created the bureau’s Cyber Division to fight computer-based crime. The division took over the NIPC’s investigative work, while prevention efforts moved to the Department of Homeland Security, which was established in November 2002. The DHS, however, put the computer crime prevention mission on hold for years as it focused instead on deterring physical attacks.

To ramp up the new division, the FBI put a cyber squad in each field office and launched a training program to help existing agents switch tracks. It also benefited from the “patriot effect,” as talented computer experts who felt a call to service applied. Among them were Milan Patel and Anthony Ferrante, two of the agents who would attend the meeting with Comey.

Fresh out of college, Ferrante was working as a consultant at Ernst & Young on 9/11. From his office in a Midtown skyscraper, he watched the towers fall. In the days that followed, he resolved to use his computer skills to fight terrorism. While pursuing a master’s degree in computer science at Fordham University, he met with an FBI recruiter who was trying to hire digital experts for the new Cyber Division. The recruiter asked Ferrante what languages he knew.

“HTML, JavaScript, C++, Business Basic,” he answered.

“What are those?” the perplexed recruiter responded. “I mean, Russian, Spanish, French.”

It wouldn’t be the last time Ferrante felt misunderstood by the bureau. When he arrived at Quantico in 2004, he found himself in a firearms class of about 40 new agents-in-training. There, the instructor asked: “Who here has never shot a gun?”

With his gaze cast downward as he concentrated on taking notes, Ferrante raised his hand. The room became silent. He looked around and saw he was the only one. Everyone stared.

“What’s your background?” the instructor asked.

“I’m a computer hacker,” Ferrante said.

On a campus that recruits jokingly referred to as “college with guns,” his answer was not well received. The instructor shook his head, rolled his eyes and moved on.

Patel arrived at the FBI Academy in 2003 with a college degree in computer science from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. From Quantico, he was assigned to a cyber squad in New York, where his new boss didn’t quite know what to do with him. The supervisor handed him a beeper, a Rand McNally map and the keys to a 1993 Ford Aerostar van that “looked like it was bombed out in Baghdad,” Patel said. Another agent set him up with a computer running a long-outdated version of Windows.

“Oh my God, this is like the Stone Age,” he thought. As time went on, Patel discovered how cumbersome it was to brief supervisors about cyber cases. Since many of them knew little about computers, he had to write reports that he considered “borderline childish.”

“You had to try to relate computers to cars,” he said. “You’re speaking a foreign language to them, yet they’re in charge, making decisions over the health of what you do.”

Patel realized that most of his Cyber Division colleagues, like Arruda and Augenbaum, didn’t have a technical background. The bureau tried to turn traditional law enforcement officers into tech specialists while passing over computer scientists who could not meet its qualifications to become agents. “Is the person who can do 15 pull-ups and run 2 miles around the track in under 16 minutes the same guy that you want decrypting ransomware?” Patel said. “Typically people who write code and enjoy the passion of figuring out malware, they’re not in a gym cranking out squats.”

Some agents ended up in the Cyber Division because it had openings when they graduated from Quantico, or because it was a stop on the way to a promotion. In a popular move, many senior agents and supervisors pursued a final assignment in the division before becoming eligible for retirement at age 50, knowing it made them more attractive to private-sector employers for their post-FBI careers.

“On a bureau cyber squad, you typically have one or two people, if you’re lucky, who can decrypt and do network traffic analysis and programming and the really hard work,” Patel said. “And you’ve got two or three people who know how to investigate cybercrime and have a computer science degree. And the rest — half of the team — are in the cyber program, but they don’t really know anything about cyber.” Some of those agents made successful cases anyway, but they were the exception.

Despite the internal headwinds, Patel worked on some of the bureau’s marquee cybercrime cases. He led the investigation into Silk Road, the black-market bazaar where illegal goods and services were anonymously bought and sold. As part of a sprawling investigation into the dark web marketplace, law enforcement located six of Silk Road’s servers scattered across the globe and compromised the site before shutting it down in October 2013. Ross Ulbricht, of San Francisco, was later found guilty on narcotics and hacking charges for his role in creating and operating the site. He is serving two life sentences plus 40 years in prison. Patel was nominated for the FBI Director’s Award for Investigative Excellence; he became a Cyber Division unit chief, advising on technology strategy. Then, shortly after the Dirty Dozen meeting with Comey, he left the FBI for a higher-paying job in the private sector.

Ferrante was selected for the FBI’s Cyber Action Team, which deployed in response to the most critical cyber incidents globally. As a supervisory special agent, he became chief of staff of the FBI’s Cyber Division. After the meeting with Comey, Ferrante remained in the FBI for another two years. He left in 2017 to become global head of cybersecurity for FTI Consulting, where he worked with companies victimized by ransomware.

He kept tabs on the bureau’s public actions in fighting the crime. Despite occasional successes, he said in 2021 that he was disappointed by the small number of ransomware-related indictments in the years that followed Comey’s 2015 gathering.

“They would work cases, but those cases would just spin, spin, spin,” Ferrante said. “No, they’re not taking it seriously, so of course it’s out of control now because it’s gone unchecked for so many years. … Nobody understood it — nobody within the FBI, and nobody within the Department of Justice. Because they didn’t understand it, they didn’t put proper resources behind it. And because they didn’t put proper resources behind it, the cases that were worked never got any legs or never got the attention they deserved.”

By 2012, FBI leadership recognized that most crimes involved some technical element: the use of email or cellphones, for example. So that year, it began to prioritize hiring non-agent computer scientists to help on cases. These civilian cyber experts, who worked in field offices around the country, did not carry weapons and were not required to pass regular physical fitness tests. But respect for the non-gun-carrying technical experts was lacking. This widespread condescension was reflected in a nickname that Stacy Arruda, the early NIPC agent who went on to a career as a supervisor in the Cyber Division, had for them: dolphins.

“Someone who is highly intelligent and can’t communicate with humans,” said Arruda, who retired from the FBI in 2018. “When we would travel, we would bring our dolphins with us. And when the other party started squeaking, we would have our dolphins squeak right back at them.”

If agents like Patel and Ferrante had a hard time winning the institutional respect of the FBI, it seemed almost impossible for the dolphins to do so. They worked on technical aspects of all types of cases, not just cyber ones. Yet, despite the critical role they played in investigating cyber cases — sometimes as the sole person in a field office who understood the technical underpinnings of a case — these civilian computer scientists were often regarded as agents’ support staff and treated as second-class citizens.

Randy Pargman took a circuitous route to becoming the Seattle field office’s dolphin. As a kid in California, Pargman regularly hung out with his grandma, who was interested in technology. She bought magazines that contained basic code and helped Pargman copy it onto their Atari video game console. It was his introduction to computer programming. Later, as a teenager, Pargman was drawn to a booth of ham radio enthusiasts at a county fair and soon began saving up to buy his own $300 radio. It was the early 1990s, before most home users were online, so Pargman was thrilled when he used the radio to access pages from a library in Japan and send primitive emails.

After high school, Pargman put his radio skills to work when he became a Washington State Patrol dispatcher. Although it wasn’t a part of the job description, he created one computer program to improve the dispatch system’s efficiency and another to automate the state’s process for investigating fraud in vehicle registrations. The experience led him to study computer science at Mississippi State. In the summer of 2000, while still in college, Pargman completed an FBI internship, an experience that left him with a deep appreciation for the bureau’s mission. So, following brief stints working for the Department of Defense and as a private sector software engineer once he graduated, he applied to become an agent. He was hired in 2004, around the same time as Patel and Ferrante.

Like those two agents, Pargman was shocked by the digital Stone Age he found himself in upon arriving. At the FBI Academy, a computer instructor gave lessons on typing interviews and reports on WordPerfect, the word processing platform whose popularity had peaked in the late 1980s. To Pargman, even more outrageous than the FBI’s use of WordPerfect was the notion that agents would need instruction on such a basic program. The first week of class, the instructor delivered another surprise.

“OK, who are the IT nerds in here?” he asked.

After Pargman and a classmate raised their hands, the instructor addressed them directly.

“You’re not going to be working on cybercrimes. You’re going to be working on whatever the bureau needs you to do.”

The other tech-savvy recruit later confided to Pargman that he was dropping out of the FBI Academy to return to private industry. “This is not what I thought it was going to be,” he said.

Pargman was similarly torn. He believed in the FBI’s mission but wanted to work solely on cybercrime. Like Ferrante, he didn’t have experience with guns, and he was unsure about how he would handle that aspect of the job. He faced a reckoning when an FBI speaker led a sobering session about the toughest aspects of working for the bureau, from deadly force scenarios to the higher-than-average rates of suicide and divorce among agents.

After consulting with FBI counselors and a bureau chaplain, Pargman decided he didn’t want to become an agent. Instead, he stayed in the FBI as a civilian, working as a software developer at the FBI Academy. Eight years later, when the FBI launched the computer science track, Pargman eagerly applied. He became the Seattle field office’s dedicated computer scientist in October 2012.

“This is why I had gotten into the FBI to begin with,” Pargman said. “I can concentrate just on cybercrime investigations and not have to deal with the whole badge and gun.”

Once Pargman got to Seattle, he began to dream big. His vision: The FBI could model its Cyber Division after one of the world’s most successful computer crime-fighting law enforcement organizations, the Dutch High Tech Crime Unit. He knew how traditional and hidebound the bureau was, how different from the HTCU and its innovative culture. But, ever idealistic, he hoped that the HTCU’s remarkable track record would persuade the FBI to adopt elements of the Dutch approach.

Pargman had long been familiar with the HTCU’s reputation for arresting hackers and disrupting their infrastructure. When he met a Dutch officer through an FBI program for midcareer professionals, he asked her the secret to the HTCU’s success. Her response was straightforward: the HTCU was effective because it paired each traditional police officer with a computer scientist, partnerships that had been a founding priority of the unit. While the HTCU computer scientists weren’t required to pass police exams, meet physical fitness requirements, or handle weapons, they nonetheless were entitled to the same rank and promotions as their traditional counterparts. They also were not obligated to pivot to noncomputer work during their police careers.

The density of computer science experts in the HTCU astounded Pargman, who thought it was brilliant. He suggested the Dutch approach to managers in the FBI’s Operational Technology Division, which oversaw the new computer science track. They laughed.

“We can’t get funding for that many computer scientists,” one contact told him. “That would be crazy.”

Pargman acknowledged that, since the FBI’s Cyber Division was much larger than the Dutch Police’s HTCU, establishing a one-to-one partnership was a stretch. Yet the FBI’s setup all but ensured that its drastically outnumbered computer scientists would not find a collective voice, as the tech experts had done in the HTCU. As Pargman dug into cyber investigations in Seattle, he learned that the bureau’s staffing imbalance was straining its cyber experts, both civilian computer scientists and technically advanced agents like Patel and Ferrante.

Many of the cyber agents Pargman worked with in Seattle had prior careers as accountants, attorneys or police officers. To get acquainted with the digital world, they took crash courses offered by the SANS Institute, the bureau’s contractor for cybersecurity training; popular offerings included Introduction to Cyber Security and Security Essentials Bootcamp. From an institutional perspective, learning on the job to investigate computer crime was no different from learning on the job to investigate white-collar or gang crime. But FBI leadership didn’t take into account something that early leaders in the Dutch HTCU knew from the unit’s start: It’s not easy to teach advanced computer skills to someone who has no technical background.

Cyber agents routinely came to Pargman with basic tasks such as analyzing email headers, the technical details stored within messages that can contain helpful clues.

“This is easy, you need to learn how to do this,” Pargman told one agent. He produced the IP address from the headers.

“What does that mean?” the agent responded. “What is this IP address?”

Pargman had to make the time to help because, if he didn’t, the agent might do something embarrassing, like attempt to subpoena publicly available information “because they just didn’t know any better.”

In the FBI, investigations into specific ransomware strains were organized by field office. For example, Springfield, Illinois, investigated complaints involving a strain called Rapid, while Anchorage, Alaska, investigated those related to Russia-based Ryuk, one of the first ransomware gangs to routinely demand six-figure payments and to carefully select and research its targets. From time to time, Pargman learned of victim complaints to the Seattle office about emerging ransomware strains. Since cases weren’t assigned directly to computer scientists, he pushed the agents to take them on. “Oh boy, here’s one that nobody is working,” he told one colleague.

“Let’s jump on this.”

“That sounds amazing,” the agent responded. “But I’ll be so busy with that case that I won’t get to do anything else.”

In the early days of ransomware, when hackers demanded no more than a few hundred dollars, the FBI was uninterested because the damages were small — not unlike Cliff Stoll’s dilemma at Berkeley. Later, once losses grew to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, agents had other reasons to want to avoid investigating ransomware. In the FBI, prestige springs from being a successful “trial agent,” working on cases that result in indictments and convictions that make the news. But ransomware cases, even with the enthusiastic support of a computer scientist like Pargman, were long and complex, with a low likelihood of arrest.

The fact that most ransomware hackers were outside the United States made the investigative process challenging from the start. To collect evidence from abroad, agents needed to coordinate with federal prosecutors, FBI legal attachés and international law enforcement agencies through the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty process. Seemingly straightforward tasks, such as obtaining an image of a suspicious server, could take months. And if the server was in a hostile country such as Iran or North Korea, the agents were out of luck. Aware of this international labyrinth, even some federal prosecutors discouraged agents from pursuing complex cyber investigations.

During Pargman’s time as Seattle’s computer scientist, the field office took on a number of technically sophisticated cases. He was especially proud of one that led to the Justice Department’s indictment, unsealed in 2018, of hackers accused in the notorious Fin7 attacks. They breached more than 100 U.S. companies and led to the theft of more than 15 million customer credit card records. But during his seven years in Seattle, the office never got a handle on ransomware.

“If you spend all of your time chasing ransomware, and for years you never make a single arrest of anybody, you’re seen as a failure,” Pargman said. “Even if you’re doing a ton of good in the world, like sharing information and helping protect people, you’re still a failure as an investigator because you haven’t arrested anybody.” Despite its own inaction, the FBI feuded with the other federal agency responsible for investigating ransomware: the Secret Service. Although the Secret Service has been guarding presidents since 1894, its lesser-known mission of combating financial crimes dates back even longer — to the day in April 1865 that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Before heading to Ford’s Theatre, Lincoln signed legislation creating the agency and giving it the mandate to fight counterfeit currency. As financial crime evolved and moved online, the Secret Service and the FBI squabbled over cases. Although it, too, had a federal mandate to fight computer crime, the Secret Service was sometimes bigfooted by the FBI, said Mark Grantz, who was a supervisory special agent for the Secret Service in Washington.

“They’d say: ‘Yeah, we’ve got a case on that already. We were looking at him five years ago. Give us everything you’ve got and we’ll go from there.’ That was their M.O.,” Grantz said. It left him wondering: “You haven’t touched that case in five years, why are you asking me for my case file?”

Grantz led an investigation into a ransomware attack in January 2017, eight days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. The strike disabled computers linked to 126 street cameras in a video surveillance system monitoring public spaces across Washington, D.C., including along the presidential parade route. Instead of paying the five-figure ransom, the district scrambled to wipe and restart the cameras, which were back online three days before the swearing-in. Assisted by other law enforcement organizations, the Secret Service traced the hack to two Romanians, who were arrested in Europe, extradited to the United States and found guilty on wire fraud charges — an uncommon U.S. law enforcement success against ransomware operators.

Other Secret Service investigations sometimes stalled because agents had to rotate away for protective detail. “That’s where it gets frustrating,” Grantz said. “You’d train someone. They’d do digital forensics for five years. They’d get really good at it. And then you’d send them off to do presidential detail.”

Randy Pargman also grew frustrated by the FBI’s reluctance to engage meaningfully with private-sector cybersecurity researchers like the Ransomware Hunting Team. An elite, invitation-only group of tech wizards in seven countries, the team has uncovered keys to hundreds of ransomware strains, saving millions of individuals, businesses, schools and other victims from paying billions of dollars in ransom. When the FBI did connect with experts in the private sector, sensitive information typically flowed only in one direction — to the bureau.

Following large cyberattacks against U.S. targets, the FBI routinely affirmed its commitment to public-private partnerships to help prevent and gather intelligence on such strikes. But some agents believed the rhetoric was hollow, comparing it to public officials’ offering “thoughts and prayers” after mass shootings. The reality was that many people in the FBI had a deep distrust of private-sector researchers.

“There’s this feeling among most agents that if they share even a little bit of information with somebody in the private sector, that information will get out, broadcast over the internet — and the bad guys will definitely read it, and it will destroy the whole case,” Pargman said.

Even though he couldn’t work on ransomware cases, Pargman found ways to feel fulfilled in his job, including by helping organizations defend themselves against impending cyber intrusions. He examined malware command-and-control servers obtained through the MLAT process, then alerted potential victims to imminent attacks. “That was a really good feeling because we stopped a ton of those intrusions,” he said. FBI leadership rewarded his efforts: Pargman earned both the FBI Director’s Award for Excellence in Technical Advancement and the FBI Medal of Excellence.

But he grew tired of his subordinate role as an “agent helper,” and he thought about how things would be different if the FBI were more like the Dutch HTCU. In the bureau, he couldn’t be promoted since Cyber Division leadership roles were open only to agents. And while agents could retire at 50 with full pensions, he had to wait until age 62, and would receive less money. In 2019, Pargman resigned from the FBI, telling his supervisor he wanted to be in a role where he could enact changes rather than just suggest them.

“I love working for the FBI,” he told his supervisor. “It’s very meaningful and fulfilling. But there is no leadership spot for me to go to, only because I’m not an agent. So you cannot be upset that I’m going to get a job where I can be a leader, and make changes, and create a team to do big things.”

When it came to ransomware, the FBI didn’t have a lengthy roster of achievements to boast about. It would not be until after the May 2021 attack on the Colonial Pipeline, which shuttered gas stations across the Southeast, that the FBI would prioritize the ransomware threat and embrace assistance from private researchers like the Ransomware Hunting Team. But even with its new emphasis on ransomware, the FBI didn’t undertake fundamental reforms to expand its roster of cyber experts. It still wanted its cyber agents to be athletic college graduates with relevant job experience, who also had to be willing to shoot a gun, relocate their families and pivot away from investigating cybercrime as needed.

The bureau’s reluctance to adapt disappointed some former agents. “I think the next generation of cyber people in the bureau should be the type of people who want to be cyber first, and not agents at all,” said Patel, one of the agents who attended the 2015 meeting with Comey. “The bureau needs expertly trained technical programmers, cybersecurity engineers, that know how to write code, compile, dissect and investigate — and it has nothing to do with carrying a gun.”

Excerpted from “The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits’ Improbable Crusade to Save the World from Cybercrime” by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2022 by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden. All rights reserved.

by Jeremy Schwartz

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With the 2022 midterms less than a month away, election administrators in Texas and elsewhere continue to face a level of harassment and threats that experts say had never been experienced before the November 2020 presidential election.

In August, the entire staff of the elections office in Gillespie County, about 80 miles west of Austin, resigned, citing threats, “dangerous misinformation” and a lack of resources. The same month, Bexar County elections administrator Jacque Callanen told KSAT, a San Antonio news station, that her department was confronting similar challenges.

“We’re under attack,” Callanen said.“Threats, meanness, ugliness.” She added that staff members were drowning in frivolous open-records requests for mail ballots and applications. Texas is one of several states targeted by right-wing activists who are seeking to throw out voter registrations and ballots, according to The New York Times.

Last month, angry activists disrupted a routine event in which officials publicly test voting equipment outside of Austin, swarming the Hays County elections administrator and Texas Secretary of State John Scott, a Republican, while alleging unproven election law violations.

The instances follow reporting from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, which last year detailed the case of Michele Carew, an elections administrator in Hood County, a staunchly Republican area an hour southwest of Fort Worth. Then-President Donald Trump received 81% of the vote in Hood County in 2020. But Trump loyalists mounted a monthslong effort to oust Carew, a Republican, alleging disloyalty and liberal bias. Carew defended herself from the attacks, surviving a motion to terminate her, before resigning from the position in October 2021.

Elections officials like Carew are increasingly feeling pressure to prioritize partisan interests over a fair democratic elections process, according to a study released last year by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice and the Bipartisan Policy Center. The study, which interviewed more than three dozen elections administrators, found that 78% believe misinformation and disinformation spread on social media has made their jobs harder, with more than half saying the position has become more dangerous.

In Texas, about one-third of election administrators have left their jobs in the past two years, according to surveys conducted this year by the secretary of state’s office. State officials said data prior to 2020 is less reliable, making it difficult to compare the rates over time.

The levels of distrust that have come to dominate the political landscape in Texas, a state that Trump carried with relative ease, should be cause for concern, says David Becker, the founder and executive director of The Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonprofit focused on ensuring accessible and secure elections for all eligible voters. He previously directed the elections program at Pew Charitable Trusts, where he led development of the Electronic Registration Information Center, which has helped 33 states, some led by Democrats and others by Republicans, update millions of out-of-date voter records. Before that, Becker helped oversee voting rights enforcement for the Department of Justice under Presidents Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and George W. Bush, a Republican.

I recently sat down with Becker, the coauthor of the book “The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of the Big Lie,” to talk about the realities facing elections administrators in Texas and across the country ahead of the 2022 midterms.

When we talked a year ago about Michele Carew, you said Texas’ new voting restrictions, a push by GOP activists to seize control of local party precincts and efforts to delegitimize the elections process in places like Hood County could have a chilling effect that drives out a generation of independent elections administrators. Do you feel like that is coming to fruition?

I think the risk definitely is still there. It is very difficult to get hard quantitative data on this, mainly because the definition of an election administrator is not always consistent across the states. We won’t really get a good sense of that until after the [2022] election.

What I do know is, on a state-by-state basis, I’ve heard pretty good evidence that states like California, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and several other states are seeing unprecedented departures of chief county election officials. In some cases, somewhere in the range of around 30% or 45% are leaving in a two-year period. That’s very, very high. I know from talking to election officials privately that many of them are considering whether or not they can stay in these jobs, because the harassment is so great.

Being an election official is not a path to fame and fortune. People don’t become election officials because they see something in it for them. In fact, if you ask most election officials how they got into being an election official, they’ll tell you it was by accident. They applied for a job, and it just looked like a pretty good job. And they stayed because they found a calling. That’s true of conservative Republicans, liberal Democrats and everything in between.

The best-case scenario for election officials on the Wednesday after an election is anonymity. No one’s talking about the election because everything went smoothly and everyone’s moved on.

We’ve been in a position where election officials actually achieved probably the greatest success in American democratic process in history [in 2020]. They somehow managed the highest turnout we’ve ever had, during a global pandemic, and withstood incredible scrutiny. And, despite that success, the exact opposite has been spread about them. They are suffering an enormous amount of stress and harassment and abuse, and in some cases threats. So it’s normal for them to ask, “Should I keep doing this? Can I do this to my family?”

We are seeing candidates who have denied the outcome of the 2020 election now running for secretary of state, attorney general and election management positions at the county and precinct level around the country. Are you concerned about what this could mean for elections in the future?

I think it’s important to assess where the risks actually are. It is difficult — not impossible, but difficult — to anoint the loser of an election as the winner. We saw that in 2020. Even under enormous stress, with the White House itself being behind a lot of it, the courts have held up.

We have a lot of paper ballots, we have a lot of transparency, and so there’s a lot of evidence. So it’s very hard to anoint the loser as the winner.

I don’t want to say I’m completely sanguine about that not happening, but I think it’s a lower concern for me than the concern of the rhetoric being used by someone in a position of power, as we saw with former President Trump.

If you have someone in a position of power who is spreading lies about an election, who’s trying to create an incendiary environment where the supporters of a losing candidate are going to get more upset, we could see a lot of little Jan. 6s all over the place. (This refers to the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection in the U.S. Capitol.)

You write in your book that election denialism and skepticism have only grown among some Republicans since 2020, despite evidence that the presidential election was not marred by widespread fraud. Why do you believe the sentiment increased?

This is about the outcome being dissatisfying to some, and then looking for some reason to distrust the process. Because there’s no other way to explain it other than the fact that the losing presidential candidate got 7 million fewer votes than the winning presidential candidate, which is in fact what did happen.

We are almost exactly 700 days since the November 2020 election, and the losing presidential candidate has had an opportunity to present and find as much evidence as possible. He had over 60 courts to do that in, including in front of judges appointed by himself. He has had months and months to collect evidence. In 700 days, they’ve gotten nothing. Literally, not a shred of evidence has been demonstrated to indicate the outcome was wrong.

Nevertheless, the doubts have persisted, if not grown. I think it comes from the fact that there is kind of a warped incentive structure where the losing presidential candidate is getting rich off of spreading the lies, so he’s going to keep doing it. And then the ecosystem of grifters that surround him are also getting rich; they’re lining their pockets with small donations from people who are sincerely disappointed about the outcome of the election.

I think that’s a really key point here. Seventy-four million people voted for the loser. Not all of them are insurrectionists. Not all of them are bad Americans. In fact, the vast majority of them are good Americans who just wanted a different outcome in the election.

Who among us hasn’t suffered a bitter electoral disappointment in the last decade? But they have been targeted and taken advantage of, exploited because they live largely in media silos where they’re only hearing the echo chamber that the election was stolen because that comforts them, and the grifters know that. And so they know they can keep them bitter and angry and divided and donating.

As long as that incentive structure continues, I think the lies are going to persist. We now live in a country where, for many, a secure election is defined only as an election in which my candidate has won. That’s ridiculous. We need to change that incentive structure so that people stop exploiting their own supporters in order to make a buck.

Given some of the nationwide turnover in election administrators, what’s your level of optimism that the 2022 midterms will be carried out without major issues?

I’m very worried, but I’m not pessimistic, if that makes sense. I don’t think we’re inevitably heading towards conflict. I don’t think we’re heading inevitably towards political violence. But all of the ingredients are there. The gasoline has been poured. The question is, is there going to be a spark? And if there is going to be a spark, are there going to be enough of us who will act as firemen?

Where I find optimism is in institutions that have withheld so far, like the judiciary. I also find the most inspiration from election officials and others who have stood for a sense of duty to the Constitution.

But make no mistake: We are in a precarious moment. And that precarious moment is not going to wait for November 2024. We are in the middle of it right now. What happens in November and December of 2022 could show what path we’re on.

by Heather Vogell, ProPublica, with data analysis by Haru Coryne, ProPublica, and Ryan Little

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On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants.

“Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said in a video touting the company’s services. Turning to his colleague, Parsons asked: What role had the software played?

“I think it’s driving it, quite honestly,” answered Andrew Bowen, another RealPage executive. “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.”

The celebratory remarks were more than swagger. For years, RealPage has sold software that uses data analytics to suggest daily prices for open units. Property managers across the United States have gushed about how the company’s algorithm boosts profits.

“The beauty of YieldStar is that it pushes you to go places that you wouldn’t have gone if you weren’t using it,” said Kortney Balas, director of revenue management at JVM Realty, referring to RealPage’s software in a testimonial video on the company’s website.

The nation’s largest property management firm, Greystar, found that even in one downturn, its buildings using YieldStar “outperformed their markets by 4.8%,” a significant premium above competitors, RealPage said in materials on its website. Greystar uses RealPage’s software to price tens of thousands of apartments.

RealPage became the nation’s dominant provider of such rent-setting software after federal regulators approved a controversial merger in 2017, a ProPublica investigation found, greatly expanding the company’s influence over apartment prices. The move helped the Texas-based company push the client base for its array of real estate tech services past 31,700 customers.

The impact is stark in some markets.

In one neighborhood in Seattle, ProPublica found, 70% of apartments were overseen by just 10 property managers, every single one of which used pricing software sold by RealPage.

To arrive at a recommended rent, the software deploys an algorithm — a set of mathematical rules — to analyze a trove of data RealPage gathers from clients, including private information on what nearby competitors charge.

For tenants, the system upends the practice of negotiating with apartment building staff. RealPage discourages bargaining with renters and has even recommended that landlords in some cases accept a lower occupancy rate in order to raise rents and make more money.

One of the algorithm’s developers told ProPublica that leasing agents had “too much empathy” compared to computer generated pricing.

Apartment managers can reject the software’s suggestions, but as many as 90% are adopted, according to former RealPage employees.

The software’s design and growing reach have raised questions among real estate and legal experts about whether RealPage has birthed a new kind of cartel that allows the nation’s largest landlords to indirectly coordinate pricing, potentially in violation of federal law.

Experts say RealPage and its clients invite scrutiny from antitrust enforcers for several reasons, including their use of private data on what competitors charge in rent. In particular, RealPage’s creation of work groups that meet privately and include landlords who are otherwise rivals could be a red flag of potential collusion, a former federal prosecutor said.

At a minimum, critics said, the software’s algorithm may be artificially inflating rents and stifling competition.

“Machines quickly learn the only way to win is to push prices above competitive levels,” said University of Tennessee law professor Maurice Stucke, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s antitrust division.

RealPage acknowledged that it feeds its clients’ internal rent data into its pricing software, giving landlords an aggregated, anonymous look at what their competitors nearby are charging.

A company representative said in an email that RealPage “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner.”

The company noted that landlords who use employees to manually set prices “typically” conduct phone surveys to check competitors’ rents, which the company says could result in anti-competitive behavior.

“RealPage’s revenue management solutions prioritize a property’s own internal supply/demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors’ rents,” a company statement said, “and therefore help eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing.”

The statement said RealPage’s software also helps prevent rents from reaching unaffordable levels because it detects drops in demand, like those that happen seasonally, and can respond to them by lowering rents.

RealPage did not make Parsons, Bowen or the company’s current CEO, Dana Jones, available for interviews. Balas and a Greystar representative declined to comment on the record about YieldStar. The National Multifamily Housing Council, an industry group, also declined to comment.

Proponents say the software is not distorting the market. RealPage’s CEO told investors five years ago that the company wouldn’t be big enough to harm competition even after the merger. The CEO of one of YieldStar’s earliest users, Ric Campo of Camden Property Trust, told ProPublica that the apartment market in his company’s home city alone is so big and diverse that “it would be hard to argue there was some kind of price fixing.”

What role RealPage’s software has played in soaring rents — which in the decade before the pandemic nearly doubled in some cities — is hard to discern. Inadequate new construction and the tight market for homebuyers have exacerbated an existing housing shortage.

But by RealPage’s own admission, its algorithm is helping drive rents higher.

“Find out how YieldStar can help you outperform the market 3% to 7%,” RealPage urges potential clients on its website.

Few tenants know that such software, owned by a privately held company, has had a hand in rent increases across the country.

In Boston, renter Kaylee Hutchinson said she was puzzled when her landlord — unbeknownst to her, a RealPage client — told her days into the first pandemic lockdowns that her rent was going up. Building staff insisted that the market rate for her apartment was 6.5% higher than she was paying, despite her protests that people were fleeing the city.

Kaylee Hutchinson’s landlord, who uses RealPage’s pricing software, told her rent was going up at the start of the pandemic even as many people were fleeing the city. (Philip Keith, special to ProPublica)

A few weeks later, she and her fiancé saw a newly vacant unit in their building advertised online for less. One of their landlord’s policies permitted moving to another unit owned by the company, so they did.

Hutchinson, who is an analyst for the police department, wondered if a computer algorithm was behind building staff’s inflexibility. “It was pretty obvious they should have been dropping prices,” she said. “They were digging their heels in.”

Hutchinson said she watched apartments in her building sit vacant at prices that didn’t make sense to her.

“A normal mom-and-pop landlord, they’re worried about having a good tenant and protecting their interest in the agreement,” Hutchinson said. “These companies, they’ll just replace you.”

The Origins of YieldStar

One of YieldStar’s main architects was a business executive who had personal experience with an antitrust prosecution.

A genial, self-described “numbers nerd,” Jeffrey Roper was Alaska Airlines’ director of revenue management when it and other major airlines began developing price-setting software in the 1980s.

Competing airlines began using common software to share planned routes and prices with each other before they became public. The technology helped head off price wars that would have lowered ticket prices, the Department of Justice said.

The department said the arrangement may have artificially inflated airfares, estimating the cost to consumers at more than a billion dollars between 1988 and 1992. The government eventually reached settlements or consent decrees for price fixing with eight airlines, including Alaska Airlines, all of which agreed to change how they used the technology.

At one point, federal agents removed a computer and documents from Roper’s office at the airline. He said he and other creators of the software weren’t aware of the antitrust implications. “We all got called up before the Department of Justice in the early 1980s because we were colluding,” he said. “We had no idea.”

When Roper returned to the United States in the early 2000s after a stint in central and eastern Europe, he said, he discovered the apartment rental industry was so far behind technologically that it resembled the emerging markets he’d just left.

Apartment managers were “basically pricing their product on a paper napkin,” said Roper, who eventually formed his own company.

Old computers and manual recordkeeping were mainstays of the industry. Leasing agents gauged how their buildings compared by calling up competitors. “This was just a ripe business,” with lots of money and lots of opportunities for technological improvement, Roper said.

RealPage hired Roper as its principal scientist in 2004 to improve software it had bought from Camden Property Trust, a large investor-backed owner and manager of apartment buildings.

Roper quickly realized he required data — a lot of data — to get the algorithm working properly. He began building a “master data warehouse” that pulled in client data from other RealPage applications, such as those for leasing managers.

A proof-of-concept version of the software had performed well in tests at townhouses Camden offered for rent in its home city of Houston.

At the time, the street behind Camden’s townhouses was shut down while a grocery store was being built. Leasing staff wanted to discount rent for the townhouses because of the nuisance, said Kip Zacharias, who worked with Camden as a consultant.

Instead, YieldStar suggested boosting rents. “We were like, ‘Guys, just try it,’” Zacharias said.

The units ended up renting for significantly more than staff had expected, he said. “That was kind of the eureka moment,” Zacharias said. “If you’d listened to your gut, you would have lowered your price.”

The practice of lowering rent to fill a vacancy was a reflex for many in the apartment industry. Letting units sit empty could be costly and nerve-wracking for leasing agents.

Such agents sometimes hesitated to push rents higher. Roper said they were often peers of the people they were renting to. “We said there’s way too much empathy going on here,” he said. “This is one of the reasons we wanted to get pricing off-site.”

Unimpeded by human worries, YieldStar’s price increases sometimes led to more tenants leaving.

Camden’s turnover rates increased about 15 percentage points in 2006 after it implemented YieldStar, Campo, the company’s CEO, told a trade publication a few years later. But that wasn’t a problem for the firm: Despite having to replace more renters, its revenue grew by 7.4%.

“The net effect of driving revenue and pushing people out was $10 million in income,” Campo said. “I think that shows keeping the heads in the beds above all else is not always the best strategy.”

(Reminded of that quote, Campo told ProPublica it “sounds awful” and doesn’t reflect how he or Camden views renters today. “We fundamentally believe our customers are the most important part of our business,” he said. “We’re not about pushing people out.”)

Hiking rents at the same time benefited all landlords, the industry learned. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” one real estate executive and revenue management proponent told the industry publication Yield Pro in 2007.

One of the greatest threats to a landlord’s profit, according to Roper and other executives, was other firms setting rents too low at nearby properties. “If you have idiots undervaluing, it costs the whole system,” Roper said.

Jeffrey Roper helped develop YieldStar, which uses an algorithm to suggest prices for apartments across the country. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica)

Roper wasn’t the only technologist working on an apartment pricing algorithm. Donald Davidoff, the primary developer of rival software called Lease Rent Options, or LRO, said he designed his program differently, to head off any concerns about collusion.

Instead of relying on a digital warehouse that includes competitor data, Davidoff used a complex formula and public market data to steer LRO’s algorithm. The system relied on incremental price shifts to manage demand for apartments, said Davidoff, an MIT-educated former rocket engineer. “That’s not dissimilar to changing a trajectory of a rocket through inflection of a nozzle,” he said — making small changes that can dramatically alter something’s course over time.

Davidoff said he was careful to avoid features that might run counter not only to anti-discrimination laws, such as the Fair Housing Act, but also those that bar competitors from conspiring to set prices.

“I had many conversations with attorneys to understand where the boundaries are,” he said. “Anybody who’s building one of these systems or is involved in these should care a lot about fair housing and should care a lot about price collusion to avoid both.”

Roper told ProPublica that when he was developing the YieldStar software more than a decade ago, he was concerned about avoiding both issues. He also said he didn’t want to misuse private data in pricing.

“I was highly sensitized to: You just don’t do it,” Roper said.

Despite differences in the software’s design, RealPage acquired LRO in 2017 after months of scrutiny by the antitrust division of the justice department. Federal regulators review mergers above a certain size — right now, it is transactions valued at $101 million — and typically allow them to proceed after only a preliminary review. But some are flagged for a more extensive look. The government can challenge a merger in court if it believes it could substantially harm competition.

RealPage’s purchase of LRO received such a second look, but the DOJ allowed it to proceed in late 2017. The department did not respond to requests for comment.

The approval allowed RealPage to acquire its only significant competitor, Roper said, adding, “I was surprised the DOJ let that go through.”

RealPage was pricing 1.5 million units, and the acquisition of LRO would double that, Steve Winn, RealPage’s then-CEO, said at a mid-2017 investor conference. “I don’t think there’s any concentration, enough concentration, of buying or pricing power here” to warrant DOJ concerns, he said. A third company had a substantial footprint in the market, Winn said, but property managers’ own manual pricing processes or proprietary systems were RealPage’s largest competitor.

“We expect our combined platform to drive accelerated, sustained revenue growth,” Winn said in a media release announcing the deal.

RealPage’s influence was burgeoning. That year, the firm’s target market — multifamily buildings with five or more units — made up about 19 million of the nation’s 45 million rental units. A growing share of those buildings were owned by firms backed by Wall Street investors, who were among the most eager adopters of pricing software.

RealPage renamed its combined pricing software AI Revenue Management. By the end of 2020, the firm was reporting in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that its clients used its services and products to manage 19.7 million rental units of all types, including single-family homes. The private equity firm Thoma Bravo bought the public company a few months later for $10.2 billion.

Winn, whose net worth Forbes estimates at $1.7 billion, stepped aside. He did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokesperson for Thoma Bravo declined to comment.

Who Uses the Software and How It Works

Somewhere around 2016, according to one trade group, the industry’s use of the pricing software began to achieve “critical mass.”

The more property managers who sign on to RealPage services, the more data flows into the company’s repository. That in turn aids its pricing service, which the company says “leverages multifamily’s largest lease transaction database.”

RealPage’s clients include some of the largest property managers in the country. Many favor cities where rent has been rising rapidly, according to a ProPublica analysis of five of the country’s top 10 property managers as of 2020. All five use RealPage pricing software in at least some buildings, and together they control thousands of apartments in metro areas such as Denver, Nashville, Atlanta and Seattle, where rents for a typical two-bedroom apartment rose 30% or more between 2014 and 2019.

Greystar and FPI Management each control hundreds of buildings in metro areas where rents have risen steeply in recent years. And Equity Residential, Lincoln Property Company and Mid-America Apartment Communities each manage dozens of buildings in high-growth markets.

In contrast, these same companies control fewer buildings in metro areas such as Philadelphia, Tampa and Chicago, where rents have increased more slowly, the analysis found.

Many factors may cause RealPage clients to cluster in high rent-growth markets. The company’s clients may gravitate toward such markets because those areas will bear more rent hikes and so offer an opportunity to make more money, for instance. But RealPage says its software steers pricing that beats the market in areas where it operates.

RealPage’s algorithm calculates how demand for apartments responds to changes in price — what’s known as price elasticity.

The algorithm takes into account characteristics of apartments, like the number of bedrooms. It also considers factors such as how many more of a complex’s apartments are likely to become available in the near future. Property managers can adjust settings according to their priorities — such as how full they want their buildings to be.

The software also analyzes rent prices in the broader market, the company said. That data can provide insight into how competitors’ buildings located near the client — such as within, say, a half-mile or mile radius — are being priced, said Ryan Kimura, a former RealPage executive.

One advantage RealPage’s data warehouse had was its access to actual lease transactions — giving it the true rents paid, instead of simply those a landlord advertised, RealPage said.

Property managers can’t look at the unpublished data any one rival is sharing with YieldStar, Roper and other former RealPage employees said.

Nicole Lott said that when the building where she worked as a property manager near Dallas started using YieldStar, the software determined that similar buildings in the area were charging more. It pushed for steep increases.

“It really jumped rates up,” Lott said. “Leasing slowed down to a crawl.”

She and other staff challenged the software, asking the division of her company that oversaw YieldStar for a review, she said. The landlord ended up raising rates more gradually, she said.

“We didn’t think we could get those rates,” she said. “In some cases we were right and in some cases we might have been wrong.”

Kimura, a former RealPage executive who worked at the firm for three years before leaving in 2021, said the company would typically see pushback from property staff on about 10%-20% of the software’s recommendations. It was part of the process. “If they are approving every rate and it’s 100% acceptance,” he said, “they basically have a blindfold on and are pushing a button.”

RealPage claims its software will increase revenue and decrease vacancies. But at times the company has appeared to urge apartment owners and managers to reduce supply while increasing price.

During an earnings call in 2017, Winn said one large property company, which managed more than 40,000 units, learned it could make more profit by operating at a lower occupancy level that “would have made management uncomfortable before,” he said.

The company had been seeking occupancy levels of 97% or 98% in markets where it was a leader, Winn said. But when it began using YieldStar, managers saw that raising rents and leaving some apartments vacant made more money.

“Initially, it was very hard for executives to accept that they could operate at 94% or 96% and achieve a higher NOI by increasing rents,” Winn said on the call, referring to net operating income. The company “began utilizing RealPage to operate at 95%, while seeing revenue increases of 3% to 4%.”

But the software’s supporters say it’s not driving the nation’s housing affordability problem.

Though soaring rent is giving the industry a “black eye,” Campo said, the culprit is a lot of demand and not enough supply — not revenue management software. The software just helps managers react to trends faster, he said.

“Would you rather do your work today on a typewriter or a computer?” he asked. “That’s what revenue management is.”

Using software like YieldStar is “taking what we used to do manually on a yellow pad and calling people on the phone and putting it on a codified system where you take the errors out of the pricing,” he said.

RealPage, Seattle and Rising Rents

To see how rent-setting software can make a difference, look no further than Seattle, where over the last few years rents have risen faster than almost anywhere in the country, some studies show.

Large apartment buildings in one ZIP code just north of downtown, sandwiched between the Space Needle and Pike Place Market, are overwhelmingly controlled by RealPage clients, ProPublica found.

The trendy Belltown neighborhood, with its live music venues and residential towers, had 9,066 market rate apartments in buildings with five or more units as of June, according to the data firm CoStar and Apartments.com. Property management was highly concentrated: The ZIP code’s 10 biggest management firms ran 70% of units, data showed.

All 10 used RealPage’s pricing software in at least some of their buildings, according to employees, press releases and articles in trade publications.

Expensive markets with high rents, like Seattle, tend to have “very high” rates of revenue management use by landlords, Roper said.

Two buildings in the ZIP code — one with revenue management software and the other without — reveal diverging approaches to pricing apartments.

The Fountain Court apartments, 320 units clustered around a courtyard with a fountain, are about a half-mile from Amazon’s corporate headquarters. The building is owned and managed by Essex Property Trust, whose executives told investors in a 2008 earnings call that they were implementing YieldStar in the trust’s apartment buildings.

At the Fountain Court, rent has risen 42% since 2012, CoStar data shows — steeper than the 33% average increase for similar downtown buildings.

Tenant Amanda Tolep and her husband were approaching the end of their lease for a one-bedroom at the six-story building near the end of 2021 when they learned rent would jump about $400, to $1,600. The increase amounted to 33% — in one year.

Tolep had been working as a barista and launching her own nutrition-related business. Her husband worked for a bank. They expected their rent to go up, knowing they had received a “COVID deal.” But the size of the jump, along with other nuisances — like stolen packages and noise from a nearby fire station — led them to look elsewhere.

After finding prices similar to their raised rent at several other neighborhood buildings, the couple decided to leave the city and move a half-hour’s drive north.

A spokesperson for Essex declined to comment. None of the other biggest property managers commented on the record about their use of revenue management.

About six blocks away, rent has not gone up as dramatically at The Humphrey Apartments, a historic six-story brick building with 74 units.

John Stepan’s rent stayed relatively steady in a building that did not use RealPage’s pricing software. (Jovelle Tamayo for ProPublica)

John Stepan, a writer for a tech company, moved into a studio in the 1923 building a little more than a year ago. It was small, but he liked the high ceilings, hardwood floors and farmhouse-style kitchen. He had secured a COVID deal, too: one month free, with rent of $1,295 a month after that.

A few months before his lease was up, the building notified him that rent would increase by $50, which amounted to about a 3.9% rise. “It was surprisingly low,” said Stepan, who left only because he found a condo to buy nearby.

Tami Drougas, the asset manager who oversees The Humphrey and two other Seattle-area buildings for the local real estate developer who owns them, said she doesn’t use a revenue management system.

“I don’t believe in them,” she said. “That’s great and fine for larger corporations. But I think it takes the humanity out of what we do.”

After 24 years in the industry, she said, she sees good relationships with tenants and vendors as the key to running a building successfully. She said The Humphrey has low costs related to vacancies.

The building’s rent has barely budged in recent years, she acknowledged. “We have a lot less turnover and I feel like that keeps expenses down,” Drougas said.

Seattle has been hit particularly hard by soaring rents. One report found the city had the steepest rent growth of any major city in the nation over the decade ending in 2019. Almost 46,000 Seattle households were spending more than half their incomes on housing, making them what federal standards call “severely cost-burdened,” according to a 2021 study the city commissioned. Many families have trouble paying for necessities like food and medical care when their rent eats up 30% or more of their income.

“Many others have been priced out of Seattle altogether due to rapidly rising rents and housing prices,” the study said.

It also found that people with higher incomes often “down rented,” choosing cheaper apartments that would otherwise have been available to people making less. Seattle should have had a surplus of 9,000 apartments affordable to people making 80% or less of the median income, the study found. But tenants’ down renting as prices rose turned that surplus into a deficit of 21,000.

Newly Rent-Burdened Workers Range From Accountants to Groundskeepers

In metro Seattle, more people in a variety of jobs are spending over 30% of their income on rent. Below are the 10 occupations where the share of rent-burdened households jumped the most.

Note: A household’s occupation was determined by the job held by the highest earner in each household; to determine if a household is cost-burdened, gross rent (including utilities) was divided by total household income. Homeowners were not included. Source: IPUMS USA, University of Minnesota. (Graphic by Haru Coryne)

As the availability of apartments has shrunk, so has the choice of landlords. The startling concentration of property management in Belltown mirrors a national trend.

The number of apartments controlled by the country’s 50 largest property managers has grown every year for 14 years, according to the National Multifamily Housing Council, which surveys buildings with five or more units.

Those firms oversaw about 1 in 6 such apartments nationwide in 2019, amounting to 3.6 million units. By 2021, the number had risen to almost 4.2 million.

James Nelson, a former bank examiner and loan broker, noticed the concentration of landlords when he and his partner moved to Seattle in 2018.

Troubled by astronomical home sale prices and high rents, Nelson began looking at what was happening in the broader market.

After some digging, he found that many if not most of the bigger apartment managers in Seattle appeared to be using price-setting software. “The name RealPage kept popping up,” said Nelson, who is retired and writing a book on his research. “I went in and looked at the technologies that they were using.”

He concluded the landlords were using tech to do exactly what RealPage advertised it could do — help them charge high rents and beat the market.

“There is no competition,” he said.

Concerns About Competition

RealPage’s software has gained traction at a time when the Biden administration, concerned about rising prices and corporate concentration, is looking to bolster enforcement of rules meant to ensure competition is flourishing.

To win cases, antitrust prosecutors have traditionally needed to show that competitors agreed among themselves to tamper with pricing. “If competitors agreed among themselves to use the same algorithm and to share information among themselves with the purpose of stabilizing pricing, that would be per se illegal,” said Stucke, the former antitrust prosecutor.

If they simply shared information without agreeing to manipulate pricing, the question of whether antitrust law was violated would be more complex, he said. Stucke said he knew of no cases where companies had been prosecuted for what’s known as tacit collusion while using the same algorithm to set prices.

But Maureen K. Ohlhausen, who was then the acting chair of the Federal Trade Commission, said in a 2017 talk that it could be problematic if a group of competitors all used the same outside firm’s algorithm to maximize prices across a market.

She suggested substituting “a guy named Bob” everywhere the word algorithm appears.

“Is it OK for a guy named Bob to collect confidential price strategy information from all the participants in a market and then tell everybody how they should price?” she said. “If it isn’t OK for a guy named Bob to do it, then it probably isn’t OK for an algorithm to do it either.”

Through a representative, Ohlhausen declined to comment on RealPage.

RealPage’s software raises multiple concerns, experts said.

Courts have frowned on sharing nonpublic data among competitors. Lease transaction data is not always public.

As far as RealPage’s claim on its website that it uses “disciplined analytics that balance supply and demand to maximize revenue growth,” Stucke said that businesses can’t usually control supply and demand on their own. “Normally that’s left to market forces,” he said.

The RealPage User Group — the forum for apartment managers who use the company’s products — encourages rivals to work together, something that has been challenged as anti-competitive in antitrust prosecutions, too. The company’s website says the group aims to “promote communications between users,” among other things.

Starting out with 10 members in 2003, the group has grown to more than 1,000 participants, according to the website. A dozen subcommittees, including two focused on revenue management, meet in invitation-only sessions at the company’s annual conference, RealWorld, and participate in a conference call each quarter.

Those sorts of collaborations, Stucke said, “could raise an antitrust red flag.”

If clients are tampering with market forces, their assertions in RealPage marketing videos that its software keeps prices and occupancy “more stable” could also become relevant in court, Stucke said. Similar comments have been used as evidence in previous antitrust cases.

And the exhortations by RealPage and real estate executives for companies to use YieldStar and let some units sit vacant to raise prices are reminiscent of a legal case in the early 1900s, he said, where lumber companies shared information and a directive to reduce supply in order to push up prices.

In an email to ProPublica, RealPage dismissed the notion that the company was using market data improperly.

The company said that using actual rents helps the company “capture a truer picture of price elasticity and affordability,” which reduces the odds a unit is overpriced. And the lease transaction data RealPage is using isn’t always private; sometimes such data is disclosed, the company said, such as when publicly traded real estate firms make reports.

The FTC, which has broad authority to bring enforcement cases against businesses for anti-competitive practices, said in 2021 that it was seeking a more active role in such cases.

A spokesperson for the FTC declined to comment on RealPage’s pricing software.

The agency has tangled with RealPage before: In 2018, the company agreed to pay $3 million to settle an FTC complaint that the company had failed to do enough to make sure personal information used in its tenant screening product was accurate. RealPage did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement.

Higher Rents Are Burdening More Tenants

Drama over rising rent costs — now a key driver of inflation — has been increasingly public. The year before the pandemic, roughly 46% of renters in the U.S. spent more than 30% of their income on rent and therefore met the definition of cost-burdened, Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found.

In mid-September in Washington, D.C., angry protesters disrupted the normally sedate yearly conference held by the National Multifamily Housing Council. Before security ejected them, they seized the stage and recounted how their families had been harmed by an inability to find safe, affordable housing.

At the center of the acrimonious debate has been RealPage’s Jay Parsons.

Since RealPage’s own July conference, he’s repeated a statistic, compiled from a company data set of new lease transactions, that market-rate apartment renters are only spending around 23% of their income on rent.

“The reality is that rents can only rise as incomes rise,” Parsons told The New York Times last month. “If people can’t afford it, you can’t lease it.”

But his sunny view has drawn sharp rebukes.

“This is demonstrably false,” wrote Ben Teresa, co-director of the RVA Eviction Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University, on Twitter. “One of the defining characteristics of housing markets in the last 40 years has been rents increasing faster than wages.

“The problem is quite precisely that people are paying rents they can’t afford,” he wrote.

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Maya Miller contributed reporting and Doris Burke contributed research.

by Michael Grabell

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

After decades of failing to reduce the incidence of one of the most common foodborne illnesses, the U.S. government may finally change the way it regulates salmonella contamination in chicken and turkey.

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that it is considering banning poultry companies from selling raw chicken and turkey contaminated with high levels of certain types of salmonella. Under current regulations, the agency allows raw poultry to be sold in supermarkets even when food safety inspectors know it’s tainted with dangerous strains of the bacteria.

In addition, the USDA said it could require poultry companies to test flocks for salmonella before they’re slaughtered and increase monitoring inside processing plants to prevent the bacteria from spreading.

Last year, ProPublica detailed how flawed federal food safety regulations had done little to stop people from getting sick from salmonella poisoning and had allowed a virulent, antibiotic-resistant strain of the bacteria, known as infantis, to spread widely through the U.S. chicken supply.

After repeated interview requests from ProPublica, the USDA announced that it was rethinking its approach to salmonella a week before the investigation was published. That announcement began a yearlong effort by the agency to gather feedback from scientists, industry and consumer advocates to come up with proposals that could improve public health. The USDA said Friday that infantis is one of the types of salmonella it is considering targeting.

The USDA’s plan, which it called a “proposed framework,” is still in its early stages and is couched with language like “may propose” and “exploring.” And some elements are likely to face stiff resistance from the poultry industry. But if implemented, it would represent the most significant change in salmonella regulation in decades.

“We know that salmonella in poultry is a complex problem with no single solution,” Sandra Eskin, USDA deputy undersecretary for food safety, said in a statement. “However, we have identified a series of strategic actions FSIS could take that are likely to drive down salmonella infections linked to poultry products consumption.” (FSIS stands for Food Safety and Inspection Service, the arm of the USDA that inspects meat and poultry plants.)

Every year, about 1.35 million people in the U.S. get sick from salmonella poisoning. While outbreaks have been linked to onions, peanut butter and pet turtles, the most common source is chicken.

But the USDA has been hampered in its ability to protect consumers. Unlike its counterparts in Europe, it’s not allowed to control salmonella on farms, where it often spreads. It has no power to order recalls and can only ask companies to voluntarily pull products from shelves after an outbreak. And even when it finds persistent contamination in a company’s poultry, the USDA can’t rely on those findings alone to shut a plant down.

As a result, the USDA has instead relied on publicly naming poultry plants that have high rates of salmonella. But food safety advocates have criticized that method for years because the agency tests only a tiny fraction of the poultry sold to consumers and doesn’t focus on the types of salmonella most likely to make people sick. Likewise, industry representatives have faulted the agency’s approach because it doesn’t account for how much bacteria is in a product. Greater contamination is more likely to make people sick.

To make the government’s data easier to use, ProPublica created an online database that lets consumers look up the salmonella records of the plants that processed their chicken and turkey.

The USDA’s proposal addresses many of the problems that consumer advocates — including Eskin, who worked on food safety for Pew Charitable Trusts before joining the Biden administration — have pointed out for years.

By testing flocks before they are brought into processing plants, the USDA said, it hopes to encourage poultry companies to target salmonella on farms by vaccinating birds and improving sanitation in chicken houses. Such an approach helped the turkey industry eradicate an outbreak of a virulent, antibiotic-resistant strain that had plagued turkey flocks and sickened thousands of people from 2017 to 2019.

Another proposal, to increase bacterial sampling inside plants, could help the agency pinpoint where salmonella is spreading as birds are stripped of feathers, dunked in decontaminating chemicals and cut or ground into breasts, wings and turkey burgers.

But the most far-reaching proposal that the USDA said it is exploring is to set a standard that would, for the first time, prevent highly contaminated raw chicken and turkey from being sold.

That approach would model one of the most successful food safety reforms in American history: the USDA outlawing the sale of meat tainted with a strain of E. coli called O157:H7 after several children died from eating hamburgers in the 1990s.

The agency has never done the same thing for salmonella in poultry, and doing so could set off a firestorm among chicken processors. Earlier this year, the industry’s trade group, the National Chicken Council, strongly criticized an agency proposal to ban low levels of salmonella in a far less popular product: frozen breaded raw stuffed chicken breasts like chicken cordon bleu and chicken Kiev.

The poultry industry has so far taken a more moderate tone toward the USDA’s overall efforts to revamp salmonella regulation. Last year, several poultry giants, including Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms and Butterball, joined with consumer groups to push the USDA to update its standards. And a Cargill official was quoted in the USDA’s news release Friday as saying that the company “supports the need to develop a public health risk-based approach” to lowering salmonella illnesses.

Still, the National Chicken Council, which has long held sway over the USDA, said it was disappointed with the agency’s framework and noted that under the current testing methods salmonella rates have declined in raw chicken.

“We support the need to develop science-based approaches that will impact public health, but this is being done backwards,” said Ashley Peterson, the trade group’s senior vice president of science and regulatory affairs. “The agency is formulating regulatory policies and drawing conclusions before gathering data, much less analyzing it. This isn’t science — it’s speculation.”

The USDA emphasized that it is being methodical in its approach, gathering scientific evidence, and plans to seek additional input from industry, consumer groups and scientists.

The changes will likely take months, if not years, to take effect and could be upended by political turnover. The agency said it plans to formally propose rules next year with the goal of finalizing them by mid-2024.

by Marilyn W. Thompson and Perla Trevizo

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

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

District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine has opened an investigation into whether southern border state governors misled immigrants as part of what he called a “political stunt” to transport them to Washington.

Racine told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune his office is examining whether immigrants were deceived by trip organizers before boarding buses for Washington, including several hundred who were bused from Texas under instructions from Gov. Greg Abbott and dropped near the official residence of Vice President Kamala Harris. Racine’s office has the authority to bring misdemeanor criminal charges or to file civil fraud cases.

Racine said that in interviews with his investigators, arriving immigrants “have talked persuasively about being misled, with talk about promised services.” He offered no specifics about the inquiry, including whether it is being handled by his office’s criminal or civil divisions. The attorney general’s office declined to answer further questions.

Various state and federal laws could apply to transporting immigrants across state lines. Racine’s office could look into whether anyone committed fraud by falsely promising jobs or services, whether there were civil rights violations or whether officials misused taxpayers’ money.

Racine’s investigation comes after weeks of escalating tensions between some Republican governors and the Biden administration over immigration policy. In April, Abbott began busing to Washington immigrants who had been processed and released by federal immigration officials, and he later expanded the initiative to New York and Chicago. To date, more than 12,000 immigrants have been relocated from border towns.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey has followed Abbott’s lead and bused 2,170 immigrants to Washington on 60 buses, according to Ducey’s spokesperson, C.J. Karamargin. Most of them, he said, had said they hoped to relocate to New York, New Jersey or Florida.

Last month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is seeking reelection, turbocharged the issue and moved it to the forefront of a national debate on Biden’s immigration policies. He sent two charter flights to Martha’s Vineyard carrying Venezuelan immigrants who had arrived in Texas. Local officials in Texas have said they were not consulted.

The immigrants and their advocates said that passengers on the charter flights had been told they would be given jobs and support. A sheriff in Texas has opened a criminal investigation into whether Florida officials violated the law by recruiting the migrants from a Texas shelter.

Racine’s involvement ratchets up the pressure on the governors over their actions.

Elected as a Democrat, Racine criticized the Republican governors for using “people as props. That’s what they’ve done with the immigrants.”

Racine’s office can prosecute certain misdemeanors, and felonies are handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. But its highest profile work has been bringing civil fraud lawsuits against nonprofits and businesses. In May, it reached a $750,000 settlement in a lawsuit against former President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee, alleging that it had abused donors’ funds by overpaying for rentals at the Trump International Hotel.

The governors have said they have done nothing wrong in transporting immigrants to “sanctuary cities” that may be better equipped to care for them. They say they want the rest of the nation to share the burden of what they call the Biden administration’s open border policies.

Abbott, who is also campaigning for reelection, said that he had had immigrants bused from Texas to Harris’ residence in D.C. to call attention to border security, saying on Twitter, “We’re sending migrants to her backyard to call on the Biden Administration to do its job and secure the border.”

In a statement to ProPublica and the Tribune, Abbott’s press secretary, Renae Eze, denied that any trickery has been involved in Texas’ migrant transportation program, which has now sent 8,200 people to Washington on over 195 buses, 3,200 to New York City on over 60 buses and 920 to Chicago on over 15 buses.

“These Democrat elites in our nation’s capital know nothing about Texas’ busing operations. These migrants willingly chose to go to Washington, D.C., having signed a voluntary consent waiver available in multiple languages upon boarding that they agreed on the destination. And they were processed and released by the federal government, who dumped them in small Texas border towns,” she wrote.

DeSantis’ office did not respond, but the governor has said he intends to transport more immigrants out of Florida. Ducey’s spokesperson said Arizona is working with a regional health center to ensure that immigrants are well-treated and get to their final desired destinations. Ducey has said he will continue busing migrants to Washington until he leaves office in January.

Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, an advocacy group, said that some immigrants who were sent from Texas to Harris’ residence in Washington have told his team they were misled about their final destination. The immigrants believed they were bound for Union Station, the city’s central transportation hub, where many hoped to connect with family or trains and buses to other locations. Instead, he said, they were dropped off at about 6 a.m. in an unfamiliar spot, where a church group quickly organized to pick them up.

“I think they are being tricked and being used,” Garcia said.

Since the spring, buses have arrived almost daily at Union Station, where immigrants can now seek support from a new city Office of Migrant Services. So far, Texas taxpayers have spent about $14 million on migrant transportation, according to state records. Buses into Washington have continued in recent days, with several additional arrivals at the vice president’s residence.

Meanwhile, Florida procurement records suggest that the state transportation agency intends to continue using charter air services to transport immigrants out of the state until June 30. The vendor chosen for the charter flights is run by a state Republican donor.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s inspector general is examining Florida’s use of money from COVID-19 funds to finance its migrant transportation program, Politico reported. DeSantis’s office says it used the money properly.

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

by Alison Burdo, The Press of Atlantic City, photography by Kriston Jae Bethel, special to ProPublica

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

For the better part of the past decade, 108 Albion Place, about a block from Atlantic City’s legendary boardwalk, was a refuge for a dozen elderly and low-income residents. The property manager of the three-story house, a patchwork of tan stucco and weathered white vinyl, hosted friends and family for Sunday dinners of baked chicken, hot wings and macaroni and cheese. In the summer, tenants barbecued on the patio, enjoying the cool night air.

But in the spring of 2021, they said, they found a notice posted on their door: Tenants must vacate by June 30. The date was just six weeks away. The owner was selling the building, along with two other neighboring rooming houses. Together, the three properties provided 42 rooms and two apartments to some of Atlantic City’s most vulnerable residents.

The buyer was a state agency known as the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, an entity established by New Jersey nearly four decades ago to use casino tax revenue to revitalize Atlantic City. And the transactions were all part of a program to reduce the number of rooming houses in the city — an undertaking that officials variously said would reduce blight, improve the city’s housing stock and expand affordable housing.

But since launching the rooming house initiative more than two years ago, CRDA has fallen well short of those goals, while displacing dozens of low-income residents in the process, an investigation by The Press of Atlantic City and ProPublica has found. In fact, in some cases, it has made neighborhood conditions worse.

Today, far from the purchase having reduced blight, the three rooming houses remain empty, boarded up, with no signs of activity, while a fourth that the agency purchased last year was demolished, leaving behind a vacant lot overgrown with weeds. In the case of 108 Albion Place, a developer has another year to start construction under its contract with CRDA, but in the meantime the property has become the kind of eyesore that officials claimed they were trying to transform. Earlier this fall, the patio was littered with empty beer cans and condom wrappers, and a makeshift bed of cardboard and old sofa cushions was tucked in a corner.

At the same time, some of the former residents are still searching for stable housing and questioning why they were rushed from the premises in the first place.

“We all took care of each other,” said Nada Gilbert, who moved into 108 Albion Place in 2015 and managed the building in the months following the death of her husband, Wayne, in April 2021.

“The way they went about everything was just wrong, period,” added Nikki Knight, a nursing aide and mother of two who rented there for five years.

The project is the latest in a string of land deals that prioritized Atlantic City’s tourism industry at the expense of local residents. Gov. Phil Murphy in 2018 had attempted to fix that, commissioning a report that directed CRDA to rebuild neighborhoods by investing in housing assistance, among other community needs. And, in turn, the agency pledged to change. Since then, however, it has spent millions of dollars to remove critical housing and social services from the city’s Tourism District, displacing low-income residents, disrupting outreach efforts and leaving additional blight throughout the city’s neighborhoods, the news organizations found. Among the shuttered properties: an addiction treatment center and a soup kitchen.

The effort also included the rooming house deals. In the case of the three properties that included 108 Albion Place, CRDA spent $1.1 million and flipped them to a hotel developer, who expects to command as much as $500 a night during peak tourism season.

Side-by-side rooming houses on Albion Place were bought by CRDA and sold to a developer, which has plans to convert the properties into a boutique hotel.

Now, in response to our findings, one of the authors of the original legislation establishing CRDA is pointing to the rooming house outcomes and questioning how the agency is using its power. “This kind of activity raises some serious red flags as to how CRDA is operating and should be a wake-up call to legislators in Trenton,” said David Sciarra, who as deputy public advocate helped write the bill creating the reinvestment authority. “They need to do some serious oversight to make sure that CRDA is operating in the best interests of all residents of Atlantic City and not just an investment arm of the casino industry.”

Murphy, who ultimately approves or vetoes CRDA’s spending, declined to comment for this story through a spokesperson, and his office referred all questions to the state agency.

CRDA officials said the agency has limited funds to service a variety of goals, which, under the law, include redevelopment as well as addressing “the pressing social and economic needs” of Atlantic City residents. “You’re trying to hit all of them,” said Lance Landgraf, CRDA’s director of planning and development. “You’re not going to hit every one.” He noted that the agency had spent $4.45 million in recent years to help renovate 153 units of affordable housing, as well as $10.3 million to build student housing at Stockton University’s Atlantic City campus. He defended the rooming house project as critical economic development.

"We needed to get those properties cleaned up and changed into a better, more viable use in the community that would promote development, not restrict it," Landgraf said.

CRDA’s former executive director, Matthew Doherty, who led the agency when the three rooming houses were purchased, agreed.

“The benefits to eliminating the blighted properties and then working with private developers to get them back on the tax rolls as useful properties will reap dividends for generations to come in Atlantic City,” said Doherty, who left the agency in late January. “Trying to enhance neighborhoods, attract private capital and improve the lives of the residents of the city is virtually impossible with rooming houses holding back progress.”

CRDA did not answer questions asking about the current blighted conditions of the properties it had purchased. But when previously criticized by state auditors for the slow return on its investments, the agency said it must be a “‘patient’ investor focused on larger policy goals and objectives.”

Meanwhile, the need for affordable housing in Atlantic City is as dire as ever.

“Where’s the success story?” demands Steve Young, a local housing activist, about the closure of the rooming houses to build a hotel. “Who came up with the concept? We’ve been hoodwinked and bamboozled for so long.”

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

When the New Jersey Legislature created CRDA in 1984, it gave the agency a mission: Use millions of dollars in casino taxes to “address the pressing social and economic needs” of Atlantic City residents. At the time, a quarter of the local population lived in poverty — more than double the state figure — so affordable housing was at the top of the priority list. In fact, in its early years, CRDA was required to dedicate 100% of its funds to the rehabilitation or construction of housing facilities for low- and middle-income families.

And for much of its first decade, the agency did that, adding hundreds of new townhomes and apartments to the city’s housing stock. But the early investment in housing didn’t last, as policymakers sought ways to counter increasing gambling competition from other states. So in 1992 CRDA leaders started to shift priorities, adopting a plan that allowed it to devote tens of millions of dollars to back commercial development: a noncasino hotel to support a new convention center, a new minor-league baseball stadium, roadway repairs.

The following year, the Legislature, concerned about a projected shortage of hotel rooms in Atlantic City, went even further: It amended the law to allow CRDA to allot $100 million for casinos’ hotel projects, effectively permitting the agency to hand casino taxes back to the industry that had paid them. State lawmakers in 1996 added another $75 million to that pot. And CRDA moved quickly, spending nearly as much on hotel expansions in the span of just four years as it had on housing projects since the agency’s launch. Additional money flowed to the industry in 2003, with the creation of a $30 million, three-year Casino Capital Construction Fund, which gaming companies could tap for new hotel rooms, retail or parking facilities or other improvements.

CRDA was established to use tax revenue from casinos like the Borgata to revitalize Atlantic City. Construction and development in Atlantic City’s Tourism District is governed by CRDA.

Meanwhile, rents had soared and housing conditions worsened as landlords aimed to squeeze out local residents so they could sell their property to casino speculators. With its focus on supporting the gaming industry, CRDA fell well short of the housing goals that the state prescribed two decades earlier; by late 2004, it had funded the construction of just 1,394 housing units — about half of the original goal. The Great Recession drove rental demand even higher as thousands of Atlantic City residents lost their homes to foreclosure. “Legalized gambling has not fully lived up to its promise as a ‘unique tool’ for Atlantic City’s urban redevelopment,” researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia wrote in a 2009 study. "High rental costs have led to overcrowding, doubling up of households, and an increased rate of homelessness among families."

In 2011, then-Gov. Chris Christie signed legislation that further strengthened CRDA’s relationship with the tourism industry, narrowing the agency’s focus to economic development within a newly created 2.5-square-mile Tourism District. The region included the city’s boardwalk and casinos, as well as the immediate surrounding areas, and the effort was intended to “enhance the cleanliness and safety” of the district. But the district map left out entire city neighborhoods, hindering those areas’ chances to obtain CRDA funding.

The next year, the agency began spending money to remove social services from the heart of the casino-lined Tourism District. CRDA leaders said certain facilities, including an addiction treatment center and a nonprofit’s now-shuttered soup kitchen, gave tourists the wrong impression of the city. “It’s detrimental, I would argue, to the growth and prosperity of the district, for us succeeding in becoming an economic generator for the region,” CRDA’s executive director at the time, John Palmieri, told The Press of Atlantic City.

For its part, the treatment center wanted to move, because it had a long waiting list and needed more space to accommodate more beds. CRDA ultimately directed millions to help the center relocate to Mays Landing, about 20 miles outside Atlantic City. The soup kitchen also agreed to relocate, and CRDA initially pledged $1 million to help it renovate a new headquarters outside the Tourism District. But then the agency reneged on that promise. At first, CRDA said the nonprofit’s contractor, which led the rebuilding of hundreds of New Jersey homes in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, wasn’t qualified. Then, the agency said a revised plan with a CRDA-approved contractor was too expensive. Amid the back-and-forth, city inspectors declared the nonprofit’s Tourism District building unsafe, effectively closing the soup kitchen and suspending meal services.

In the end, CRDA did provide the nonprofit with a $300,000 loan to pay off its mortgage on the new facility, but the group has been unable to raise enough money to complete the renovations that would allow it to restore hot meals.

“It just seems that the state really does more to mess with Atlantic City than almost any other place in New Jersey because we got the goose that lays the golden egg here,” said Rev. John Scotland, executive director of Friends of Jean Webster, which operates the soup kitchen that once served 300 meals a day. For the past two years, the nonprofit has been operating in a limited capacity, handing out boxes of groceries in front of its new headquarters.

Between 2012 and 2016, CRDA returned to funding housing, allocating more than $30 million to residential projects. But it made little difference to low- and middle-income residents. Half of the funds supported NoBe, a 250-unit designer high-rise and the city’s first new market-rate housing in decades; rents started at $1,500, nearly 40% higher than the median rent in Atlantic City. To be sure, because the project received federal housing tax credits, 20% of the units featured reduced rents for households earning 50% or less of the area median income. Nearly all the rest of CRDA’s investment went to two housing projects that never materialized. In one case, CRDA dedicated nearly $10 million to purchasing land that was home to more than five dozen residents in Atlantic City’s South Inlet for new housing that never came to fruition. In the other, the agency set aside $1.5 million for a developer to build 57 semidetached homes outside the Tourism District and $3.5 million to subsidize their sales to low-income buyers. But those plans fell apart when the developer realized the site wasn’t large enough to accomodate the project; CRDA had previously helped fund the widening of a road in the area ahead of a new casino opening, reducing the available land.

Today, a fence surrounds those dusty vacant lots. CRDA did not respond to questions about the failed housing deals.

In recent years, a series of critical audits blasted Atlantic City and CRDA leaders for focusing on tourism while the city’s rates of poverty, unemployment, lead exposure and infant mortality soared to among the highest in the state. “Urban challenges cannot be completely walled off,” said a 2018 report commissioned by Murphy. “Legacy cities that recover include social concerns as part of the agenda for change. Atlantic City must do that also.”

CRDA’s investment choices, however, “often had little to do with the core interests of the city,” the report said.

Agency leaders, in turn, “expressed a desire to focus greater attention on the challenges at its doorstep — the wide range of needs of Atlantic City — and exercise greater discipline in its investments intended to drive economic development,” according to the report.

In the winter of 2020, as CRDA pursued its “Vacant Rooming House Conversion Project,” officials said the initiative would “protect Atlantic City residents by providing improved housing conditions and revitalize numerous properties.” They maintained that the sheer number of Atlantic City rooming houses violated city regulations, which limit the collective occupancy of such dwellings to 0.5% of the total population and mandate that no two be within 1,000 feet of each other. And the substandard condition of many of them endangered their residents, who “constitute some of the City’s most vulnerable residents as they tend to be elderly, disabled and economically disadvantaged,” according to the CRDA resolution authorizing the program.

In exchange for giving up their licenses, rooming house owners could receive an interest-bearing loan to demolish the properties or redevelop them into other uses like apartments, single-family homes or mixed-use buildings. To be eligible, the rooming house had to be vacant and located in the Tourism District. “We’re here to help improve the housing stock in Atlantic City,” Doherty, the agency’s executive director at the time, told The Press in February 2020. “This will give us another tool at our disposal to continue to convert these rooming houses into a better form of housing stock.”

Some civic leaders and residents weren’t so sure. Sheila Hull-Freeman, president of the Bungalow Park Civic Association, expressed concern that the rooming houses would be turned into short-term rentals like Airbnbs, which locals say draw overcrowded, noisy parties that impact neighbors. And resident Geoffrey Rosenberger underscored that the properties are homes to people who work minimum wage jobs, according to minutes from the CRDA board meeting.

Nevertheless, the board unanimously approved the program, which also aligned with the priorities of city leaders, who have largely considered rooming houses a blight and a nuisance in recent years, citing violence and drug activity.

But CRDA found no takers for the loan program and soon shifted to purchasing rooming houses itself. The strategy would help the agency “still accomplish our goal of eliminating blight,” Doherty later told a local TV news station.

CRDA, however, ignored two key facts: One, 108 Albion Place and the adjacent rooming houses were not vacant; dozens of people lived there. And two, for many, like Knight and her neighbors, rooming houses had become a critical form of shelter amid the affordable housing crisis. For $800 a month, the single mother rented a one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of 108 Albion Place. The exterior lacked curb appeal, but inside it was clean, safe and affordable — qualities that had been lacking in her last building, which was a hot spot for police activity. Her unit had a kitchen, a bathroom and a living room, which served as her teenage son Jeremyah’s bedroom.

It also had a built-in community: Gilbert and her husband, the property managers, were Knight’s longtime friends. The couple would babysit Knight’s younger child while she worked overnight shifts at a local assisted living facility.

Nikki Knight plays with her son Johari. The single mother was forced to move out of 108 Albion Place, where she lived near friends who helped her with child care.

Jeffrey Matchett lived upstairs. He had lost his Atlantic City home in 2016, unable to afford the mortgage amid rising property taxes. For $600 per month, he rented a room. It had no frills, just a bed, a dresser, a nightstand, a microwave and a refrigerator. He shared a hallway bathroom. Still, Matchett appreciated the location: From a bus stop on the corner he could easily commute to his job at the local water department. In the summer, Matchett would enjoy the ocean breeze; in the winter, he’d head toward the beach to see the storms roll in.

“I loved it. It was always peaceful,” he said.

CRDA’s first rooming house deal came in July 2020, when it approved the purchase of the Memphis Belle Inn, a 15-room rooming house in the heart of the Tourism District, a mile north of Albion Place. Officials had cited the property, which was owned by another landlord, for bedbugs, roaches, mice and dozens of necessary repairs. When later asked why the agency had selected this particular rooming house, Doherty said the acquisition was part of a larger effort to buy “rooming houses that are considered to be the most problematic from a public safety standpoint.”

The purchase piqued the interest of Michael Scanlon Jr., whose father owned 108 Albion Place and the adjacent rooming houses. While he had previously rebuffed CRDA’s efforts to enlist him in the loan program, he now seemed interested in a new deal, according to emails obtained through a public records request. “I hear that CRDA is purchasing empty rooming houses,” he wrote in a Dec. 16, 2020, email to the agency. “I’d like to discuss a possible sale.” At first, Scanlon floated selling two other properties. But before long, he added the rooming house where Knight, Gilbert and Matchett lived, along with the neighboring properties: 105 S. California Ave. and 106 Albion Place. In an interview, Scanlon Jr. told The Press of Atlantic City and ProPublica that once the pandemic started some tenants in his father’s properties stopped paying rent, meaning less revenue for the business. (Matchett and Knight said they always paid their monthly rent on time, while Gilbert, as property manager, did not have a rent payment.)

In mid-May 2021, CRDA officials inspected the rooming houses. Scanlon soon posted the eviction notice at Albion Place, residents said. For some, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Gilbert’s husband had died of COVID-19 complications in April. And Knight had just had a baby, Johari. He was only 10 months old.

“He knew I had a baby,” Knight said of the landlord. “I had, really, no words for him. I still really don’t have no words for him. Honestly.”

Matchett was also in a bind. He looked at the available rental options but couldn’t find anything within his budget. So he tapped his savings and spent $5,000 to buy a 2009 Toyota Camry. For the next month, it would serve as his new home. “I had to do what I had to do,” Matchett said. “I thought about the people that were worse off than me.”

Asked whether CRDA discussed relocation efforts with landlords in the program, Landgraf said no. “That was solely on the owners to deal with that,” he said. “Our direction to them was: ‘We will not buy this with anybody in it.’ That’s as far as I went with it.” In response to questions from the news organizations, Doherty stuck by the approach. “Selling rooming houses to CRDA was a voluntary decision by the property owners,” he said. “I do not believe our purchasing of rooming houses incentivized landlords to evict people.”

Scanlon Sr. did not respond to requests for comment. His son, Scanlon Jr., insisted he and his father did right by the Albion Place residents. Tenants were offered cash in exchange for vacating, he said — Matchett said he accepted $600, the equivalent of one month’s rent — and the opportunity to rent in Scanlon’s other properties. Scanlon Sr. also paid for a few residents to stay in hotels, his son added.

Scanlon Jr. claimed the tenants had “far, far more time than six weeks” to vacate the rooming house, and offered to provide documentation that backed his timeline. But when The Press of Atlantic City and ProPublica pressed for the information in several follow-up requests, Scanlon Jr. did not produce it and stopped returning calls.

Matchett moved into 108 Albion Place after losing his Atlantic City home in 2016. “I loved it. It was always peaceful,” he said.

As residents scrambled to find other places to live, CRDA moved to finalize the rooming house deals.

In July 2021, the agency authorized the purchase of 105 S. California Ave. Known as Treana’s Guest House, the 12-unit rooming house backed up against the rear of the Albion Place properties. Several CRDA board members balked at the cost, $375,000, which exceeded the owner’s most recent asking price. Scanlon Sr. had listed the property on the market for $349,000.

Doherty, CRDA’s executive director, however, defended the deal. According to the board meeting minutes, Doherty said that the property had 60 calls in a year for police service and had public safety issues.

He “further stated that it is difficult to quantify what the value is to clean up the Tourism District and the rooming house issue,” according to the minutes.

Then, in September 2021, CRDA turned to 106 and 108 Albion Place. “Both of these are large rooming houses that have fallen into disrepair and have become problematic eyesores in the neighborhood,” Doherty told board members.

As with CRDA’s July approval of a rooming house purchase, some board members expressed doubts. Debra DiLorenzo, a business consultant and former president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce Southern New Jersey, considered it a poor financial deal. The board was being asked to approve up to $1.2 million for the two properties, an amount that was considerably above market value. Moreover, DiLorenzo worried the agency was setting a bad precedent; the prior year, CRDA had purchased the Memphis Belle rooming house for $250,000 and later agreed to flip it to a developer for just $51,000. At the meeting, she predicted the same would happen with Albion Place. “We are buying high and selling low,” she said.

DiLorenzo then asked Doherty how CRDA picked the properties it wanted to buy.

“Ones that have the most calls for service, ones that are in the most disarray,” he responded. “There are some rooming houses in Atlantic City that are perfectly fine. We are going after the ones that are holding back redevelopment and progress in the Tourism District.”

Landgraf told The Press of Atlantic City and ProPublica that CRDA had based those conclusions on a report generated by the Atlantic City Police Department, but both he and the police department declined to provide it to the news organizations. According to records from the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections, neither property had a history of code violations. And while police records obtained through a public records request show that police had in fact responded to dozens of calls at 106 Albion Place in the past year, they rarely visited the neighboring property; 108 Albion Place had prompted nine calls in that same time period, including a request for an ambulance to treat Gilbert’s husband, who was dying of COVID-19 complications.

In an interview, Doherty downplayed any distinctions between the rooming houses. “They may not have the same calls for service. They may not have any calls for service,” Doherty said, “but they could still be a problematic property in that neighborhood.” He noted complaints from a nearby restaurant about car break-ins in the area. The restaurant owner, however, told the news organizations that he had no problems with the rooming houses and good relationships with the property managers.

Matchett points to the window of the room he rented at 108 Albion Place.

At the CRDA meeting in September 2021, another board member, Edward Gant, a former union official, also pressed Doherty on the agency’s selection process. If CRDA is making decisions based on police calls for service, he said, are the rooming houses actually vacant?

The buildings, Doherty said, “are vacant when we purchase them.”

Gant was still unconvinced. “We definitely need to take a long pause and see where we’re going on this,” he said.

Board member Brett Matik, president of her family’s beverage distribution company, agreed. “We all want blighted properties gone in this city,” she said, “but we want to see that there is a method to helping the community and not helping developers.”

Others, however, backed the program.

“Let’s get these places empty, out and done and demolished,” said Mike Beson, a business owner and board member who lives 75 miles north of Atlantic City, citing concerns about criminal activity. (Beson declined to comment when presented with the news outlets’ findings.)

Board chair Modia Butler also supported the rooming house program. “I firmly believe in the public policy goal and think the agency is doing the right thing,” said Butler, a North Jersey-based lobbyist who previously served as chair of the Newark Housing Authority. (Butler did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

He suggested that the board move forward with a vote and that members convene a subgroup to address their concerns. The three dissenters voted no. But with 12 votes in favor, the deals moved forward.

The agency would ultimately pay $780,000 for the Albion Place properties, county property records show. That was about $100,000 more than the seller’s most recent asking price and $40,000 more than CRDA’s own appraisal. In an interview, Landgraf said the differential was to compensate the owner for the value of the business. “Now that’s created a spot where there’s three contiguous properties that someone is going to redevelop,” he said.

In response to written questions, Doherty also defended the deal. “I believe it was worth paying a ‘Premium’ for these properties because they were a blighted detriment to the Tourism District and stood in the way to making improvements to this neighborhood and the city,” he said. “If we didn’t pay a premium, they would have simply gone to another rooming house landlord and nothing would have changed.”

But Young, the local housing advocate, said CRDA had other options besides closing the rooming houses down. The agency, he noted, has code enforcement powers in the Tourism District and funds police there. “You control enforcement over everything,” he said. “Why would you let it get to that?”

Likewise, Alan Mallach, a senior fellow at the Center for Community Progress, a Michigan-based nonprofit that advocates for the revitalization of vacant and abandoned properties, said there were ways to preserve affordable housing while addressing the concerns about crime. “If you want to reduce the nuisance,” said Mallach, who was an advisor to the governor’s 2018 report, “Why not buy the rooming houses and resell them to the best available nonprofit operator of rooming houses that you can find so that they would be better maintained?”

CRDA did not respond to questions about the criticisms.

In all, CRDA paid a company tied to Scanlon Sr. a total of $1,155,000 for the three rooming houses, and earlier this year its board unanimously approved selling them to Liberty Hudson, which operates 18 Airbnbs in Atlantic City, including one that was set to host MTV’s “Jersey Shore 2.0” show until the production was paused this summer. The sale price: $150,000.

Ahead of the board’s okay, CRDA leadership noted the group would not seek additional subsidies or financing from the agency beyond the “reduced” price. “We have to hold this developer to the fire,” said board member William Mullen, president of the New Jersey State Building & Construction Trades Council. “Very stringent timelines and make sure this gets done.”

Liberty Hudson partner John Errico said the firm’s sales contract with CRDA stipulates that construction must begin no later than September 2023; workers must make the prevailing wage; the firm should spend more than $1 million on construction, which it expects to easily surpass; and it cannot sell the properties before redevelopment has been completed. Hotel rates, the developer said, are expected to range between $100 and $500 a night, depending on tourist demand. “I understand the optics of it, but I don't really know what other lever there is for a government agency to pull to solve this problem,” Errico said of the sale of the rooming houses. “It’s like choosing from a bunch of really bad options.”

Offering private real estate developers a deal on property is routine for CRDA. For instance, in 2020, it paid $4.1 million to acquire the addiction treatment center and its separate residential facility in Midtown. A year later, the CRDA board approved selling the center and an adjacent vacant lot to Odin US Holdings for one dollar. The firm proposed developing 56 market-rate apartments at the site, but the sale has not yet closed. A company spokesperson said he expects that to happen this month, but he could not give specifics on a timeline.

Sciarra, the former deputy public advocate, called the rooming house deals “outrageous” and said the community, not the state agency, should be guiding CRDA’s investment decisions. “Their mission can’t be redevelopment,” he said. “It’s the most pressing needs.”

Matchett returns home from work to a studio apartment he found with the help of a nonprofit.

Harriet Newburger, the lead author of the 2009 Philadelphia Fed study, which found that CRDA had prioritized the city’s gambling industry over residents, agreed. “It just looks like the more things change, the more they stay the same in Atlantic City,” she said. “The neighborhoods shouldn’t be treated second behind the industry.”

By the time CRDA purchased 108 Albion Place, its former residents were scattered across Atlantic City. After sleeping in his car for a month, Matchett found a studio apartment in the city’s Back Maryland neighborhood with the help of a nonprofit. And Gilbert and Knight took Scanlon Sr. up on his offer to relocate to another one of his properties, a Westside rowhome that he had purchased for $12,500 at sheriff’s sale in 2018. More than a mile from the beach and boardwalk, the property borders a power generating station and is a short walk from a homeless shelter. The street is prone to flooding, the water rising high enough to cover the home’s front steps.

The two women and Knight’s teenage son share the three-bedroom home and pay $1,400 a month in rent — an increase for them compared to Albion Place, where monthly utilities were cheaper and Gilbert, as property manager, paid no rent. In recent months, though, they’ve been withholding payment because of the property’s poor condition. Knight said persistent leaks already ruined her mattress, and she’s moved her furniture away from the wall to avoid any more damage. On a visit in mid-August, The Press of Atlantic City and ProPublica observed the ceiling bulging overhead and the bathroom sink precariously attached to the wall. In the hallway, the carpet had been removed from the staircase, leaving behind staples and other metal fasteners. Both women complained about roaches and mosquitoes, which they say have multiplied because of the standing water in Knight’s ceiling.

Scanlon Jr. did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails seeking comment on Gilbert and Knight’s claims. But after the news organizations’ visit to the property, the sink was replaced and new carpeting was installed in the stairwell, Gilbert said. Then, in late August, Scanlon initiated eviction proceedings against the two women for nonpayment of rent. Knight and Gilbert, who are fighting the eviction, maintain that the conditions are still unsafe.

Knight said her other son, Johari, who is now 2 years old, was continually battling colds and getting bug bites, so she sent him to live with a family friend in early 2022. “As long as he has been at her house, he has not been sick,” Knight said. (Last week, after the news organizations sent a final request for comment to Scanlon Sr. and Scanlon Jr., Gilbert said a maintenance worker showed up to inquire about additional repairs. She said the worker mentioned the letter sent by The Press of Atlantic City and ProPublica.)

On a recent Friday afternoon, the two women sat on the porch, with makeshift pillars propping up a sagging roof, as Johari visited for the day. They thought about their old home, how their landlord made them move out and how CRDA bought the property.

“Why did they let him do it the way that he did it to all of them people?” Gilbert asked. “They let him do it. He used them. He used their name to do this.”

Nada Gilbert, right, and Knight, left, with Johari on the porch of the three-bedroom home they share, where makeshift pillars prop up a sagging roof.

Mollie Simon of ProPublica contributed research.

by Eli Hager, photography by Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica and NBC News

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The banging on Ronisha Ferguson’s apartment door in the Bronx started on a Thursday afternoon as she waited for her two sons to get home from school.

Ferguson, a nurse working 16-hour double shifts, knew instantly who she’d find in her hallway that day in February 2019.

For years, caseworkers from the Administration for Children’s Services, New York City’s child protective services bureau, had been showing up unannounced like this and inspecting her kitchen, her bathroom and her bedroom — and her children’s bodies — without a warrant.

A domestic violence survivor who previously lived in a shelter, Ferguson had never been accused of child abuse, ACS case records show. But she had faced repeated allegations of parenting problems largely stemming from her long hours at work, including that she’d provided inadequate supervision by having her 14-year-old daughter babysit the boys when they were 5 and 2, and had also allowed the kids to miss dozens of days of school.

NBC News

The social workers pounded and pounded like police, she said.

This scene plays out an average of more than 150 times a day — tens of thousands of times a year — across New York, overwhelmingly in the neighborhoods with the most Black and Hispanic residents, according to ACS data.

By law, ACS caseworkers are not allowed to enter and search a home without either permission to enter or an entry order, which is the legal equivalent of a search warrant, unless a child is in imminent danger. But many parents don’t know that they have the right to deny these government agents or don’t push back for fear of losing their children, according to parents and their advocates. And caseworkers frequently say things that are coercive and manipulative in order to get inside homes without going to a judge, according to interviews with more than three dozen former ACS workers, New York City Family Court judges, parents, children and attorneys.

A ProPublica and NBC News investigation found that the agency obtains an average of fewer than 94 entry orders a year to inspect homes, meaning it has a warrant less than 0.2% of the time.

Note: Depicted is the average number of Administration for Children’s Services cases per year from 2010 to 2020. There is at least one home search in every case, and often many more. ACS obtains court orders for entry into homes or to produce children for inspection in less than 0.2% of cases.

Across the nation, child protective services agencies investigate the home lives of roughly 3.5 million children every year, according to statistics from the federal Department of Health and Human Services. Only about 5% of them are ultimately found to have been physically or sexually abused.

With rare exceptions, all of these investigations include at least one home visit, and often multiple, according to a review of all 50 states’ child welfare statutes and agency investigative manuals.

Yet in a ProPublica and NBC News survey that drew detailed responses from 40 state child welfare agencies, all said they would only obtain a warrant or court order to search a home — or call the police for help — in rare cases when they are denied entry. None said they keep any data on how often they get an entry order.

It’s a staggering reality — likely millions of warrantless searches a year — and one that has not been reported before.

“The scale of this is beyond what anyone imagines,” said Anna Arons, a law professor who is the impact project director of New York University’s Family Defense Clinic.

“And with it,” she said, “comes a kind of mass insecurity in many neighborhoods about the next knock on the door.”

Ferguson said she came to fear that sound, knowing the humiliating drill that would follow.

Nearly every time, caseworkers would examine the contents of her refrigerator and cabinets, noting what she lacked, and scrutinize the cleanliness of her floors and how she organized her clothes, her case records show. In one report, they gave as evidence of child maltreatment that she had let her bedroom get “dusty and stuffy” and hadn’t disposed of “a large garbage bag.”

Then they would instruct her children to lift up their shirts and pull down their pants, leaving their underwear on, to look for bruises, scrapes and scratches, she said.

So Ferguson was exasperated to find ACS back at her doorstep that afternoon in 2019 — this time to investigate a tip that her then-8-year-old son was still absent from school too often and had a bruise and a cut under his eye. (He and his siblings said he got the injury roughhousing with them and their grandmother’s cat while their mom was at work, according to case records, which were partially redacted by Ferguson’s lawyer to protect other relatives’ privacy. A judge later dismissed the case.)

“I thought I was done with these people,” Ferguson said of the pounding on her door, adding: “What was the Constitution for? What was all that about?”

In New York, a sweeping state law mandates that ACS caseworkers attempt to inspect a child’s home every time they’re forwarded a tip about possible child maltreatment from the state’s central hotline, no matter how serious the allegation is or whether it has anything to do with the condition of the household.

Less than 4% of the agency’s more than 56,000 cases each year end up revealing a safety situation requiring the removal of a child from a home, according to data provided by an ACS spokesperson.

Rather than being saved from harm, most children are forced to watch as their moms and dads are “humiliated, rendered powerless and turned into second-class citizens in their own homes,” said David Shalleck-Klein, founder and executive director of the Family Justice Law Center, a newly formed civil rights organization that is considering filing a rare class-action lawsuit challenging such searches as unconstitutional.

Black and Hispanic children are disproportionately the ones going through this, accounting for at least 83 percent of children in ACS cases last year, agency data shows.

This “is one of the most important — yet unaddressed and misunderstood — civil rights issues of our time,” Shalleck-Klein said.

Administration for Children’s Services caseworkers confronted Ferguson at the front door of her apartment in the Bronx.

Jess Dannhauser, the commissioner of ACS since January, acknowledged in an interview that home visits can be nerve-wracking for families and said he has been shadowing his front-line staff looking for less intrusive ways of doing their jobs. It is “something we really need to work at,” he said.

Dannhauser said he is open to striking a balance between families’ privacy rights and his agency’s fundamental legal and moral responsibility to keep children safe.

ACS officials emphasized in additional responses to ProPublica and NBC News that the law requires them to attempt to evaluate a child’s home before going to court. The fact that they must do this is a choice that lawmakers have made, they said. The searches, which ACS calls home evaluations, can also identify families’ needs and connect them with services, including food pantries, the agency said.

Almost always, officials said, caseworkers get permission from a parent to come inside, which they said explains why they only need to get an entry order in less than 0.2% of cases. (The agency does not, however, collect data showing how often families consent or object to home entry, and officials did not respond to a ProPublica and NBC News finding that ACS has no way of tracking whether consent is freely given.)

ACS has also fought proposed legislation that would require caseworkers to give a Miranda-style warning to parents at their front door, informing them of their right to remain silent, to refuse entry and to speak to a lawyer or have one present. Versions of the bill will be reintroduced in the coming months at the City Council and the State Assembly in Albany.

Ferguson believes her constitutional rights were violated that day at her apartment, and is now suing New York City in federal court. (The city denied her claims in a court filing this summer.)

When she met the caseworkers at her door, they asked about the mark on her son’s face, records show, and she felt unjustly accused. Retreating into her apartment, she pulled up a know-your-rights website on her phone, she said.

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Even people accused of murder, she read, are protected from indiscriminate, warrantless searches by the government.

Returning to the doorway, animated by years of pent-up frustration, she stood her ground at the threshold of her home.

“Fuck you, you’re not coming in here this time,” she recalls saying.

“I wasn’t my best self,” she said.

Because Ferguson wouldn’t let the ACS workers in — or let them take her sons for further inspection after they arrived home on their school bus — the caseworkers left. But they called the New York Police Department, case records show.

And at about 4:30 a.m., according to the records, they banged on her door again.

It was pitch black outside when she was jolted awake on her fold-out bed.

“ACS!” they were shouting from the hallway now. “NYPD!”

More Power Than Police

The Fourth Amendment reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”

Although the Supreme Court has never definitively weighed in on the Bill of Rights’ applicability to child welfare investigations, many federal and state courts have found that there is no “social worker exception” to this fundamental protection of the home.

Ferguson’s sons at home in the Bronx. Searches may include intrusive inspections of children’s rooms.

Yet upon entering a household, child welfare agents do not typically articulate what specifically they are looking for, as they would have to do to get a warrant. They don’t stick to what’s in “plain view,” the way that police are mandated to when inside a home without a warrant. They may open every closet, check the label on every medicine bottle and flick every light switch and faucet on and off. Whatever they find will likely be admissible later in family court.

This is all confusing to actual police.

Shamus Smith, an NYPD officer for more than a decade who is now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that while on patrol he frequently used to get calls to assist ACS. “We didn’t necessarily understand the powers and privileges they had,” he said, expressing amazement that caseworkers could comb through whatever they wanted within a home as if they had a “blank check” instead of a warrant — and no deterrent if they overstepped. “What the hell does ACS have that we don’t?” Smith said.

Tarek Ismail, a law professor at the CUNY School of Law in New York who has defended Muslim families surveilled in national security cases as well as families in the child welfare system, said he often tells clients under investigation by the FBI not to open the door for anyone unless they have a warrant. But he would have a hard time recommending that when it comes to ACS agents, he said, because they have the power to take children without a court order.

In response to this reporting, ACS officials drew a distinction between their work and what police do, saying that the Fourth Amendment applies only to the criminal justice system and that entry orders are categorically different from search warrants.

But the New York state law governing how ACS should obtain entry orders explicitly says that the procedure “shall be the same as for a search warrant” as described under criminal law. And the federal circuit court overseeing New York City has found that an order issued by Family Court “is equivalent to a search warrant for Fourth Amendment purposes.”

Shalleck-Klein, of the Family Justice Law Center, said that “the Fourth Amendment is about the whole government, not just the police.”

The nine former ACS caseworkers who spoke with ProPublica and NBC News acknowledged that they had nearly complete access to families’ homes, saying that their supervisors never told them to advise parents they had the right not to cooperate with a search.

The Next Knock on the Door

Administration for Children’s Services caseworkers enter the homes of New York City families an average of more than 150 times a day. Our investigation found they have a warrant less than 0.2% of the time. Parents in the Bronx, Harlem and the Lower East Side shared with ProPublica and NBC News pictures of their front doors, which ACS knocked on to conduct a search.

(Pictures were shared by parents through the community organization JMac for Families.)

Watch video ➜

“Rights — no, we never did that. I didn’t even know that was a thing,” said Natasha Walden, a child protective specialist from 2019 to 2021 in Queens, adding that her goal was just to get inside and make sure the kids were safe.

To up the pressure, some caseworkers said they would use lines like “I don’t want to discuss your business out here in the hallway.” Others: “Well, I’m not going to stop coming.” “Why not, if you don’t have anything to hide?” Still other caseworkers said they framed getting a warrant to search the residence as “a warrant being put out on you,” which they admitted is misleading.

Many said they had to find ways into homes even based on anonymous or repetitive tips to the state hotline, which in some cases come from a parent’s abuser, a jilted ex or a neighbor with a grudge.

“Someone said Mickey Mouse lives at 123 Disney Lane doing something evil,” said Shytavia Cole, a child protective specialist in Staten Island from 2018 to 2021. “And I have to go in every time.”

“It’s all actually kind of immoral,” she said.

ACS responded that the majority of reports to the hotline are not anonymous and are made by mandated reporters of child abuse and neglect, including police, pediatricians and teachers. These calls are first vetted by the state to determine whether they would constitute child maltreatment if true. An ACS spokesperson added that caseworkers receive training on the U.S. Constitution, state laws and the court system and are taught that parenting is a protected constitutional right.

ACS also does home searches in ongoing cases, if a judge orders regular supervision of a family; in those cases, the agency may not need parental permission or a new court order each time.

Once inside the residence, officials said, they have an opportunity to assess and help address potential child safety concerns, including whether window guards are installed or there is drug paraphernalia left out within the reach of kids.

Critics questioned whether this type of comprehensive home inspection is a constitutional or even logical response to, for example, an allegation of a child missing school.

Many former caseworkers said they were most upset by having to routinely conduct searches of children’s bodies, down to their underwear. (More than two dozen caseworkers, parents, children and attorneys said the practice is part of every or nearly every initial home visit by the agency, regardless of whether there is any allegation of physical or sexual abuse.)

In response to this ProPublica and NBC News finding, an ACS spokesperson said the agency will send a reminder to its child protective specialists that body checks are not required as part of every visit and should be decided on a case-by-case basis with supervisory guidance. Photos should also be taken in as sensitive a manner as possible.

“For the child, it’s about bodily integrity,” said Allison Green, legal director for the National Association of Counsel for Children, a legal advocacy organization, pointing out that it is kids who sometimes experience the most invasive parts of these searches.

She added that the searches may include intrusive inspections of children’s rooms, which many see as “their castles.”

“Our Lives Were Destroyed” Ferguson is suing New York City in federal court, alleging in part that her “refusal to allow government agents to search her home” did not constitute probable cause to remove her children.

Around 4:30 that February morning, Ferguson, terrified, went to the door. She opened it a crack, revealing a hallway full of ACS agents and police officers, standing shoulder to shoulder.

In cellphone video she took of what happened next, one officer claimed that ACS now had a court order to remove her sons. She asked to see it; he did not respond. (A review of case records and court documents shows that no removal order had been issued by a judge at any point. When Ferguson stated this in her lawsuit, the city denied it.)

The video then shows another officer sticking his foot into the doorway and grabbing the phone out of her hand.

ACS and the police eventually convinced Ferguson to let them inside to take her children — by threatening her with arrest, according to video she took after she got her phone back. This scared her, she said, because she would be no help to her kids from jail.

The agency didn’t justify its actions until afterward, claiming that her refusal to cooperate suggested that the boys, who were 8 and 5, may have been in imminent danger, according to a case report. Her anger also suggested a mental health problem, ACS said, according to court documents.

Ferguson descended into a panic, missing work to go to court that morning to try to figure out where her children were being held.

Days later, when she finally got to visit her sons at a foster agency, they told her that they were being punched and shoved by their foster parent, she said. That allegation later was corroborated by ACS, according to a case report.

“Our lives were destroyed,” Ferguson said.

And she still didn’t know when she would have her children home again.

“You Have the Right to …”

In recent years, parent advocates in New York — as well as Texas and other places — have pushed to require that caseworkers read people their rights like police do.

Proponents say that borrowing the Miranda concept from the police would make it clearer that child welfare workers are playing a similar role.

The proposed practice would differ from Miranda warnings in part because child welfare cases are civil, not criminal, proceedings. Therefore, evidence obtained without properly “Mirandizing” a family would likely continue to be allowed in family court, experts said.

Still, it would at least ensure that social workers know the constitutional rules, so that they can be held liable later through lawsuits or other penalties for crossing those lines, advocates said.

They also pointed out that the right to deny entry already exists, so not verbalizing it is just a way of exploiting educational inequality and lack of access to legal counsel to get inside less-privileged households.

In a 2020 memorandum opposing the idea, the city of New York argued that a formal legal warning to parents would unnecessarily escalate cases that could otherwise be closed or addressed with services. It noted that “two-thirds of ACS investigations are unfounded, and only about 1 in 10 currently ever go to court.”

Ferguson plays with her sons at a park near their home. ACS agents and police convinced her to let them inside to take the boys after threatening her with arrest.

The memo also said the practice would potentially make the relationship between social workers and parents more adversarial and “spark unwarranted fears.”

But four recent New York City Family Court judges said in interviews that they support the movement for a Miranda-style warning, in part because ACS too expansively defines its authority to engage in searches and seizures and too rarely seeks court approval for such actions.

Ann O’Shea, a Family Court judge in Brooklyn from 2005 to 2019, said that most parents who have had an ACS caseworker show up at their door will say that it’s already an adversarial situation, with or without rights being read. “They are telling you you’re a bad parent,” she said. “You can lose your child, and that is monumental.”

In neighboring Connecticut, one of the nation’s only experiments with this kind of active statement of rights in child welfare cases has been going on for the past decade.

Michael Williams, deputy commissioner of operations for the Connecticut Department of Children and Families, said in an interview that the written reports of his staff show they are getting more information from families than they did prior to implementation of the policy. The greater transparency, he said, has brought down the anxiety of the interaction.

“We are not experiencing what New York is stating,” Williams said, adding that there has been no negative impact on child safety.

It is relatively rare for affluent families to experience any of this, according to dozens of caseworkers, judges and lawyers around the country. Such parents are more likely to have a lawyer and to immediately refuse entry, and workers are more likely to then seek a warrant or choose not to search the home, experts said.

Diana Rugh Johnson, a child welfare attorney in Georgia, said that well-off parents often hire her immediately upon finding out they are being investigated, a time when low-income parents typically go without legal counsel. She tells them to politely decline any home inspection until she can be present. “Affluent families are very used to a high level of privacy,” she said, emphasizing that this differential treatment by the system is not fair.

She added, “I’ve never had one of these result in the removal of a child.”

“You Would Think There’d Be Some Accountability”

A month after Ferguson’s children were taken from her, she finally got a ruling from a court. A judge found that the boys were not in danger with her, ordering them returned home. The decision also said she should go to therapy and anger management and make her home available to ACS for inspections going forward.

The case later was permanently dismissed, with the judge finding that Ferguson’s hostility toward letting the agency into her private life was not itself evidence of a mental health issue or of child neglect as defined under New York law, according to court documents.

Ferguson’s sons were 8 and 5 when they were separated from their mother.

“I just have protecting-my-kids syndrome,” Ferguson said, adding, “In a place like New York City, you would think there’d be some accountability.”

That’s why she brought the federal lawsuit against the city, as well as the ACS agents and NYPD officers involved in the seizure of her children, alleging in part that her “refusal to allow government agents to search her home” did not constitute probable cause to remove children from a mother’s care.

The city responded in its court filing that throughout the case, the two agencies’ employees “acted reasonably, lawfully, properly, constitutionally, without malice, and in good faith.” The individual ACS agents and police, the filing also argued, are shielded from liability under the doctrine of qualified immunity, which says that government officials cannot be held personally responsible for violations of constitutional rights that are not clearly established.

An ACS spokesperson added that the agency could not comment on an individual case, due to confidentiality laws.

An NYPD spokesperson said the department provides assistance when requested by its partner agencies, including ACS. Officers may be present as ACS performs its duties, the spokesperson said, in order to ensure the safety of all parties. The department declined to comment on pending litigation.

ProPublica and NBC News attempted to reach all 12 ACS employees listed in Ferguson’s lawsuit and left messages for most of them, but none responded. Reporters were not able to reach the four NYPD officers named in the complaint.

Ferguson said she still can’t figure out how to talk to her sons about that time when the strangers came in the middle of the night to take them away — all because she’d tried to guard them and their home. “This shouldn’t be in their memory, and it kills me that I can’t take it out,” she said.

At least her boys will always know, she said, that “when it comes to their rights, their mom doesn’t play.”

Ferguson sits with her sons at the park. A judge permanently dismissed the case that had accused her of neglecting the boys.

Help Us Investigate Termination of Parental Rights in the Child Welfare System

Reporting was contributed by Agnel Philip of ProPublica and Suzy Khimm, Mike Hixenbaugh and Hannah Rappleye of NBC News. Mariam Elba and Mollie Simon of ProPublica contributed research.

by Mick Dumke

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

The deal had been orchestrated by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, but even her allies knew the optics were bad: Land long set aside for low-income housing would be turned over to a professional soccer team owned by a billionaire. And criticism was intensifying.

Bombarded with questions during a City Council committee meeting last month, a local housing official stressed that the deal would be scrutinized by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development before it could proceed.

That assurance helped the mayor’s allies win approval in the council. Later that day, the Chicago Housing Authority sent an application asking HUD to sign off on the deal.

But if the past is any indication, the outcome of the federal review is hardly in doubt. Over the last decade, HUD has never blocked a public housing land deal in Chicago, according to records from HUD and the Chicago Housing Authority.

With HUD’s consent, the CHA has essentially become a land piggy bank for other government agencies and the private sector. Through sales, leases and swaps, the agency has turned over land for two Target stores on the North Side, a privately owned tennis complex on the South Side, and infrastructure in gentrifying neighborhoods, such as a fire house and a police station on the Near West Side.

HUD ultimately approved more than a dozen land transactions while applying little pressure on the CHA to measure the benefits for residents or produce more affordable housing. In several cases, the agency agreed to accept far less than a property’s market value.

The approvals in Chicago are part of a larger pattern. ProPublica found that HUD routinely signs off on plans to get rid of property owned by public housing authorities across the country, including in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Milwaukee.

In Chicago, the CHA justified its actions by saying the deals would generate more money for housing. Yet the projected units have been delayed repeatedly, and some didn’t materialize at all.

This wasn’t what was promised. In 2000, HUD officials helped the CHA launch its Plan for Transformation, a citywide effort to dismantle and redevelop public housing sites. As the CHA leveled most of its apartment buildings, thousands of families had to find new places to live. Within a few years, the agency was sitting on blocks of open land. Officials committed to building new homes for families with a range of income levels.

Two decades later, some of the former public housing sites have been rebuilt and are thriving, but many parcels remain empty, and the agency still needs to build hundreds of units of housing to comply with court agreements.

The Near West Side deal that Lightfoot is pushing would let the Chicago Fire build a new practice facility on CHA-owned land that was long reserved for new housing. The team is owned by billionaire Joe Mansueto, a Lightfoot ally. Questions about the deal grew after ProPublica and WTTW-TV published a story about it in June.

In August, housing advocates sent a letter to HUD officials asking them to oppose the Fire agreement. The CHA’s failure to build promised new homes “must not serve as a basis to jettison an important supply of coveted, available public housing land in a gentrifying community,” they wrote.

These types of deals show how the CHA has drifted away from its mission to provide affordable housing, said Don Washington, one of the authors of the letter to HUD. Washington is executive director of the Chicago Housing Initiative, a coalition of community organizations.

“What it’s doing is getting the CHA and HUD out of the business of creating brick-and-mortar housing for low-income, mostly Black and brown children and families,” he said. “They’re instead building new facilities for new people.”

CHA officials say they want to develop their land with more than housing. “CHA’s investments in communities go beyond replacing the failed public housing model of the past,” an agency spokesperson wrote in a statement.

Agency officials say they have used a formal procurement process to select developers for many of their sites. But in other instances, they have accepted pitches from businesses, nonprofit organizations and other government entities on a case-by-case basis, without soliciting competitive bids.

CHA officials say the land deals fit into the agency’s strategy of “mixed-income, mixed-use” development that leads to “economic independence,” and some residents and community leaders have welcomed that approach.

“Housing is our middle name,” Ann McKenzie, the CHA’s chief development officer, said at a recent city planning meeting. But, she added, “we can use some of this space for other things people want and need in their lives.” That could include schools, parks, jobs, health care access and grocery stores, McKenzie and other CHA leaders say.

For their part, HUD officials say they have little control over the CHA’s land management strategies and are limited to reviewing proposals one at a time.

Those reviews are meant to ensure that housing authorities follow a “fair and open process” while “residents’ voices are heard,” according to a statement from HUD. It added that land deals can generate money for housing and other community needs.

“HUD takes its obligation to enforce statutory requirements very seriously and will continue to do so,” Diane M. Shelley, the department’s Midwest regional administrator, wrote in a statement. She added that increasing the supply of affordable housing is “a high priority for the Biden-Harris administration.”

HUD’s Rubber Stamp Looking north from where the Ickes Homes once stood, the view includes another public housing development, skyscrapers downtown and new hotels in the growing South Loop neighborhood. (Jamie Davis for ProPublica)

By law, local housing authorities are not allowed to dispose of public housing property unless low-income residents will benefit or the property is no longer needed.

No public housing land deals advance without HUD’s support. Its Special Applications Center is responsible for making sure that the property transactions comply with the law, and that they have been discussed with residents and have support from local government leaders.

To examine the volume and outcomes of these applications, ProPublica submitted open records requests to HUD, the CHA and housing authorities in six other cities. Each agency tracks land dispositions differently, and in many cases the CHA and HUD didn’t provide the same documents for the same transactions, making it challenging to get precise counts of such deals. But taken together, the records offer a revealing portrait of how the process works.

Records show that since 2011, HUD greenlit every property disposition application — more than 100 — from housing authorities in Chicago; Atlanta; Baltimore; Memphis, Tennessee; Milwaukee; Philadelphia; and Pittsburgh, all of which have received large revitalization grants from the agency.

HUD authorized plans to raze old apartment buildings, transfer land for new housing and redevelopment projects, and sell properties to private investors. But only the CHA appears to have received approval for so many applications that didn’t involve building new housing, according to the records.

CHA officials said that’s because the agency has a larger footprint than the other housing authorities.

A land deal on Chicago’s Near West Side illustrates HUD’s tendency to go along with CHA plans. In 2019, HUD allowed the CHA to give an acre of land in the ABLA Homes area to a local nonprofit for much less than its market value. Though an appraisal concluded that the parcel was worth $2.7 million, the CHA agreed to lease it to SOS Children’s Villages Illinois for $1 a year over 99 years so the nonprofit could build a community center. In return, SOS promised to provide social services to CHA families.

Some residents opposed the land transfer because there was an existing community center just two blocks away. In addition, they pointed out, the CHA had only constructed a fraction of the housing units promised for the redevelopment of ABLA, where 3,600 families lived before much of the complex was razed. But HUD signed off on the deal, agreeing with the CHA that it was “in the best interest of the public housing residents.”

The SOS community center is two blocks from the 23-acre site the CHA wants to lease to the Chicago Fire soccer team so it can build a new training facility.

Records show that CHA officials encountered HUD speed bumps just twice, and both ended up being temporary. On one occasion, HUD held up the sale of a vacant two-unit building to a county agency that planned to have it rehabbed. HUD determined some paperwork was missing from the CHA’s application, but once that was provided, HUD backed the sale.

The other delay was prompted by deeper concerns. In 2013, the administration of then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel engineered a land swap between the CHA and the city. The CHA gave up a vacant block that was formerly part of the Ickes Homes, a Near South Side development where 1,000 families lived before the apartment buildings were demolished in the Plan for Transformation. The city used that Ickes block to build a running track and turf field for a public, selective-enrollment high school a mile and a half away.

In return, the CHA received almost 10 acres on the Near North Side, across the street from the site of the CHA’s former Cabrini-Green complex. The CHA made plans to use that land for housing and retail as part of its Cabrini redevelopment.

HUD approved the land swap. But the process hit a snag when the CHA sought permission to transfer almost half of the Near North Side property — including an existing baseball diamond — to the Chicago Park District.

Attorneys for the Cabrini-Green Local Advisory Council, the development’s elected residents’ group, opposed the move. They argued that the CHA should not get rid of land at Cabrini until the agency had delivered the 1,800 affordable housing units it had agreed to as part of a 2015 federal consent decree, which resulted from litigation to force the CHA to fulfill its promises. Then, as now, more than 30,000 people were waiting for housing assistance from the CHA.

“Displaced CHA residents and applicants on CHA’s waitlist have been waiting too many years for replacement housing in the revitalized Cabrini Green neighborhood, and disposing of four acres of valuable land before CHA can show its ability to replace the minimum 1,800 subsidized units without this land is unjustifiable,” wrote Richard Wheelock of the Legal Assistance Foundation, now known as Legal Aid Chicago, and Jeff Leslie from the University of Chicago Law School.

That’s when HUD took the unusual step of pausing the CHA’s land transfer. The federal agency cited the attorneys’ letter and questioned the CHA’s rationale for giving the land to the Park District for free when it was appraised at more than $17 million. HUD determined the CHA’s application for approval was “substantially incomplete.”

In the following months, the CHA submitted new documents stating that Cabrini residents wanted more park space. Agency officials noted that they had received twice as much land as they had given up in the original swap, arguing that they would still have plenty of property left for the housing they were obligated to build at Cabrini.

That was good enough for HUD, which approved the deal.

The Near North Side property now includes a park; when a ProPublica reporter visited on multiple occasions this summer and fall, it was largely used by white residents.

The parcel planned for Cabrini housing remains vacant and enclosed by fencing.

New Priorities Audrey Johnson points toward the south end of the Ickes Homes site where she grew up. After years of delays, the CHA is almost ready to open two new apartment buildings there. (Jamie Davis for ProPublica)

Over the last decade, the CHA has made no secret that it is open to land deals. The 2008 housing market collapse left it years behind in its commitments to build new homes, and in 2013 agency leaders appointed by Emanuel released a strategy statement, “Plan Forward.”

Its new goals included using vacant land for “long-term public and private investment” and “creative, community-building purposes” such as “performance or sports spaces.” HUD endorsed the plan.

CHA officials applied this new philosophy when leaders of XS Tennis, a nonprofit, approached the agency about acquiring 13.5 acres for a new athletic complex. The property, part of the former Robert Taylor Homes site on the South Side, was estimated to be worth $4 million, but the CHA agreed to sell it for half that when XS promised to provide free tennis lessons and tutoring to low-income youth.

HUD accepted the CHA’s justification for the XS Tennis deal in a 2015 letter, agreeing it was “in the best interest of the public housing residents.”

In a statement to ProPublica, the CHA said XS had followed through on the opportunities it had pledged to deliver, providing residents with access to the tennis center, academic tutoring and jobs.

The CHA plans to replace the Taylor homes with a new development, Legends South, that includes 2,400 total units, some integrated into the surrounding neighborhood. So far the agency has finished fewer than 500.

Despite its struggles to rebuild former public housing sites, CHA officials say they now serve more households than ever, largely by issuing 45,000 vouchers that can be used to subsidize rent in the private market.

But housing advocates say too many families still need help finding decent places to live amid a housing shortage and a spike in homelessness. More than 30,000 people are on the CHA’s waiting lists for public housing and for vouchers.

“The goals of the CHA need to return to providing public and affordable housing,” said Emily Coffey, senior counsel for the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.

“And HUD has an obligation to make sure that each and every disposition complies with civil rights laws and holds CHA to its commitment to replace lost public housing units.”

Another Disputed Deal Siblings Audrey and Andre Johnson stand together on a pathway that used to run between apartment buildings at the Ickes Homes complex. They moved into the development with their parents in 1970. (Jamie Davis for ProPublica)

In addition to the Chicago Fire agreement, it’s likely that the CHA will soon ask HUD to sign off on another hotly debated land deal that opponents believe will fuel more gentrification and displacement.

At a board meeting in July, CHA officials explained that the Chicago Public Schools had approached them about acquiring 1.7 acres of undeveloped property at the Ickes site on the near South Side. The school district wants to build a new high school there to serve the booming South Loop and Chinatown neighborhoods, as well as some South Side CHA developments.

In return for its property, the CHA would get a parcel a block away that McKenzie, the agency’s chief development officer, described as “pretty expensive.”

Tracey Scott, the CHA’s chief executive officer, argued that the agency would give up little for such a payoff. She acknowledged that the CHA had long planned to put new housing on its vacant Ickes land, but those plans would be changed. As a result of the land swap, the CHA would “increase the density” of the new housing and fit it into a smaller space near the school, Scott said.

“We felt this opportunity was available that would benefit the residents,” Scott said.

McKenzie also noted that two new apartment buildings, including 68 units reserved for public housing residents, are almost ready to open at Ickes. The agency still has to build additional units for the Ickes site, including another 176 for CHA families.

The school plan won the backing of the local alderman and some parents. But many CHA residents and Black community leaders have blasted it. The school district should invest in existing high schools, they say, and the CHA should build the replacement homes it committed to after forcing out hundreds of families who once lived at Ickes.

Audrey Johnson, whose family has deep roots at Ickes, has watched those promises get broken as the land grows more valuable.

Her grandfather and his 10 children were among the first residents at Ickes in 1955, and Johnson’s family — her parents and three brothers — moved there in 1970, when she was 1. Her mother worked for a railroad and then the post office; her dad was a janitor at Ickes for 30 years. The family lived at the south end of Ickes, land where the new school would be built.

While she now lives several miles away, Johnson has worked for 20 years as a lunchroom supervisor and student aide at the National Teachers Academy, a public elementary school that was built on the Ickes site even before the public housing buildings were torn down. In recent years, two of her adult children also started working at the school.

“I’ve been here all my life,” she said.

Johnson said she’s all in favor of quality schools — that’s why she works in one. But she said Black residents are tired of seeing public facilities in their communities closed or destroyed, then replaced with new infrastructure when the neighborhoods begin to gentrify.

“I think they’re trying to push us out,” Johnson said. “They’re trying to push the Black and the brown to the suburbs. And eventually they will if we allow them to.”

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by Karim Doumar and Cynthia Gordy Giwa

Sign up for ProPublica’s User’s Guide to Democracy, a series of personalized emails that help you understand the upcoming election, from who’s on your ballot to how to cast your vote.

Here’s a refresher how the lawmakers we elect are supposed to make laws.

1. A senator or representative introduces a bill.
2. The bill goes to a committee for hearings and approval.
3. It is debated and voted on from the House and Senate floors.
4. Often, a compromise version is worked out.
5. The resulting bill is voted on.
6. If it passes and the president signs it, it becomes a law.

Ta-da!

But most of the time — as Derek Willis, former ProPublica reporter and current professor at University of Maryland’s journalism school (who’s been helping on this project), has taught me — that’s not how it works at all.

Here’s a more realistic look at lawmaking:

Congress does pass a lot of bills through the legislative process. But these are mostly noncontroversial bills that do things like bestow honors, rename a post office or erect statues. There’s no debate and no deliberative, committee-driven process required.

When it comes to the legislation you do hear about — big, politically contentious things like the Inflation Reduction Act or the American Rescue Plan, both of which passed, or the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which did not — the process doesn’t always work as planned.

OK, How Does Congress Really Work?

One reason for the gridlock is that, these days, bills addressing big, national issues are written under the supervision of the Senate majority leader and the House speaker. (Currently, that’s Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, respectively.) They often receive guidance from only a small group of other congressional power brokers rather than the rank-and-file lawmakers who used to contribute to the process by working on legislation in committees.

For example: The recent Inflation Reduction Act was mostly hammered out in secret by Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin. After it became public, lawmakers made just a couple of changes to get other senators on board, and it passed.

This has been slowly changing since the mid-2000s and has intensified during the past decade, according to a 2018 deep dive from ProPublica and The Washington Post. But the current Congress has been one of the most productive in years.

How Do I Know if My Representative Is Doing Their Job?

To evaluate your lawmakers in this new reality, you can look at what they are doing and which issues they’re spending their time on, either through lawmaking (on those topics that don’t necessarily grab headlines) or in public position statements.

1: Lawmaking: Is Your Rep Getting Things Done?

One of the ways you can find out what representatives are up to is by checking out what bills they have sponsored. This is all public information, and ProPublica’s Represent app can help you navigate to the parts that matter to you.

To understand your representative through their bills, you want to look for three things:

1. What the bill is about.
2. How far it got.
3. Who else is supporting the bill.

What the bill is about: Think about the things that matter to you and your community, and ask yourself:

• Is your representative sponsoring bills on those topics?
• If your lawmaker seems to be ignoring your issues, why is that?

How far it got: Every bill that gets introduced is automatically referred to a committee. Many measures never get past this stage and were never intended to — because they are mostly meant to let lawmakers go to town halls and say, “I introduced an important bill.” But this type of posturing is not enough for those of us who want to see things get done. That’s why our site lets you focus on recent bills that made it beyond the introduction stage.

Who else is supporting the bill: Pay attention to who co-sponsored the bill — does it have bipartisan support? Maybe you want a lawmaker who’s willing to compromise, or maybe you see compromise as giving in, but either way, bipartisan support can mean that your representative has done some work to shop the bill around and help get it passed.

2: What They Say: Is Your Rep Speaking Out on Issues You Care About?

Legislation isn’t the only way to compare representatives' concerns against your own. There’s also the stuff they talk about. On Represent, you can see what your representative focuses on in their press releases, as well as what topics they discuss more than other members of Congress.

Since your representative is the person in the federal government who’s closest to you, the more specific issues they’re discussing should, ideally, sound familiar to you. Do they?

Now that you’re familiar with the basics of using ProPublica’s Represent database, take some time to look up the legislative work of your lawmakers in the Senate, too. What does it tell you about what they’re doing in your name?

by Mike Hixenbaugh and Suzy Khimm, NBC News, and Agnel Philip, ProPublica, photography by Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica and NBC News

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More than a decade before the Penn State University child sex abuse scandal broke, an assistant football coach told his supervisors that he had seen Jerry Sandusky molesting a young boy in the shower. When this was revealed during Sandusky’s criminal trial in 2012, it prompted public outcry: Why hadn’t anyone reported the abuse sooner?

In response, Pennsylvania lawmakers enacted sweeping reforms to prevent anything like it from ever happening again.

Most notably, they expanded the list of professionals required to report it when they suspect a child might be in danger, broadened the definition for what constitutes abuse and increased the criminal penalties for those who fail to report.

“Today, Pennsylvania says ‘No more’ to child abuse,” then-Gov. Tom Corbett declared as he signed the legislation into law in 2014.

A flood of unfounded reports followed, overwhelming state and local child protection agencies. The vast expansion of the child protection dragnet ensnared tens of thousands of innocent parents, disproportionately affecting families of color living in poverty. While the unintended and costly consequences are clear, there’s no proof that the reforms have prevented the most serious abuse cases, an NBC News and ProPublica investigation found.

Instead, data and child welfare experts suggest the changes may have done the opposite.

The number of Pennsylvania children found to have been abused so severely that they died or were nearly killed has gone up almost every year since — from 96 in 2014 to 194 in 2021, according to state data. State child welfare officials say more vigilance in documenting severe cases of abuse likely contributed to the increase. But child safety advocates and researchers raised concerns that the surge of unfounded reports has overburdened the system, making it harder to identify and protect children who are truly in danger.

In the five years after the reforms took effect, the state’s child abuse hotline was inundated with more than 1 million reports of child maltreatment, state data shows. More than 800,000 of these calls were related not to abuse or serious neglect, but to lower-level neglect allegations often stemming from poverty, most of which were later dismissed as invalid by caseworkers.

The number of children reported as possible victims of abuse or serious neglect increased by 72% compared to the five years prior, triggering Child Protective Services investigations into the well-being of nearly 200,000 children from 2015 to 2019, according to a ProPublica and NBC News analysis of federal Department of Health and Human Services data. From this pool of reports, child welfare workers identified 6,000 more children who might have been harmed than in the five previous years. But for the vast majority of the 200,000 alleged victims — roughly 9 in 10 — county agencies dismissed the allegations as unfounded after inspecting families’ homes and subjecting parents and children to questioning.

The expanded reporting requirements were even less effective at detecting additional cases of sexual abuse. Some 42,000 children were investigated as possible sex abuse victims from 2015 to 2019 — an increase of 42% from the five years prior — but there was no increase in the number of substantiated allegations, the analysis of federal data showed. In other words, reforms enacted in response to a major sex abuse scandal led to thousands more investigations, but no increase in the number of children identified as likely victims.

More Families Were Investigated for Sexual Abuse After Pennsylvania Expanded Mandatory Reporting Policies, but the Investigations Didn't Uncover More Victims Source: National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System Child Files 2010-2020. (Lucas Waldron, ProPublica)

Child welfare experts say these findings cast doubt on the effectiveness of the primary tool that states rely on to protect children: mandatory child abuse reporting. These policies, the bedrock of America’s child welfare system, were first implemented more than half a century ago in response to growing national awareness of child maltreatment. The thinking was simple: By making it a crime for certain professionals to withhold information about suspected abuse, the government could prevent vulnerable children from falling through the cracks.

Over the past decade, at least 36 states have enacted laws to expand the list of professionals required by law to report suspicions of child abuse or imposed new reporting requirements and penalties for failing to report, according to data compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures, a group representing state governments.

Some legal experts and child welfare reform activists argue these laws have created a vast family surveillance apparatus, turning educators, health care workers, therapists and social services providers into the eyes and ears of a system that has the power to take children from their parents.

“I don't think we have evidence that mandated reporting makes children safer,” said Kathleen Creamer, an attorney with Community Legal Services, a Philadelphia nonprofit that provides free representation to parents accused of abuse and neglect. “I actually think we have strong evidence that it puts child safety at risk because it makes parents afraid to seek help, and because it floods hotlines with frivolous calls, making it harder for caseworkers to identify families who really do need services.”

In a yearlong investigation, ProPublica and NBC News are examining the extraordinary reach of America’s child welfare system and its disproportionate impact on the lives of low-income families of color. The stream of reports generated by mandatory reporting is so vast, and so unevenly applied, public health and social work researchers estimate that more than half of all Black children nationally will have been the subject of a child protective services investigation by the time they turn 18 — nearly double the rate of white children.

After a hotline report comes in, it’s the job of child welfare investigators to determine whether a child is truly in danger. These caseworkers aren’t held to the same legal or training standards as law enforcement, but they can wield significant power, ProPublica and NBC News found, sometimes pressuring their way into homes without court orders to comb through closets and pantries, looking for signs of what’s lacking.

Under this system, child welfare agencies investigate the families of 3.5 million children each year and take about 250,000 kids into protective custody, according to federal data. Fewer than 1 in 5 of these family separations are related to allegations of physical or sexual abuse, the original impetus behind mandatory reporting. Instead, the vast majority of removals are based on reports of child neglect, a broad range of allegations often tied to inadequate housing or a parent’s drug addiction.

In response, a growing movement of family lawyers, researchers and child welfare reform advocates have called for a radical change in the approach to child protection in America, starting with the abolition of mandatory reporting. This idea has grown in popularity among both progressive activists and conservatives who oppose what they call excessive government intrusion in the lives of families. Other critics support less dramatic reforms, such as limiting which professionals are required to report and providing better training for mandated reporters.

A playground in Philadelphia, where nearly a quarter of residents live in poverty. The deluge of new reports stemming from the state’s child welfare reform disproportionately involved Black families in the city and led to a sharp increase in the number of children being taken from their parents.

The fallout from Pennsylvania’s expansion of mandatory reporting has become something of a cautionary tale among those calling for a system overhaul. Even some proponents of the changes have begun to question their impact.

State Rep. Todd Stephens, a Republican who helped spearhead the post-Sandusky reforms, said the impact of the changes warranted closer examination. In response to NBC News and ProPublica’s findings, he said he would lead a legislative effort to take a “deep dive in the data” to ensure the laws are protecting children as intended.

But Stephens said he believes the legislation is working, citing the massive increase in hotline reports and the 6,000 additional children with substantiated findings of abuse or serious neglect over five years.

“The goal was, if people thought children were in trouble or in danger, we wanted the cavalry to come running,” Stephens said. “That’s 6,000 kids who are getting help who might not have otherwise.”

Child welfare experts, however, cautioned against drawing conclusions based on the increase in substantiated abuse cases because those are subjective determinations made by caseworkers that children were more likely than not to be at risk of being abused and do not indicate whether the findings were ultimately dismissed by a judge.

Dr. Rachel Berger, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh who served on a task force that paved the way for the 2014 reforms, said the state has not produced evidence to show the changes have made children safer.

In 2020, while testifying before the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Berger warned lawmakers that the reforms “may have inadvertently made children less safe” by straining the system and siphoning resources away from genuine cases of abuse.

“We are continuing to tell mandated reporters, ‘Report, report, report,’ and nobody can handle it,” Berger said in an interview.

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Jon Rubin, deputy secretary at the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services’ Office of Children, Youth and Families, which oversees the state’s ChildLine call center, said it’s “really hard to evaluate” whether the 2014 reforms succeeded in making children safer overall. Rubin said he’s aware of the concern that the changes overwhelmed the system and may have contributed to the increase in child abuse deaths. But he cautioned against drawing conclusions without considering other factors, such as the strain on the system caused by the fentanyl epidemic beginning in 2017.

Rubin said his agency is studying ways to reduce the number of hotline reports related to poverty and housing issues, in part by encouraging mandatory reporters to instead connect families directly with resources. The state has also made it a priority to keep struggling families together by providing access to services such as mental health counseling and parental support groups, Rubin said. He worries about the potential impact of more dramatic changes.

“How many children’s lives are we willing to risk to, as you said, abolish the system, to reduce the overreporting risk?” Rubin said. Would preventing unnecessary reports, he asked, be worth “one more child hurt or killed, five more children hurt or killed, 100 more children hurt or killed?”

But Richard Wexler, the executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, a Virginia-based advocacy group, said that this logic ignores the harm that comes with unnecessary government intrusion in the lives of innocent families. Simply having an investigation opened can be traumatic, experts say, and numerous studies show that separating young children from their parents leads to increased risk of depression, developmental delays, attachment issues and post-traumatic stress disorder.

It isn’t necessary to threaten educators, social workers, doctors and other professionals with criminal charges in order to protect children, Wexler argued.

“Abolishing mandatory reporting does not mean abolishing reporting,” he said. “Anybody can still call ChildLine. What it does, however, is put the decision back in the hands of professionals to exercise their judgment concerning when to pick up the phone.”

The Cost of Seeking Help

Lee on her porch in Philadelphia. Numerous studies show separating young children from their parents leads to increased risk of depression, attachment issues and post-traumatic stress disorder.

April Lee, a Black mother of three in Philadelphia, said she has seen and experienced firsthand the way mandatory reporting and the prospect of child removals create a culture of fear in low-income communities.

In Philadelphia, the state’s most populous city, Black children were the focus of about 66% of reports to the city’s Department of Human Services, its child welfare agency, even though they make up about 42% of the child population, according to a 2020 report commissioned by the department.

Over time, Lee said, moms in neighborhoods like hers get used to having child welfare agents show up on their steps.

“It’s a shame,” she said. “You get to the point where it’s almost normalized that you’re going to have that knock on your door.”

Lee estimates that she’s personally had about 20 such reports filed against her in the two decades since she gave birth to her first child at the age of 15. In most instances, she said, the caseworkers didn’t leave her with paperwork, but she said the accusations ranged from inadequate housing to concerns over her son’s scraped knee after a tumble on the front porch.

The agency never discloses who files the reports, but Lee believes it was a call from a mandatory reporter that triggered the investigation that resulted in her children being taken away. In 2013, a year after the birth of her third child, Lee said, she was drugged at a bar and raped. In her struggle to cope with the trauma, she said, she confided in a doctor.

“I was honest,” Lee said. “Like ‘I'm fucking struggling. I’m struggling emotionally.’”

She suspects someone at the clinic where she sought mental health care made the hotline call, most likely, she said, believing that the city’s child welfare agency would be able to help.

The agency opened an investigation and determined that Lee — who at one point had left her three children with a friend for several days — was not adequately caring for her children. The agency took them into protective custody, according to court records reviewed by NBC News and ProPublica. Afterward, Lee said, she spiraled into drug addiction and homelessness.

Lee holds a journal she wrote in during the time she was separated from her kids.

At her lowest point, Lee slept on a piece of cardboard in the Kensington neighborhood, the epicenter of Philadelphia’s opioid crisis. It took two years to get clean, she said, and another three before she regained custody of all of her children.

Lee said people like to tell her she’s proof that the system works, but she disagrees.

“My children still have deficits to this day due to that separation,” she said. “I still have deficits to this day due to that separation. I still hold my breath at certain door knocks. That separation anxiety is still alive and well in my family.”

Now Lee works as a client liaison at Community Legal Services, guiding parents through the system. The job is funded by a grant from the city agency that took her children. Virtually all of the mothers she works with have one thing in common, she said: They’re struggling to make ends meet.

“We see that in a lot of our cases,” Lee said. “You have someone that went to their doctor to say, ‘Hey, I relapsed.’ That's a call to the ChildLine. Or you have a family that might go into a resource center saying, ‘Hey, we’re homeless.’ That’s a call to the ChildLine. You have children that show up to school without proper clothing. That’s a call to the ChildLine.”

But mandatory reporting, and the fear that it provokes, makes it harder for them to get the help they need.

“The solution to poverty,” Lee said, “should not be the removal of your children.”

Family photographs hang on the wall at Lee’s home. Policies Driven by Outrage

In 1962, a pediatrician named C. Henry Kempe published a seminal paper identifying a new medical condition that he called “the battered-child syndrome.” Drawing on a survey of hospital reports nationwide and a review of medical records, Kempe warned that physical abuse had become a “significant cause of childhood disability and death” in America and that this violence often went unreported.

The paper led to widespread media attention and calls to address what some experts began calling the nation’s hidden child abuse epidemic. In the rush to take action, one solution emerged above all else: mandatory reporting.

Within four years of Kempe’s paper, every state had passed some form of mandatory child abuse reporting. In 1974, despite a lack of research into the effects of these new policies, the approach was codified into federal law when Congress enacted the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which requires states to have mandatory reporting provisions in order to receive federal grants for preventing child abuse.

It became conventional wisdom among child welfare policymakers that more reporting and investigations would make children safer. States gradually expanded reporting requirements in the decades that followed, adding ever more professionals — including animal control officers, computer technicians and dentists — to the list. They also expanded the definition of child maltreatment to include emotional abuse and neglect.

But critics say these policy decisions too often have been guided by public outrage and politics, not by data and research.

“Reporting has been our one response to concerns about child abuse,” said Dr. Mical Raz, a physician and professor of history at the University of Rochester who has studied the impact of mandatory child abuse reporting. “Now we have quite a bit of data that shows that more reporting doesn’t result in better identification of children at risk and is not associated with better outcomes for children, and in some cases may cause harm to families and communities.”

The Sandusky scandal, Raz said, demonstrates how a high-profile atrocity and public outcry can drive policy decisions.

The longtime Penn State assistant football coach was convicted in 2012 on 45 counts of child sexual abuse tied to the repeated rape and molestation of boys over a 15-year period. An investigation commissioned by the Penn State Board of Trustees found that several university officials, including legendary Nittany Lions football coach Joe Paterno, had known about allegations of sex abuse against Sandusky as early as 1998, but had shown a “total and consistent disregard” for “the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims.”

In response, Pennsylvania passed a raft of reforms. It clarified and expanded the definition of abuse and added tens of thousands of additional people to the state’s roster of mandated reporters — which now includes virtually any adult who works or volunteers with children. It also increased the criminal consequences for failing to report child abuse, with penalties ranging from a misdemeanor to a second-degree felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Although such prosecutions are rare, child welfare officials said the threat is effective in driving more professionals to report.

But the state failed to include additional funding to handle the anticipated increase in hotline calls and investigations, despite warnings from county officials that the reforms “were going to put a massive strain on their workers and would require additional resources,” according to a 2017 report from the state auditor general.

Those warnings proved prescient. In early 2015, after the changes went into effect and thousands of additional reports flooded Pennsylvania’s child abuse hotline, state officials estimated 4 in 10 callers were placed on hold for so long that they hung up before getting a caseworker on the line.

Some ChildLine workers reported an uptick in calls from mandated reporters who openly acknowledged they did not really believe that a child was in danger. Haven Evans, now the director of programs at Pennsylvania Family Support Alliance, which trains mandatory reporters across the state, was working at the state’s hotline center that year.

“There were a lot of mandatory reporters who would even admit on the phone call that they were making this report because they were concerned with the changes in the law and the penalties being increased,” Evans said. “They just wanted to, for lack of a better word, cover their butt.”

In the months and years that followed, the state added funding and workers and upgraded call center technology to keep up with the deluge. But taking a report is just the first step of the process — what some refer to as the child welfare system’s “front door” — and not enough attention has been paid to studying whether the system as a whole leads to better outcomes, said Cathleen Palm, founder of the Center for Children’s Justice, a nonprofit in Bernville, Pennsylvania, that advocates for government interventions to protect children.

Philadelphia rowhouses. Pennsylvania’s Office of Children, Youth and Families, which oversees the state’s ChildLine call center, has said the agency is studying ways to reduce hotline reports related to poverty and housing issues.

In 2018, Palm came out against proposed legislation to further expand mandatory reporting that had been introduced in the wake of the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal and grand jury investigation. Even though Palm is herself a survivor of child sexual abuse, her calls for a formal study before passing more reforms made her a target of attacks, she said.

“I literally got called by a senior official at the attorney general’s office, who called me screaming at me, equating me to a friend of the pedophile,” Palm said. “I was floored. Do you have any sense of who you’re talking to?”

The following year, state lawmakers acted anyway, passing a law that expanded when failure to report is a felony.

The same dynamic has played out across the country: High-profile media coverage of child abuse deaths and child sexual abuse have created overwhelming political pressure to ramp up mandatory reporting, in red and blue states alike.

Eighteen states have gone so far as to implement universal child abuse reporting requirements, deputizing every adult in the state as a mandatory reporter. But a 2017 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that universal reporting requirements led to more unfounded reports while failing to detect additional confirmed cases of child maltreatment.

Kelley Fong, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, has done extensive research into the impacts of mandatory reporting policies. When Fong interviewed dozens of impoverished mothers in Rhode Island and later Connecticut, they described how mandated reporters are “omnipresent” and how the fear of a call to Child Protective Services leads some to avoid seeking public assistance.

But when she spoke to professionals who had filed reports against parents, Fong found a disconnect.

“Almost to a person, every single mandated reporter said, ‘I reported because I wanted to help the family,’” Fong said. “For the most part, these mandated reporters are in their jobs because they want to help people, they want to improve conditions for children and families. And so here is this agency that offers them this possibility of getting help to parents and children.”

Fong compared this approach to sending armed police officers to assist people struggling with homelessness, mental illness and addiction — a practice that’s drawn increased scrutiny since 2020’s nationwide demonstrations for racial justice and police reform. But while there’s growing awareness of the consequences of what activists view as the overpolicing of Black communities, Fong said fewer people have applied that same critical lens to child welfare.

That’s starting to change.

In 2019, in response to concerns that Massachusetts wasn’t doing enough to protect children, the state legislature voted to create a special commission to study how best to expand mandatory reporting requirements. For two years, the commission was progressing toward that goal — until they agreed to hear public comments on their plans.

During four hours of virtual testimony in April 2021, the commission heard from dozens of parents, social workers, legal experts and reform activists, most of whom expressed deep concerns about the potential harms of expanded reporting requirements. Raz was among those who testified, citing as a warning the dysfunction that followed the Pennsylvania reforms.

Afterward, members of the commission said they were “shocked” and “taken aback” to learn about potential problems associated with expanding the child welfare system. As a result, when the commission delivered its final report to lawmakers in June 2021, it made no formal policy recommendations.

Instead, it called for further study of the unintended impacts of mandatory reporting.

The Strain on Philadelphia’s System

Philadelphia Family Court in downtown Philadelphia. The new laws led to a surge in the number of parents brought before judges on allegations of child neglect.

Few places were harder hit by Pennsylvania’s surge of new child abuse reports after 2015 than Philadelphia.

Kimberly Ali, commissioner of the Philadelphia Department of Human Services, the city’s child welfare agency, acknowledged in an interview with NBC News that the change in the state’s mandatory reporting policies put a strain on Philadelphia’s system. She said the local hotline managed by her department “imploded” after the Sandusky reforms. It took the agency years to recover.

“That was a difficult time at the Department of Human Services, just trying to manage the number of calls and the number of investigations,” Ali said.

In a city where nearly a quarter of residents live in poverty, the deluge of new reports disproportionately involved Black families and led to a sharp increase in the number of Philadelphia children being taken from their parents. In 2017, the city’s child welfare agency removed the most children per capita among the 10 largest cities in the U.S. — at three times the rate of New York and four times that of Chicago, according to data compiled by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.

Five of those children belonged to Lisa Mothee.

On Aug. 21, 2017, a mandatory reporter employed by the Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia called in a hotline report flagging that Mothee’s newborn baby had tested positive for opioids. The hospital later reported that Mothee had also failed to provide her baby with proper medical care, because she declined vaccinations and other medical screenings typically provided to newborns, according to court records.

At a court hearing a month later, Mothee, who is Black, told a judge that she had taken a Percocet to cope with pain late in her pregnancy. She explained that she’d stopped consenting to vaccines after one of her children had an adverse reaction several years earlier, which she believed was her right as a parent. After a lawyer for the city’s child welfare agency acknowledged in court that they didn’t have reason to believe Mothee’s children were in danger, she figured the case would be dismissed.

Instead, the judge ordered Mothee and the father of four of her children to be handcuffed and held in court for several hours while child protection agents picked up all five of her kids from school and a babysitter.

“What? No!” Mothee called out, according to a court transcript. “You can’t take my kids! You can’t take my kids!”

Eight months would pass before a different judge ordered her children to be returned. Years later, Mothee said she’s still struggling with the trauma of the ordeal. “It’s like a death,” she said. “You never get over that feeling.”

Mothee’s case was part of a statewide trend post-Sandusky.

The number of Pennsylvania children reported as possible victims of serious medical neglect — a blanket term describing a parent’s failure to provide adequate medical care — nearly quadrupled after the reforms went into effect in 2015, triggering Child Protective Services investigations into the well-being of about 9,600 children over a five-year span, according to the ProPublica and NBC News analysis of federal data.

This surge followed a change in how the state defined when neglect, including medical neglect, can be considered a form of child abuse. Lawmakers lowered the threshold from any failure to care for a child that endangers their “life or development,” to any failure that “threatens a child’s well-being.” Critics say the change has usurped parents’ right to make medical decisions for their children and has punished people who lack easy and affordable access to health care.

Mothee’s case was among several cited in a scathing report issued in April by a special committee of the Philadelphia City Council that detailed the unintended consequences of mandatory child abuse reporting and alleged failures at Philadelphia’s child welfare agency.

City Councilmember David Oh pushed for the creation of the special committee after his own brush with a mandatory reporter in 2018. A hospital worker at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia had phoned in a hotline report after Oh, a Republican and the city’s first Asian-American councilmember, brought his son to the emergency room with a broken collarbone. Oh explained that his boy had been injured while practicing martial arts, but the hospital social worker said she had no choice but to notify the city, triggering what Oh viewed as a senseless investigation into a report that was ultimately deemed unfounded.

City Councilmember David Oh at Philadelphia City Hall. Oh pushed to create a special committee that has called for the state to abolish mandatory reporting.

Afterward, Oh said, he heard from dozens of Philadelphia parents, including Mothee, who’d gone through similar ordeals.

Ali, the DHS commissioner, said her agency has reduced the city’s foster care rolls by about 29% since 2017, with an increased focus on providing families with services rather than removing children. But Oh said not enough has been done to mitigate the fear created by mandatory reporting, especially in poorer Black communities.

“In those neighborhoods, everyone knows about mandated reporters,” Oh said during an interview at his office. “So when your child falls off a bike, you’ve got to think, ‘Do we take him to the hospital or not?’”

Oh’s committee made several recommendations for reforms — including a call for the state to abolish mandatory reporting.

“They have a system where everyone pulls a fire alarm anytime they feel like there’s a potential for fire, and theoretically it’s great because we’re going to catch every fire before it begins,” Oh said. “But how it’s worked out is all our firefighters are running around to false alarms, and now buildings are burning and people are dying. It’s a bad system.”

“Mandatory Reporters Into Mandatory Supporters”

Some experts argue that the best way to reduce unfounded reports of child abuse and neglect is not by abolishing mandatory reporting, but by doing a better job of training professionals on when to report — and when it’s better to provide help to a family in need instead.

In Pennsylvania, medical professionals are required to complete a two-hour mandatory reporter training course every two years; other professionals must take a three-hour training every five years.

But Dr. Benjamin Levi, a pediatrician and former director of the Center for the Protection of Children, a research and policy group at Penn State Children’s Hospital, said such training programs typically lack a clear explanation of the “reasonable suspicion” of abuse that should trigger a report.

“‘Reasonable suspicion’ is a feeling — they don’t even define it,” said Levi, who developed an alternative training for mandatory reporters to help fill in the gaps.

“If you increase mandated reporting, and you don’t make sure that mandated reporters know what to report and what not to report, you’ve just made the problem worse.”

Educators, the largest source of child abuse reports nationally, in particular have struggled to correctly identify children in need of help. From 2015 to 2019 in Pennsylvania, 24 out of 25 children referred to Child Protective Services by education professionals had their cases dismissed by case workers as unsubstantiated — but only after children and parents had been subjected to questioning and home searches.

Ali, the head of the Philadelphia child welfare agency, said her department has heard from educators who felt unable to help struggling families because they feared potential criminal charges for not reporting to the abuse hotline. With the support of a federal grant, her department plans to create an alternative hotline that mandatory reporters can call when they believe a family is in need but don’t suspect children are in danger.

Adopting the language of reform activists, Ali said the goal is “turning mandatory reporters into mandatory supporters.”

Children wait at an ice cream truck on a street corner in Philadelphia. Child welfare reform advocates have argued for providing parents with more resources to care for their families.

But Benita Williams, former operations director of Philadelphia’s child welfare agency, warned against more radical change, stressing that mandatory reporters should never hesitate to make a report in cases of suspected child abuse.

“Just report,” said Williams, now executive director of the Philadelphia Children’s Alliance, which supports victims of child sexual abuse. “If you are not sure, report and let the professional screen that out. Don’t try to become a social worker.”

Phoebe Jones, who helps lead DHS-Give Us Back Our Children, a group that advocates on behalf of Philadelphia mothers and grandmothers who’ve had children taken from them for issues related to poverty and domestic violence, argues that the real solution is to address the issues underlying most ChildLine reports, by providing parents and caregivers with a universal basic income to ensure they have what they need to care for children.

“Rather than taking children from their mothers and paying foster parents to care for them,” Jones said, “why don’t we invest that money in families?”

by Vernal Coleman, ProPublica, with additional reporting by Nick Blumberg, WTTW/Chicago PBS

This story was co-published with WTTW/Chicago PBS. 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.

For years, Roseland Community Hospital has been buffeted by complaints about the quality of its medical care and the competence of its management, all while periodically at risk of shutting down. And for years, leaders at the nonprofit facility have defended it, arguing the safety net hospital is essential to the health of residents on Chicago’s South Side.

The hospital’s website is loaded with pithy phrases to reassure patients: Trust us. People come first. We provide best quality care. Always on time.

But federal inspection reports, medical malpractice lawsuits and a whistleblower complaint to the state paint the hospital as putting patients at risk of harm or death, an investigation by ProPublica and WTTW News has found.

Since Jan. 1, 2020, errors or neglect have contributed to the deaths of at least seven Roseland patients, including one who was pregnant, according to federal inspection reports. At least four more deaths during that period have prompted lawsuits against the hospital, with families of patients alleging that their loved ones would be alive if not for the staff’s medical missteps.

Two other deaths are highlighted in a whistleblower complaint that a former Roseland physician filed with the Illinois Department of Public Health. In the complaint, the physician alleges that another doctor who used to practice at the hospital was slow to respond to patients’ medical needs, contributing to their deaths.

The deaths of those 13 patients suggest that conditions at Roseland had become dire — so much so that illnesses that should have been treatable had become potentially fatal and a hospital long dedicated to treating its South Side neighbors safely did not always manage to do so.

Federal regulators have cited Roseland at least 72 times since Jan. 1, 2017, more than any other Illinois hospital that’s monitored by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The lapses touched different departments, different employees, different leaders. Nurses and others neglected to consistently monitor patients’ vital signs as they lay slowly dying. Doctors failed to give patients required medical assessments. The pharmacy took hours to fill potentially life-saving prescriptions. In other cases, the hospital failed to maintain equipment and follow infection prevention protocols.

Some of the lapses were serious enough to warrant what federal regulators call an “immediate jeopardy” citation, which flags problems that, if left uncorrected, put patients at risk of harm or death. Since 2017, Roseland has received eight immediate jeopardy citations.

For a hospital to receive even just one immediate jeopardy warning is a “shock,” said Dr. Jose Figueroa, an assistant professor of health policy and management at Harvard University who has researched hospital quality. Getting such a large number in a relatively short period of time “seems really bad,” he said.

Timothy Egan, Roseland’s president and chief executive, declined requests for an interview. But a spokesperson and a top hospital official defended Roseland’s record, saying that it has faced significant challenges over the past several years that were made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Like other safety net hospitals, which treat all patients regardless of their ability to pay, Roseland depends financially on reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid, which pay for treatments for its low-income, senior and disabled patients.

The spokesperson, Dennis Culloton, and the hospital’s new chief quality officer, Sharon DeVita, declined to comment on particular deaths or about lawsuits brought in connection with those deaths. Court records in Cook County show Roseland denied the allegations in one lawsuit and that another lawsuit was dismissed. Court records do not show any response to a third lawsuit, while in another the hospital has said that under an executive order signed by Gov. JB Pritzker, Roseland should not face litigation stemming from incidents that occurred during parts of the pandemic.

“The entire staff of Roseland Hospital served the disinvested community of the far South Side of Chicago through the global pandemic, the challenges of which the hospital and the community continue to face to this day,” Culloton said in an email. “Severely ill patients from our community presented in our safety net hospital’s Emergency Department and sadly some did not survive.”

DeVita said Roseland’s staff “grieves for the loss of any patient.” But she said the circumstances of the deaths flagged by investigators are less similar than their reports suggest and involve patients with unique health conditions.

Roseland, like hospitals across Illinois, at the time was barred by the state from closing its emergency room since the beginning of the pandemic; that, hospital officials said, contributed to overcrowding and stress on the staff.

“The pandemic,” DeVita said, “strained staffing throughout all healthcare systems, especially urban and safety-net hospitals.” She said some nurses who were contracted by the state to help shore up Roseland’s staff during the pandemic “required significant training.”

Both Culloton and DeVita emphasized that since 2021, Roseland has embarked on a campaign to examine and enhance safety practices across the facility. They said the hospital has also addressed the specific deficiencies cited by regulators.

DeVita said Roseland has “redoubled its commitment to the process of continued improvement.”

A spokesperson for the state public health department said that corrective actions taken by the hospital in the wake of the 2021 immediate jeopardy warnings were “sufficient,” and that all of the warnings have been lifted. Roseland is now in good standing with the state.

But while Roseland’s deficiencies have been addressed, there’s no guarantee that the underlying conditions that caused them have been resolved, according to Lisa McGiffert, a co-founder of the Patient Safety Action Network.

“Not sure there’s anyone looking at these hospitals holistically,” McGiffert said of hospitals in general. “[Regulators] will say, ‘We found infection control breaches in a particular room. … You have to clean up the sinks.’ But if there’s a more systemic problem, just cleaning up the sink isn’t going to fix the issue.”

The last time Melichsia Boss spoke to her father, Wilford, in June 2021, an ambulance was speeding him to Roseland. The 70-year-old former property manager had been picked up at his South Side nursing home after he complained of trouble breathing. Medical records provided by his daughter show that Wilford Boss, who underwent regular dialysis treatments, was found breathing rapidly and somewhat confused.

Still, Boss said, her father was lucid enough to reassure her when she reached him on the phone. It was just some shortness of breath, he told her. She asked the ambulance driver not to take her father to Roseland. His primary care physician practiced at the University of Chicago Medical Center, and as a native Chicagoan, she was aware of Roseland’s reputation.

Melichsia Boss, holding a photograph of her father, Wilford. (Akilah Townsend for ProPublica)

“They have history,” she said in an interview.

But protocol required that medics take Wilford Boss to the nearest hospital. By the time the ambulance arrived at Roseland’s emergency room, his breathing had worsened and his heart rate had become erratic. Doctors ran tests to find the cause. The attending physician later wrote that, as Boss began to decline, he might need a breathing tube.

But the treating physician delayed inserting a breathing tube as Boss’ lungs failed, despite several pleas by duty nurses to do so, a Roseland physician wrote in a complaint to the Illinois Department of Public Health. Less than eight hours after the ambulance dropped Boss at Roseland, he was dead. The official cause of death was respiratory failure.

The doctor who submitted the complaint, obtained by ProPublica and WTTW News, was named in the records but declined to comment for this story. The news organizations are not naming the whistleblower.

The doctor who treated Boss no longer works at Roseland and declined to comment.

Spokespersons for the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the state public health department declined to discuss complaints regarding Boss’ death or other deaths, but it appears Roseland was never cited for its treatment of Boss.

Boss’ daughter was unaware of the complaint over her father’s medical treatment, and she began to cry when reporters showed it to her. A year after her father’s death, she said she regrets not involving herself more in his care.

“I wish I’d never let them take him to Roseland,” she said.

Wilford Boss (Akilah Townsend for ProPublica)

Roseland opened in 1924, one of several hospitals established to serve growing populations of immigrants settling on Chicago’s South Side. The area was once solidly middle class. But as factories shuttered, companies disinvested and crime increased, a number of the communities surrounding Roseland slid into poverty. Over time, the hospital increasingly struggled financially. Today its service area spans 12 predominantly Black neighborhoods and six ZIP codes.

The hospital and its advocates have often complained that reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid are slow to arrive, forcing Roseland — as well as other safety net facilities — to operate on slim financial margins.

Nearly 92% of patients admitted to Roseland in 2020 received Medicare or Medicaid, according to state reports. That’s a far larger percentage than the statewide number, which shows that 66% of all Illinois hospital inpatients relied on those benefits. Regardless of their method of payment, for many South Side residents, Roseland is the only option. The next nearest hospital is several miles away.

In 2013, budget woes forced Roseland to the brink of closure. That year, the hospital laid off nearly 70 employees amid a messy fight with then-Gov. Pat Quinn over millions of dollars in allegedly unpaid reimbursements, with accusations of mismanagement lobbed back and forth between the two sides.

A $350,000 grant from the state helped the hospital avert closure. Then-president and chief executive Dian Powell stepped down that June after less than two years on the job amid accusations of mismanagement and after stating incorrectly that the state owed Roseland $6 million. Powell denied any mismanagement but said she was mistaken about the amount the state owed Roseland.

Egan was made Roseland’s chief executive in 2014 after initially being brought on to stabilize hospital finances. But Roseland continued to struggle. In January 2018, Roseland officials announced another round of layoffs. This time, 35 workers, about 7% of the hospital’s 500 employees, were terminated in an effort to cut costs, officials said at the time. Dozens of employees, including some executives, saw their salaries temporarily reduced.

Federal tax documents filed in February 2018 show that the hospital’s operating deficit reached $7.5 million. Four years later, Roseland reported just over $11 million in surplus, the records show.

Federal investigative reports make it clear that the pandemic further stretched an already-thin medical staff.

Regulators have cited Roseland three times since 2017 — including twice since 2020 — for failing to ensure an “adequate” number of nurses were assigned to its emergency and intensive care units.

Starting in January 2022, as the omicron variant of COVID-19 surged, Roseland was frequently understaffed. Federal regulators identified five days between January and March on which the number of nurses working in the hospital’s emergency department fell below set minimums. The manager of the emergency department at the time acknowledged the staffing problems, saying they were especially “difficult.”

Alderman Anthony Beale, whose 9th Ward borders the 34th Ward that’s home to the hospital, said that on balance, the hospital is doing a “phenomenal” job. Most of its problems, Beale added, can be traced to a lack of resources.

Beale has backed recent efforts to establish a new medical district in Roseland that he said would help enhance the medical services available to residents who depend on it.

“If we had the same resources that a University of Chicago or a Northwestern or a Rush has, then we would be talking about a different type of hospital right now,” Beale said.

Carrie Austin, the 34th Ward’s alderman, did not respond to requests for comment.

While the hospital’s circumstances, including the pressures the pandemic forced on it, cannot be ignored, they do not fully explain the hospital’s recent performance, according to Dr. Robert Wachter, the chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

“What strikes me here is that this was true for every hospital in the country,” he said. “It was true for every safety net hospital in the country. It was true for every hospital that was struggling financially, and there are hundreds of them. ... But not every hospital, even while being stressed by the pandemic, had that many citations.”

Watch the WTTW/Chicago PBS Report (Video by Nick Blumberg, WTTW/Chicago PBS)

When a patient showed up at Roseland’s emergency department one evening in July 2021, the events that followed at first seemed routine. The patient, who is not identified in federal records, complained of worsening abdominal pain. A doctor diagnosed them with sepsis and dangerously high blood sugar. The doctor then ordered hourly checks of their blood sugar level, and the patient was later transferred to the intensive care unit.

The next morning, the patient coded and doctors placed them on a mechanical ventilator to help them breathe. Around noon, they “coded” for a second time. A short time later, a doctor pronounced the patient dead.

A review by inspectors found that as the patient’s condition deteriorated, nurses failed to regularly check their blood sugar levels as the doctor had ordered. A Roseland official told inspectors that on the morning of the patient’s death, ICU nurses also failed to conduct a “head-to-toe” assessment, which is required by hospital protocol, to gauge how the patient was responding to treatment.

That July death was preceded by two others, with all three patients dying after periods where checks of their vital signs were inconsistent, according to federal reports.

One arrived on July 4 and was diagnosed with sepsis. Inspectors later found that the medical staff failed to consistently check their vital signs for more than 13 hours. They died just after midnight on July 6. The third patient, who had paralysis after a stroke and low blood pressure, was treated at Roseland for more than a month before their death in early July. Inspectors determined that the medical staff failed to consistently monitor their vital signs, records show.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services hit Roseland with an immediate jeopardy warning for the treatment provided to the three patients who died. It was the second the hospital received that year. Before the year was over, the agency would issue a third.

Egan and Roseland’s senior medical team tried to correct the problems cataloged by inspectors, with Egan signing off on a package of reforms. They included hiring a consultant to oversee a suite of new programs — daily audits of nursing care among them — retraining sessions on how frequently patients should be assessed, and seminars on the proper use of blood sugar meters.

That winter, Egan also hired DeVita as Roseland’s new chief quality officer. Her assignment, she said, was to focus on ensuring that patient safety protocols were followed throughout the hospital.

But before long, inspectors returned to the hospital to investigate additional deaths.

“Meaningful progress takes time,” she said.

A second wave of patient deaths came in January 2022. An ambulance brought a patient to Roseland on a frigid January evening. A doctor would later tell inspectors that, on this night, COVID-19 had stretched the hospital’s staff and resources thin, leaving patients in beds that lined along the hallways of the emergency department.

The patient had a history of diabetes and had missed several scheduled doses of medication before coming to the hospital. Paramedics noted that the effects had begun to alter their mental state and had severely elevated their heart rate, according to a federal report.

The doctor who initially examined the patient prescribed an insulin drip, then ordered them moved to Roseland’s intensive care unit. Seven hours passed before they received the medicine.

The patient continued to decline, reports show. Their blood pressure dropped, and they became unresponsive to verbal commands, nurses noted. On the afternoon of their second day at the hospital, nurses found they had no pulse. A doctor, according to the reports, pronounced them dead just after 4 p.m.

Federal inspectors made note of the delayed insulin treatment. In interviews, a nurse told the inspectors that they’d waited “a long time” for the pharmacy to prepare the insulin before the nurse finally prepared it themselves. The inspectors did not determine a reason for the delay, according to reports.

Inspectors also found gaps in the patient’s medical records where nurses had failed to document that their blood sugar levels were checked or whether a doctor was informed that their health was worsening. Nurses told the inspectors they had done the checks but acknowledged failing to document them.

Over the next two weeks, two other patients died following monitoring and assessment lapses. The hospital was cited for understaffing and for failing to ensure proper patient care. The latter would earn Roseland another immediate jeopardy warning.

The hospital, inspectors wrote, should have flagged two of those deaths for additional review. Failing to do so violated federal regulations requiring hospitals to track unusual events and unexpected patient deaths, according to the inspection reports. A hospital official, who is not named in the reports, later told inspectors that they had reviewed the cases and determined they didn’t meet the criteria for further investigation.

The official said that the hospital’s staff was under severe strain at the time, with as many as 70 patients filling the emergency department, according to inspection reports. And the hospital was not redirecting patients coming to Roseland in ambulances to other facilities to relieve the overcrowding.

“Patients,” the official said, “were being monitored as best as possible, not as they should have been.”

by Joshua Kaplan

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was incensed. Late last year, the state’s Republican legislature had drawn congressional maps that largely kept districts intact, leaving the GOP with only a modest electoral advantage.

DeSantis threw out the legislature’s work and redrew Florida’s congressional districts, making them far more favorable to Republicans. The plan was so aggressive that the Republican-controlled legislature balked and fought DeSantis for months. The governor overruled lawmakers and pushed his map through.

DeSantis' office has publicly stressed that partisan considerations played no role and that partisan operatives were not involved in the new map.

A ProPublica examination of how that map was drawn — and who helped decide its new boundaries — reveals a much different origin story. The new details show that the governor’s office appears to have misled the public and the state legislature and may also have violated Florida law.

DeSantis aides worked behind the scenes with an attorney who serves as the national GOP’s top redistricting lawyer and other consultants tied to the national party apparatus, according to records and interviews.

Florida’s constitution was amended in 2010 to prohibit partisan-driven redistricting, a landmark effort in the growing movement to end gerrymandering as an inescapable feature of American politics.

Barbara Pariente, a former chief justice of the state Supreme Court who retired in 2019, told ProPublica that DeSantis’ collaboration with people connected to the national GOP would constitute “significant evidence of a violation of the constitutional amendment.”

“If that evidence was offered in a trial, the fact that DeSantis was getting input from someone working with the Republican Party and who’s also working in other states — that would be very powerful,” said Pariente, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Democrat Lawton Chiles.

A meeting invite obtained by ProPublica shows that on Jan. 5, top DeSantis aides had a “Florida Redistricting Kick-off Call” with out-of-state operatives. Those outsiders had also been working with states across the country to help the Republican Party create a favorable election map. In the days after the call, the key GOP law firm working for DeSantis logged dozens of hours on the effort, invoices show. The firm has since billed the state more than $450,000 for its work on redistricting.

A week and a half after the call, DeSantis unveiled his new map. No Florida governor had ever pushed their own district lines before. His plan wiped away half of the state’s Black-dominated congressional districts, dramatically curtailing Black voting power in America’s largest swing state.

One of the districts, held by Democrat Al Lawson, had been created by the Florida Supreme Court just seven years before. Stretching along a swath of north Florida once dominated by tobacco and cotton plantations, it had drawn together Black communities largely populated by the descendants of sharecroppers and slaves. DeSantis shattered it, breaking the district into four pieces. He then tucked each fragment away in a majority-white, heavily Republican district.

DeSantis Broke Up Black-Dominated District and Put Its Pieces Into 4 Majority-White Districts (Source: Redistricting Data Hub, IPUMS NHGIS)

DeSantis’ strong-arming of his Republican allies was covered extensively by the Florida press. But until now, little has emerged about how the governor crafted his bold move and who his office worked with. To reconstruct DeSantis’ groundbreaking undertaking, ProPublica interviewed dozens of consultants, legislators and political operatives and reviewed thousands of pages of documents obtained through public records requests and from the nonpartisan watchdog group American Oversight.

DeSantis’ office did not respond to detailed questions for this story.

“Florida’s Governor fought for a legal map — unlike the gerrymandered plan the Governor rightly vetoed,” Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, whose top lawyer was hired by DeSantis’ office, said in an email to ProPublica. “If Governor DeSantis retained some of the best redistricting lawyers and experts in the country to advise him then that speaks to the good judgment of the Governor, not some alleged partisan motive.”

In four years as governor, DeSantis has championed an array of controversial policies and repeatedly used his power to punish his political opponents. A presumptive candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, he has often made moves that seemed tailored to attract headlines, such as his recent stunt sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. But it’s the governor’s less flashy commandeering of the redistricting process that may ultimately have the most long-lasting consequences.

Analysts predict that DeSantis’ map will give the GOP four more members of Congress from Florida, the largest gain by either party in any state. If the forecasts hold, Republicans will win 20 of Florida’s 28 seats in the upcoming midterms — meaning that Republicans would control more than 70% of the House delegation in a state where Trump won just over half of the vote.

The reverberations of DeSantis’ effort could go beyond Florida in another way. His erasure of Lawson’s seat broke long-held norms and invited racial discrimination lawsuits, experts said. Six political scientists and law professors who study voting rights told ProPublica it’s the first instance they’re aware of where a state so thoroughly dismantled a Black-dominated district. If the governor prevails against suits challenging his map, he will have forged a path for Republicans all over the country to take aim at Black-held districts.

“To the extent that this is successful, it’s going to be replicated in other states. There’s no question,” said Michael Latner, a political science professor at California Polytechnic State University who studies redistricting. “The repercussions are so broad that it’s kind of terrifying.”

Rep. Al Lawson had his district broken into four pieces by DeSantis, reducing the share of the Black population in each. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/AP Images)

Al Lawson’s district, now wiped away by DeSantis, had been created in response to an earlier episode of surreptitious gerrymandering in Florida.

Twelve years ago, Florida became one of the first states to outlaw partisan gerrymandering. Through a ballot initiative that passed with 63% of the vote, Florida citizens enshrined the so-called Fair Districts amendment in the state constitution. The amendment prohibited drawing maps with “the intent to favor or disfavor a political party.” It also created new protections for minority communities, in a state that’s 17% Black, forming a backstop as the U.S. Supreme Court chipped away at the federal Voting Rights Act.

Florida elected its first Black member of Congress, a former slave named Josiah Walls, in 1870, shortly after the end of the Civil War. But Florida rapidly enacted new voter suppression laws, and Walls soon lost his office as Reconstruction gave way to the era of Jim Crow.

Josiah Walls was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida in 1870. (Buyenlarge/Getty Images)

Thanks to distorted maps, Florida did not elect a second Black representative to Congress until 1992. That year, a federal court created three plurality-Black districts in Florida — and then three Black politicians won seats in the U.S. House.

After the Fair Districts amendment became law in 2010, state legislators promised to conduct what one called “the most transparent, open, and interactive redistricting process in America.” Policymakers went on tour across the state, hosting public hearings where their constituents could learn about the legislature’s decision-making and voice their concerns.

The hearings also served a more nefarious purpose, a judge would later rule. They were instrumental in what state circuit judge Terry Lewis described as “a conspiracy to influence and manipulate the Legislature into a violation of its constitutional duty.”

For months, a team of state-level Republican operatives worked in secret to craft maps that favored the GOP, coordinating with both statehouse leadership and the Republican National Committee. Then they recruited civilians to attend the hearings and submit the maps as their own.

An email detailed the advice the operatives gave their recruits. “Do NOT identify oneself orally or in writing,” it read, “as a part of the Republican party. It is more than OK to represent oneself as just a citizen.”

It took years of litigation for the details of the scheme to come to light. But in 2015, the Florida Supreme Court responded with force. In a series of rulings that ultimately rejected the Republicans’ efforts, the court laid out the stringent new requirements under Fair Districts, making clear that partisan “practices that have been acceptable in the past” were now illegal in the state of Florida.

After ruling that the legislature’s process was unconstitutional, the court threw out the Republicans’ congressional district lines and imposed a map of their own. That is how Lawson’s district came to be.

“It was important,” Pariente, who authored the key opinions, told ProPublica, “to make sure the amendment had teeth and was enforceable.”

Former Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Barbara Pariente, right, said DeSantis’ collaboration with people connected to the national GOP would constitute “significant evidence of a violation” of Florida’s constitution. (Phil Coale/AP)

The amendment took on even greater significance in 2019, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling on redistricting.

The court’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause barred federal court challenges to partisan gerrymanders. Writing for the 5-4 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said it was not an issue for the federal judiciary to decide, but emphasized the ruling did not “condemn complaints about districting to echo into a void.”

In fact, the issue was being actively addressed at the state level, Roberts wrote. He cited Florida’s amendment and one of Pariente’s opinions. Responding to liberal justices who wanted to reject Rucho’s map as an unconstitutional gerrymander, Roberts wrote they could not because “there is no ‘Fair Districts Amendment’ to the Federal Constitution.”

In 2021, state legislative leaders were more careful.

The senate instructed its members to “insulate themselves from partisan-funded organizations” and others who might harbor partisan motivations, reminding legislators that a court could see conversations with outsiders as evidence of unconstitutional intent. The legislature imposed stringent transparency requirements, like publishing emails that it received from constituents. And they ordered their staff to base their decisions exclusively on the criteria “adopted by the citizens of Florida.”

The Senate leadership “explained to us at the beginning of the session that because of what happened last cycle, everything had to go through the process,” Sen. Joe Gruters, who is also chairman of the Florida Republican Party, told ProPublica.

In November, the state senate proposed maps that largely stuck to the status quo. Analysts predicted they would give Republicans 16 seats in Congress and Democrats 12.

“Were they the fairest maps you could draw? No,” said Ellen Freidin, leader of the anti-gerrymandering advocacy group FairDistricts Now. “But they weren’t bad Republican gerrymanders.”

DeSantis was incensed after the Republican-controlled legislature put forward its redistricting proposal. (Scott McIntyre/The New York Times/Redux)

DeSantis wasn’t satisfied. “The governor’s office was very pissed off about the map. They thought it was weak,” said a well-connected Florida Republican, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so he could be candid. “They thought it was ridiculous to not even try to make it as advantageous as possible.”

In early January, DeSantis’ deputy chief of staff, Alex Kelly, was quietly assigned to oversee a small team that would devise an alternative proposal, according to Kelly’s later testimony.

State employees often spend years preparing for the redistricting process — time that DeSantis did not have. As Kelly and his colleagues set to work, they brought in critical help from the D.C. suburbs: Jason Torchinsky, a Republican election attorney and one of the leading GOP strategists for redistricting nationwide.

On Jan. 5, Kelly and two other top DeSantis aides had the redistricting “kick-off call,” according to the meeting invite, which was provided to ProPublica by American Oversight. The invitation included Torchinsky and another guest from out of state: Thomas Bryan, a redistricting specialist.

In an interview with ProPublica, Bryan explained the connection between the national Republican Party and his work with DeSantis. “There’s a core group of attorneys that works with the party and then they work with specific states,” he said. “It’s not a coincidence that I worked on Texas, Florida, Virginia, Kansas, Michigan, Alabama.”

He added that the main lawyer he works with is Torchinsky: “Jason will say, ‘I want you to work on this state.’”

Jason Torchinsky, center, logged more than 100 hours working on the redistricting for DeSantis. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

A top partner at a conservative law firm, Torchinsky has represented the RNC, the Republican Party of Florida and many of America’s most influential right-wing groups, such as the Koch network’s Americans for Prosperity.

He also occupies a central role in the Republican Party’s efforts to swing Congress in its favor in 2022. Torchinsky is the general counsel and senior advisor to the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the entity the Republican National Committee helped set up to manage the party’s redistricting operations.

The NRRT boasts millions of dollars in funding and a roster of prominent advisors that includes Mike Pompeo and Karl Rove. Earlier this year, Kincaid, the trust’s executive director, summarized its objective bluntly: “Take vulnerable incumbents off the board, go on offense and create an opportunity to take and hold the House for the decade.”

In a statement to ProPublica, Kincaid said that the trust is one of Torchinsky’s many clients and that the lawyer’s work in Florida was separate: “When I would ask Jason what was happening in Florida, he would tell me his conversations were privileged.” Kincaid added that he personally did not speak with anyone in the DeSantis administration “during this redistricting cycle.”

Torchinsky’s involvement in the creation of DeSantis’ map has not been previously reported. His role in the process appears to have been intimate and extensive, though the specifics of his contributions are largely unclear. He spent more than 100 hours working for the DeSantis administration on redistricting, according to invoices sent to the Florida Department of State.

Redacted invoice from Jason Torchinsky's firm for its work on Florida redistricting (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Torchinsky held repeated meetings with DeSantis’ team as the group crafted maps and navigated the ensuing political battles, according to documents obtained by ProPublica. And he brought in other operatives who’d worked around the country in priority states for the national GOP.

A week after the kickoff meeting, Torchinsky scheduled a Zoom call between Kelly, Bryan and a second consultant, Adam Foltz.

Foltz and Bryan arrived in Florida just as they were becoming go-to mapmakers for the GOP. They appeared together in multiple states where the NRRT was directly involved last year, generating controversy in their wake.

In Texas, Foltz, Bryan and the NRRT’s leader, Kincaid, all worked behind the scenes helping draw maps, court records show. After they finished, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the state of Texas, contending that the map violated the Voting Rights Act and illegally diluted Black and Latino votes. The case is still pending.

Last fall in Virginia, each party submitted three candidates to the state supreme court to guide the state’s redistricting process. The Democrats put forward three professors. Republicans submitted Bryan, Foltz and Kincaid. The court’s conservative majority rejected all three Republican nominees, citing conflicts of interest and “concerns about the ability” of the men to carry out the job neutrally.

Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, whose top lawyer helped DeSantis with his congressional maps. (T.J. Kirkpatrick/The New York Times/Redux)

In a statement, Kincaid said Foltz and Bryan are not partisan operatives and “the Virginia Supreme Court erred” in rejecting them. He also downplayed his own relationship to the consultants, saying they are not “employees or retained consultants” for his group.

“Adam and Tom are two of the best political demographers in the country,” Kincaid wrote. “It would only make sense that states looking for redistricting experts would retain them.”

Until last year, Foltz had spent his entire career working in Wisconsin politics, on state GOP campaigns and for Republican state legislators, according to court records. He was introduced to redistricting a decade ago when he spent months helping craft maps that became notoriously effective Republican gerrymanders. When he testified under oath that partisanship played no role in the Wisconsin process, a three-judge panel dismissed his claim as “almost laughable.”

Bryan was also a new figure on the national stage. Before 2020, he was a “bit player” in the redistricting industry, he said, running a small consulting company based in Virginia. He’d drawn maps for school districts and for local elections, but never for Congress, and he held a second job in consumer analytics at a large tobacco conglomerate.

“In 2020, my phone started going off the hook, with states either asking to retain me as an expert or to actually draw the lines,” Bryan told ProPublica. “I get phone calls from random places, and I’m on the phone with a governor.” While he mostly worked with Republicans, he was also retained by Illinois Democrats this cycle, according to court records.

Foltz and Bryan’s rapid ascension culminated in Florida. On Jan. 14, Torchinsky set up a third call with Foltz and Kelly. Then two days later, DeSantis released his map.

At left, Alex Kelly, deputy chief of staff for Gov. DeSantis, answers questions about the new district lines his office developed, during a Committee on Reapportionment meeting in April at the state capitol in Tallahassee. (Phil Sears/AP)

According to Kelly’s subsequent testimony, Foltz drew the map himself.

“I was completely blindsided,” said Rep. Geraldine Thompson, a Democrat on the House redistricting committee. “That is the purview of the legislature.”

Foltz declined an interview when reached by phone and did not respond to subsequent requests for comment. Kelly and Torchinsky, who went on to defend DeSantis in a lawsuit against the redistricting, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The House redistricting subcommittee later brought Kelly in to answer questions about DeSantis’ proposals. Before the deputy chief of staff testified, the Democrats’ ranking member moved to place him under oath. Republican legislators blocked the committee from swearing Kelly in.

In his opening statement, Kelly took pains to emphasize that the governor’s office colored within the lines of the Florida constitution.

“I can confirm that I've had no discussions with any political consultant,” he testified. “No partisan operative. No political party official.”

This appears to have been misleading. By the time he testified, Kelly had been personally invited to at least five calls to discuss redistricting with Torchinsky, Bryan or Foltz, records show.

Kelly mentioned Foltz only briefly in his testimony. Torchinsky and Bryan’s names didn’t come up.

DeSantis holds as much sway in Tallahassee as any governor in recent memory. But even after he publicly weighed in with a map of his own, Republicans in the legislature didn’t bow down. The state Senate refused to even consider the governor’s version. In late January, they passed their original plan.

DeSantis’ aides argued that Lawson’s district was an “unconstitutional gerrymander,” extending recent precedent that limits states’ ability to deliberately protect Black voting power.

Florida Republicans were skeptical. House Speaker Chris Sprowls told reporters that DeSantis was relying on a “novel legal argument” that lawmakers were unlikely to adopt.

“In the absence of legal precedent,” Sprowls said, “we are going to follow the law.”

Florida House Speaker Chris Sprowls and fellow Republicans initially objected to DeSantis’ aggressive redistricting plan. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

On Feb. 11, DeSantis ratcheted up the pressure. He held a press conference reiterating his opposition to Lawson’s district. He vowed to veto any map that left it intact. But he still needed to win over Republican policymakers. Again, DeSantis’ top aides turned to Torchinsky.

In February, Torchinsky helped DeSantis’ staff pick out an expert witness to sell the governor’s vision to the legislature, according to emails provided to ProPublica by American Oversight. Once the group chose an expert, Torchinsky had a call with him in advance of his appearance.

With a deadline to prepare for the November midterms looming, the legislature moved toward compromise. In early March, it passed a new bill that was much closer to DeSantis’ version — but still kept a Democrat-leaning district with a large Black population in North Florida.

The governor’s attempts at persuasion were over.

On Mar. 28, Foltz and Kelly had another call, along with a partner at Torchinsky’s law firm. The next day, DeSantis vetoed the compromise plan.

Democrats were outraged; many Republicans were shocked. “A veto of a bill as significant as that was definitely surprising,” Gruters, the state senator and chair of the Florida GOP, told ProPublica.

Kelly soon submitted a slightly modified version of Foltz’s map to the legislature. This time, the legislature took DeSantis’ proposal and ran with it.

On Apr. 20, Rep. Thomas Leek, the Republican chair of the House redistricting committee, formally presented DeSantis’ plan before the general assembly. When his colleagues asked him who the governor’s staff consulted while drawing the map, Leek told them that he didn’t know.

“I can’t speak to the governor's entire process,” Leek said. “I can only tell you what Mr. Kelly said.”

Florida Rep. Thomas Leek during a Florida House of Representatives Redistricting Committee hearing on Jan. 13. (Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP)

The legislature had required everyone submitting a map to file a disclosure form listing the “name of every person(s), group(s), or organization(s) you collaborated with.” Kelly left the form blank.

The legislature voted on party lines and passed DeSantis’ proposal the next day. Anticipating litigation, they also allocated $1 million to defend the map in court.

Before DeSantis even signed the bill into law, a coalition of advocacy groups filed a lawsuit challenging the map in state court.

They soon scored a major victory. Circuit Court Judge J. Layne Smith, a DeSantis appointee, imposed a temporary injunction that would keep Lawson’s district intact through the midterm elections.

“This case is one of fundamental public importance, involving fundamental constitutional rights,” Smith wrote. His ruling cited the lengthy history of Black voter suppression in North Florida and across the state.

That victory was short-lived. Torchinsky’s firm quickly filed an appeal on DeSantis’ behalf. Then, in a unanimous decision in late May, the appellate court allowed DeSantis’ map to move ahead.

The higher court’s opinion was authored by Adam Tanenbaum, a familiar face in Tallahassee. Until DeSantis appointed him to the court in 2019, Tanenbaum was the Florida House’s general counsel, and before that he was general counsel to the Florida Department of State — both of which were parties to the case.

The very day Tanenbaum issued the opinion, he completed an application to fill a vacancy on the Florida Supreme Court, records show. In Florida, Supreme Court justices are appointed by the governor, in this case DeSantis.

Tanenbaum was not chosen for the position. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The broader case is still pending and is expected to eventually be decided by the state supreme court. Every justice on Florida’s supreme court was appointed by Republicans. The majority of them were chosen by DeSantis.

The deeply conservative body has already demonstrated its willingness to overturn precedent that’s only a few years old. DeSantis’ senior aides have indicated they hope it will do so here.

During his public testimony, Kelly was asked how Lawson’s district could be unconstitutional when it was recently created by Florida’s highest court.

Kelly responded tersely: “The court got it wrong.”

Help ProPublica Investigate Threats to U.S. Democracy

Do you know about how the redistricting industry is evolving nationwide or about partisan efforts to influence the process? Contact Josh Kaplan by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org or securely on Signal at 734-834-9383.

by Sebastian Rotella and Kirsten Berg

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In July 2018, President Donald Trump met at his New Jersey golf club with a Chinese businessman who should have never gotten anywhere near the most powerful man in the world.

Tao Liu had recently rented a luxurious apartment in Trump Tower in New York and boasted of joining the exclusive Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

But Liu was also a fugitive from Chinese justice. Media reports published overseas three years before the meeting had described him as the mastermind of a conspiracy that defrauded thousands of investors. He had ties to Chinese and Latin American organized crime. Perhaps most worrisome, the FBI was monitoring him because of suspicions that he was working with Chinese spies on a covert operation to buy access to U.S. political figures.

Yet there he sat with Trump at a table covered with sandwiches and soft drinks, the tall windows behind them looking onto a green landscape.

A longtime Trump associate who accompanied Liu was vague about what was discussed, telling ProPublica that they talked about the golf club, among other things.

“He was a climber,” said the associate, Joseph Cinque. “He wanted to meet Trump. He wanted to meet high rollers, people of importance.”

Documented by photos and interviews, the previously unreported sit-down reveals the workings of a Chinese underworld where crime, business, politics and espionage blur together. It also raises new questions about whether the Trump administration weakened the government’s system for protecting the president against national security risks.

For years, Liu had caromed around the globe a step ahead of the law. He changed names, homes and scams the way most people change shoes. In Mexico, he befriended a Chinese American gangster named Xizhi Li, aiding Li’s rise as a top cartel money launderer, according to prosecution documents and interviews with former national security officials.

“I’ve been doing illegal business for over 10 years,” Liu said in a conversation recorded by the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2020. “Which country haven’t I done it in?”

Liu surfaced in the U.S. political scene after Trump took office. In early 2018, he launched a high-rolling quest for influence in New York. He courted political figures at gatherings fueled by Taittinger champagne and Macanudo cigars, at meals in Michelin-starred restaurants and in offices in Rockefeller Center. He may have made at least one illegal donation to the GOP, according to interviews.

By the summer, Liu had achieved his fervent goal of meeting Trump. Two months later, he met the president again at Bedminster.

On both occasions, Liu apparently found a loophole in a phalanx of defenses designed to protect the president. The Secret Service screens all presidential visitors on official business, subjecting foreigners to intense scrutiny. In addition to their top priority of detecting physical threats, agents check databases for people with ties to espionage or crime who could pose a risk to national security or a president’s reputation.

Asked about Liu’s encounters with the president, the Secret Service’s chief of communications, Anthony Guglielmi, said, “There were no protective or safety concerns associated with these dates. The Bedminster Club is a private facility, and you will have to refer to organizers when it comes to who may have been allowed access to their facilities.”

The Secret Service does not have a record of Liu meeting Trump on the president’s official schedule, a Secret Service official said. Instead, the encounters apparently occurred during periods when the president did not have official business, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. While staying at his clubs at Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster as president, Trump often left his living quarters to mingle with members and their guests in public areas. The Secret Service screened those people for weapons, but did not do background checks on them, current and former officials said.

“Did the Secret Service know every name involved?” the Secret Service official said. “No. Those are called ‘off-the-record movements,’ and we are worried about physical safety in those situations. We don’t have the time to do workups on everybody in that environment.”

As a member or a member’s guest, Liu could have entered the club without showing identification to the Secret Service and met with Trump, the official said. It appears, in short, that Liu avoided Secret Service background screening.

During both visits, Liu accompanied Cinque, with whom he had cultivated a friendship and explored business ventures. Cinque said that he and his guests had easy access to the president at Bedminster.

“I just go in every time I want,” Cinque said in an interview with ProPublica. “I’m with Donald 44 years. … The Secret Service, they trust me. Because I got a great relation with the Secret Service and I’m not gonna bring anybody bad next to Trump.”

But Cinque now regrets ever having met Liu.

“He’s a professional con man,” Cinque said. “There was a lot of flimflam with him. He conned me pretty good.”

Cinque has given conflicting accounts about the July 2018 meeting. In an interview with a Chinese media outlet that year, he said Liu had spent three hours with the president. Last week, though, he told ProPublica that he had exaggerated the length of the conversation and Liu’s role in it.

A spokesperson for Trump and officials at the Trump Organization and Bedminster club did not respond to requests for comment. The Chinese embassy also did not respond to a request for comment.

Liu’s case is one of several incidents in which Chinese nationals sought access to Trump in murky circumstances, raising concerns in Congress, law enforcement and the media about espionage and illegal campaign financing.

Liu did catch the attention of other federal agencies. His political activity in New York caused FBI counterintelligence agents to begin monitoring him in 2018, ProPublica has learned, before his encounters with Trump at Bedminster. His meetings with the president only heightened their interest, national security sources said.

Then, in early 2020, DEA agents came across Liu as they dismantled the global money laundering network of his friend Li. Reconstructing Liu’s trail, the DEA grew to suspect he was a kind of spy: an ostentatious criminal who made himself useful to Chinese intelligence agencies in exchange for protection.

The DEA agents thought Liu could answer big questions: What was he doing with the president? Was he conducting an operation on behalf of Chinese intelligence? And what did he know about the murky alliance between Chinese organized crime and the Chinese state?

But the DEA clashed with the FBI over strategy. And by the time DEA agents zeroed in on Liu, he had holed up in Hong Kong. The pandemic had shut down travel.

If the agents wanted to solve the walking mystery that was Tao Liu, they would have to figure out a way to go get him.

This account is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former national security officials based in the U.S. and overseas, as well as lawyers, associates of Liu and others. ProPublica also reviewed court documents, social media, press accounts and other sources. ProPublica granted anonymity to some sources because they did not have authorization to speak to the press or because of concerns about their safety and the sensitivity of the topic.

(For ProPublica) Prowling the World

Liu grew up in comfort and privilege.

Born in 1975 in Zhejiang province, he studied business in Shanghai and began prowling the world. He accumulated wealth and left behind a trail of dubious ventures, failed romances and children, according to court documents, associates and former national security officials. He lived in Poland and Hong Kong before moving in 2011 to Mexico City, where he dabbled in the gambling and entertainment fields.

Soon he met Li, the Chinese American money launderer, who also sold fraudulent identity documents. Liu bought fraudulent Guatemalan and Surinamese documents from Li and acquired a Mexican passport, according to prosecution documents and interviews. He played a crucial early role helping Li build his criminal empire, according to former investigators.

Both men had links to the 14K triad, a powerful Chinese criminal syndicate, according to former investigators and law enforcement documents. Moving between Mexico and Guatemala, they were on the vanguard of the Chinese takeover of the underworld that launders money for the cartels.

But in 2014, Liu embarked on a caper in China. He touted a cryptocurrency with an ex-convict, Du Ling, known as the “queen of underground banking,” according to interviews, media reports and Chinese court documents.

It was all a fraud, authorities said. Chinese courts convicted the banking queen and others on charges of swindling more than 34,000 investors from whom they raised over $200 million.

Stills from a promotional clip posted to the video-sharing site Tencent Video show Liu at his company’s lavish launch event in Hong Kong. There, Liu told investors about planned resorts in Fiji and the Americas, where guests would soon be able to spend cryptocurrency like “actual money.”

Although accused of being the mastermind, Liu eluded arrest, according to court documents, associates and other sources. He popped up in Fiji as a private company executive promising infrastructure projects inspired by President Xi Jinping’s visit months earlier to promote China’s development initiative, according to news reports and interviews. Liu even hosted a reception for the Chinese ambassador, according to news reports.

Liu’s activities in Fiji fit a pattern of Chinese criminals aligning themselves with China’s foreign development efforts for mutual benefit, national security veterans say. Liu claims corrupt Chinese officials were his partners in Fiji, “but then they threw him under the bus,” said his lawyer, Jonathan Simms.

Liu discussed development and tourism projects with Solomon Islands officials, including Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare (second from right). Those deals fell through after an alleged victim of Liu’s Chinese cryptocurrency scam sent emails to local embassies and media organizations calling for Liu’s arrest. (Solomon Islands Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet)

After allegations surfaced about his role in the cryptocurrency scandal in China, Liu fled to Australia. Airport police there downloaded his phone and found discussions about fraudulent passports from countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, according to Simms and other sources.

In 2016, Liu returned to Mexico. He soon obtained a U.S. business/tourist visa by making false statements to U.S. authorities about whether he was involved in crime, prosecution documents say.

Now known as Antony Liu, he was ready to make a name for himself.

Money and Politics

Yuxiang Min is an entrepreneur in Manhattan’s Chinatown. For years, he has nurtured a “Chinese American dream”: to prosper in the herbal medicine industry by planting 16,000 acres of licorice in a desert in China’s Gansu province.

After meeting Min in early 2018, Liu promised to make the dream a reality, Min said.

“He made me believe he was very well-connected in China,” Min said. “And I think he was. He showed me photos of himself with top Chinese officials.”

Min said one photo appeared to show Liu with Xi, China’s president, before he took office. Between 2002 and 2007, Xi served in senior government positions in two places where Liu had lived, Zhejiang and Shanghai. But Min said he did not have the photo, and ProPublica has not confirmed its existence.

Liu rented Chinatown offices from Min, who said he helped the wealthy newcomer buy a top-of-the-line BMW and find a translator. Despite his weak English, Liu was charismatic and persuasive, associates said. He bankrolled dinners, a concert, an outing on a yacht; he flaunted the flashy details on his social media. He founded Blue Ocean Capital, an investment firm that did little actual business, according to associates, former national security officials and court documents.

Liu posted dozens of images of his high-rolling lifestyle to social media, including these from Manhattan’s Club Macanudo (first image) and a gala at Oheka Castle, a mansion-turned-hotel on Long Island. The second image is a still from a video in which an unseen man calls Liu “China’s organized crime boss.” In response, Liu laughs.

He even gained access to the United Nations diplomatic community, sharing his office suite in Rockefeller Center with the Foundation for the Support of the United Nations. The foundation’s website says it is a nongovernmental organization founded in 1988 and that it is affiliated with the UN. A UN spokesperson confirmed that the foundation had “consultative status,” which gave its representatives entry to UN premises and activities.

Liu became a financial benefactor of the foundation and was named its “honorary vice chairman.” Through the foundation, he was able to organize a conference at UN headquarters with speakers including publishing executive Steve Forbes and former Mexican President Felipe Calderón, according to interviews, photos and media accounts.

(Photos of Liu with Steve Forbes (first image) and Felipe Calderón at the UN that Liu posted to Facebook)

The Bulgarian mission to the UN helped secure the venue for the event, and ambassadors from seven countries attended, according to online posts and interviews. The mission did not respond to a request for comment.

Although it is startling that someone with Liu’s background could play a role in hosting an event at the UN, it is not unprecedented. In past cases, wealthy Chinese nationals suspected of links to crime and Chinese intelligence have infiltrated UN-affiliated organizations as part of alleged bribery and influence operations.

Janet Salazar, the president of the foundation, did not respond to phone calls, texts or emails. Efforts to reach foundation board members were unsuccessful. Emails to Salazar and the foundation in New York bounced back.

UN officials did not respond to queries from ProPublica about what vetting Liu received, if any.

“We are not aware of the story of Mr. Tao Liu,” the UN spokesperson said.

Calderón said in an email that he was invited through a speakers bureau to give a talk on sustainable development. The event included Asian participants who did not appear to speak English, Calderón said, and he had little interaction with them other than posing for photos.

Forbes’ staff did not respond to requests for comment.

Liu also met U.S. political figures through his latest romantic partner: a Chinese immigrant with contacts of her own. She introduced him to Félix W. Ortiz, then the assistant speaker of the New York State Assembly, who socialized with the couple on several occasions.

Ortiz, a Democrat who formerly represented Brooklyn, did not respond to requests for comment.

Because Liu was not a legal resident, U.S. law barred him from contributing to political campaigns. But he attended political events, according to photos, social media and associates. He also met with two veteran GOP fundraisers in the Asian community, Daniel Lou and Jimmy Chue.

Photos Liu posted to social media show him spending time with Daniel Lou and Jimmy Chue. Both were with him at a diner after a Trump rally they all attended in fall 2018 (first image; Lou is on the far left, Chue is second from right next to Liu). Liu also shared a picture (second image) with Chue and Lt. Steven Rogers (center), then a Trump campaign advisory board member, at a Manhattan restaurant in spring 2019. Rogers did not respond to requests for comment.

“He was interested in political donations and fundraising,” Lou said in an interview. “He wanted to participate. He was willing to help politicians here. That’s for sure.”

Lou said he did not engage in fundraising with Liu. In an email, Chue said he knew of “no illegal activities” related to Liu. He declined to comment further.

On April 27, 2018, Liu’s friend Min contributed $5,000 to the New York Republican Federal Campaign Committee, campaign records show. In reality, Liu told Min to make the donation and paid him back, Min said in an interview.

Min said he received the money in cash and did not have evidence of the alleged reimbursement. But if his account is true, it appears that Liu funneled a political donation illegally through Min, a U.S. citizen.

Photos on Liu’s social media show him rubbing elbows with political figures. Among them (clockwise from top left): U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao; Assistant Speaker of the New York State Assembly Félix W. Ortiz; New York Mayor Bill de Blasio; and Chair of the New York Republican Party Edward F. Cox and Lara Trump. Ortiz gave Liu an award at Blue Ocean’s launch ceremony.

The New York GOP did not respond to emails, phone calls, or a fax seeking comment.

A Sit-Down With the President

As he built his profile in Manhattan, Liu made it clear to associates that he was eager to meet Trump. For help, he turned to Cinque, the longtime Trump associate, according to interviews, photos and social media posts.

Cinque, 86, heads the American Academy of Hospitality Sciences, which gives international awards to hotels, restaurants and other entities. It has given at least 22 awards to Trump ventures, including the Bedminster club, and it once billed Trump as its Ambassador Extraordinaire.

Cinque has a colorful past. In 1990, he pleaded guilty to receiving stolen property, a valuable art collection, according to press reports. A profile in New York Magazine in 1995 quoted him discussing his interactions with “wiseguys” and a shooting that left him with three bullet wounds.

In 2016, Trump told the Associated Press that he didn’t know Cinque well and was unaware of his criminal record. In an article in Buzzfeed, Cinque’s lawyer said his client had no connection to the mob.

Liu dined with Cinque in May 2018 and they hit it off, according to photos and Liu’s associates. Cinque said he could make an introduction to the president, a close associate of Liu said.

Cinque told ProPublica that people in the Chinese American community introduced him to Liu, describing him as a wealthy entrepreneur and a “good person.” Liu impressed Cinque with his luxury car and entrepreneurial energy. He said they could make a lot of money by pursuing a lucrative cryptocurrency venture, Cinque said.

Liu and Cinque got together more than a dozen times, according to social media photos and interviews. At a June gala at the Harvard Club to launch Liu’s company, Cinque gave him a Six Star Diamond Award for lifetime achievement — an award he had previously bestowed on Trump.

“He was gonna pay me big money for giving him the award,” Cinque said. “So I did an award. I didn’t check his background, I’m not gonna lie to you.”

Liu indicated he would pay as much as $50,000 for the honor, but he never actually paid up, Cinque said.

Liu with Cinque at a United Nations conference (first image) and at the Bedminster golf club.

Liu followed a familiar playbook for well-heeled foreigners seeking access to Trump, according to national security officials: pour money into his properties.

In July, Cinque helped Liu rent a one-bedroom apartment above the 50th floor in Trump Tower by providing a credit report to the landlord as a guarantor, according to Cinque, a person involved in the rental and documents viewed by ProPublica. Liu paid a year’s worth of the $6,000 monthly rent upfront. Cinque believes Liu chose Trump Tower in an effort to gain favor with the president.

Liu also told friends he joined the Bedminster golf club, three associates said. Liu told Min he paid $190,000 for a VIP membership, Min said.

But Cinque doesn’t think Liu genuinely became a member. In fact, he said he brought Liu to Bedminster partly because Cinque hoped to impress Trump by persuading his well-heeled new friend to join the club.

“I was trying to get him to join, where I look good in Trump’s eyes if he joined,” Cinque said. But he said Liu “never gave 5 cents. He was a deadbeat.”

On July 20, CNBC aired an interview with Trump in which he complained about the trade deficit with China.

“We have been ripped off by China for a long time,” Trump said.

By the next day, Liu’s efforts to gain access to the president had paid off. He met Trump at Bedminster, according to interviews and photos obtained by ProPublica.

Liu posted a video on Facebook of Trump arriving by helicopter at Bedminster (first image). The second image is a photo obtained by ProPublica of Liu and Cinque meeting with Trump.

The images show the president with Liu and Cinque at a table covered with food, drinks and papers. Three other men are at the table. Trump also posed for photos with Liu and Cinque.

Liu was discreet about the conversation, according to Min. Cinque did most of the talking because of Liu’s limited English, Liu’s close associate said.

ProPublica found a few details in an interview of Cinque by SINA Finance, a Chinese media outlet. In the video posted that September, Cinque and a manager of his company announced a business partnership with Liu involving blockchain technology and the hospitality industry. And then Cinque said he had introduced Liu to the president at Bedminster.

“Antony Liu played a big role,” Cinque told the SINA interviewer. “Donald met him, and he wound up staying with him for three hours, just enjoying every moment.”

The video displayed a photo of the president with Liu and Cinque during the visit.

Cinque and Liu’s companies posted a shorter version of the interview on their social media pages. That video omitted the reference to Liu meeting Trump and the photo of the three of them.

In the interview with ProPublica, Cinque gave a distinctly different version than the one he gave to the Chinese outlet. He said he brought Liu along because Liu implored him for the opportunity of a meeting and photo with Trump. Cinque also said he “exaggerated the truth” when he said Liu spent three hours with the president.

The meeting lasted “maybe twenty minutes, a half hour,” Cinque said.

Cinque was vague about the topic of the conversation with the president, indicating it had to do with the golf club and the awards he gives.

Changing his account once again, he insisted that Liu did not say much.

“He just sat there,” said Cinque, who also denied discussing Liu’s business deals with Trump. “How I could tell anything good to Donald about him where he’s gonna do a deal? First I wanted to see if I could earn anything with him.”

A still from Cinque’s interview with SINA Finance in which he says the two of them spent three hours with Trump at Bedminster. (SINA)

Liu and Cinque met the president again that Sept. 22 during an event at Bedminster, according to interviews and photos. One photo shows Trump smiling with Liu, Cinque and three men who, according to a close associate, were visiting Liu from China for the occasion.

The photos appeared on the Chinese website of the Long Innovations International Group, also known as the Longchuang International Group. The consulting firm owned by Lou, the GOP fundraiser, has organized events allowing Chinese elites to meet U.S. leaders. A caption with the photos said: “Longchuang Group and Blue Ocean expert consultant team Trump luncheon.”

But Lou insists he didn’t know anything about such an event. He said colleagues in China controlled his company’s Chinese website.

“I categorically deny I was involved in this,” Lou said. “I was not there. I did not know about it. Tao Liu did offer to me at one point: You are the pro-Trump leader in the community. How about organizing an event at Bedminster? ... But I did not.”

Cinque, meanwhile, said he brought Liu and his visitors to the club. He disagreed with the company website’s description of an event with the president.

“There’s no political — it’s a golf situation there,” he said. “And people love being in [Trump’s] company.”

Although Cinque denied receiving money from Liu for himself or the president, he said he didn’t know if other visitors paid Liu for the chance to meet Trump, or if Liu made campaign donations through others.

Liu met Trump again at Bedminster in September 2018. The photos appeared on the Chinese-language website of the Longchuang International Group.

Much about the two Bedminster meetings remains unclear. Did Liu arrange a political event for Trump in September? Or did he bring a group of visitors to the club and manage to encounter the president? Either scenario raises once again the question of vetting.

The Secret Service screens all official presidential visitors for weapons and, along with White House staff, checks them in law enforcement and intelligence databases. Foreign nationals require added scrutiny that can include reviewing raw intelligence from overseas. If questions arise, the Secret Service can consult with the FBI and other agencies, said a former acting undersecretary for intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security, John Cohen, who worked on presidential protection issues.

It is not clear if databases available to the Secret Service held information about the charges against Liu in China and his other alleged illicit activities. But by 2018, Chinese media reports and court documents had described the fraud case complete with photos of Liu. English-language press had also detailed his troubles in the South Pacific and China. Despite Liu’s use of different first names, a diligent web search could have found some of that information.

But Liu apparently avoided background screening altogether, according to Secret Service officials, Cinque and other sources. Although visitors cannot schedule an official meeting with the president without being vetted, it is possible that they could communicate through the private club to set up an informal meeting, Secret Service officials said. Cinque said he took Liu to Bedminster on days he knew Trump would be there.

The case is another example, national security veterans said, of unique vulnerabilities caused by the freewheeling atmosphere at Trump’s clubs.

“Trump has chosen to reside in places that are open to the public,” Cohen said. “He has provided an opportunity to people who join these clubs to get access to him. We have seen that the president enjoys making himself available to people in these settings. A top priority for foreign intelligence is that kind of setting: infiltrating, gaining access. If the former president decides to allow access to criminals and spies, there is not much the Secret Service can do.”

A week after the Bedminster visit, Liu accompanied the Chinese American GOP fundraisers to West Virginia to see Trump speak at a rally. Liu sat in the VIP section.

Liu attended a Trump rally and posted photos of it on Facebook. In the Fall

A year later, Liu’s American spree was in shambles.

His romantic partner had a child, but they broke up. Liu accumulated angry business associates, including Min, who says Liu owes him $83,000. Liu owed another $2 million in a legal settlement with an investor who sued him for fraud in New York over a cryptocurrency deal, according to court documents.

In the fall of 2019, Liu stopped paying rent at Trump Tower, according to associates and other sources. His family left behind a crib and a bronze statuette of Trump. Liu went to California and departed the country on foot via Tijuana, later saying he “snuck out” to travel with his Mexican passport, according to his associates, national security officials and court documents.

By early 2020, Liu was back in Hong Kong. He set himself up in a high-rise hotel with a waterfront view. Then the pandemic shut down the world.

Liu’s Instagram documented his life in Hong Kong in the summer of 2020.

Meanwhile, the DEA had filed charges against his friend Li. Agents scouring a trove of communications, photos and other data realized that Liu had been an important figure in Li’s criminal activity.

The agents believed that Liu could tell them more about the money laundering for Latin American drug cartels and the alleged alliance between Chinese organized crime and the Chinese state. And his U.S. political activity intrigued and baffled them. They suspected that he had been operating in a gray area where crime and espionage mix.

“The theory is he was gathering information and feeding it back to Chinese intelligence in order to keep him in good graces to allow him to do his criminality,” a former national security official said. “His currency was influence. And the Chinese would use him as necessary based on his influence. And he was a willing participant in that. The DEA thought it could use him to get at targets in mainland China.”

But the pandemic had prompted Hong Kong to close its borders, and the authorities there were generally obedient allies of Beijing.

The Special Operations Division of the DEA often goes overseas to capture desperados with elaborate undercover stings. In that tradition, the agents came up with a plan.

In April 2020, Liu received a phone call. The caller spoke Chinese. He said he was a money launderer in New York. He said he had gotten the number from Li, their mutual friend in Mexico, court documents say.

The name apparently did the trick.

“Tao is in his apartment on lockdown,” Simms said. “He can’t go anywhere. He’s bored, talkative. He just talks and talks.”

Liu talked about teaching Li the tricks of the money laundering trade, according to Simms and court documents. He reminisced about Li’s casino in Guatemala. He boasted about using five different passports to slip across borders.

Soon, his new phone friend made a proposal, court documents say. He knew a crooked State Department official with a precious commodity to sell: bona fide U.S. passports.

Agreeing to a price of $150,000 each, Liu requested passports for himself and associates, according to prosecution documents and former national security officials. One of the associates was linked to the 14K triad, the former national security officials said.

By July, Liu had wired a total of $10,000 in advance payments. He received a realistic mock-up of his passport. He showed it off during a video call to Min.

“I’ll be back in America soon,” Liu exulted, according to Min.

In reality, the phone friend was an undercover DEA agent. Liu had taken the bait. DEA agents recorded their phone conversations over six months, court documents say.

(For ProPublica)

But a complication arose. The DEA learned that the FBI was conducting a separate investigation of Liu, national security sources told ProPublica.

FBI counterintelligence agents in New York became aware of him soon after he began spreading money around and cultivating political contacts in early 2018, national security sources said. Then his contact with Trump spurred an investigation to determine if Chinese intelligence was working with Liu to gain political access, the sources said.

His years as a fugitive gave credence to that idea. Although Chinese authorities had been pursuing him in relation to the cryptocurrency scandal since 2015, China did not issue an Interpol notice for him until 2020. Chinese authorities apparently made little effort to arrest him while he sheltered in Hong Kong for nearly a year.

The DEA and the FBI clashed over the imperatives of counterintelligence and law enforcement. FBI agents wanted to keep monitoring Liu to trace his contacts; DEA agents favored capturing him.

The DEA prevailed. That October, the undercover agent told Liu he had arranged for a private jet to pick him up in Hong Kong, according to court documents and former national security officials. It would take him to Australia, where they would seal the passport deal in person. Agents sent Liu a menu for the flight complete with a choice of cocktail. He thought that was “very high class,” his close associate said.

The stakes were high too. If Chinese authorities learned of the clandestine foray, a diplomatic uproar was likely.

On Oct. 13, the weather was warm and rainy. The DEA’s private jet landed in Hong Kong. Liu came aboard without hesitation, according to an associate and former national security officials.

Hours later, the plane touched down in Guam, which is a U.S. territory. DEA agents arrested Liu.

“He was surprised,” the close associate said. “So many police cars. He said it was like a 007 movie.”

Epilogue

On April 14 of last year, Liu pleaded guilty in a federal courtroom in Virginia to conspiracy to bribe a U.S. official in the passport sting and to conspiracy to commit money laundering. A judge sentenced him to seven years in prison.

Tao Liu (Alexandria (Virginia) Sheriff’s Office)

But two explosive questions remain unanswered: why he had contact with Trump and other politicians, and whether he worked with Chinese spy agencies.

The government has kept most of the story secret. Liu’s public court file does not mention his political activity. The DEA and Justice Department declined to discuss Liu with ProPublica. An FBI spokesperson said the agency could not confirm or deny conducting specific investigations.

Liu, meanwhile, accepted an interview request. But the Bureau of Prisons refused to allow ProPublica to talk to him in person or by phone, citing “safety and security reasons.”

The FBI investigation of Liu apparently focused on political and counterintelligence matters. Last year, agents questioned Min and at least two other associates of Liu. The agents asked Min about Liu’s interactions with Cinque and former Assemblyman Ortiz, and if Liu gave them money. Min said he told the agents he did not know.

In an interview with the close associate of Liu, FBI agents asked about Liu’s contact with Trump, whether he raised money for Trump and Ortiz, his relationship with Cinque, and his contacts with politicians in China. They also asked about money laundering in Mexico, the close associate said.

“I think the FBI thought he was a spy,” the close associate said. “I don’t think he’s a spy. His English is very bad. He just wanted to show off to Chinese people. This is the way a lot of Chinese business guys operate. A lot of American business guys, too. Getting close to politicians, taking photos with them.”

Cinque said federal agents have not questioned him about Liu.

“I just think he was a fraudulent hustler,” Cinque said. “I don’t think he would do anything against the country, but then I could be wrong. Look, he did a lot of things.”

As often happens in counterintelligence cases, Liu remains an ambiguous figure: a con man, or a spy, or possibly both. People familiar with the case are suspicious about his ability to roam the world for years and his success at infiltrating high-level U.S. politics.

“Guys like this never do this kind of thing on their own,” a national security source said. “They always do it for someone else.”

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Jeff Kao and Cezary Podkul contributed reporting.

by Sebastian Rotella and Kirsten Berg

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This is part one of an investigation into a revolutionary money laundering system involving Chinese organized crime, Latin American drug cartels and Chinese officials, and how one major figure in the scheme managed to meet former President Donald Trump. Read part two: “The Globetrotting Con Man and Suspected Spy Who Met With President Trump.”

In 2017, Drug Enforcement Administration agents following the money from cocaine deals in Memphis, Tennessee, identified a mysterious figure in Mexico entrusted by drug lords with their millions: a Chinese American gangster named Xizhi Li.

As the agents tracked Li’s activity across the Americas and Asia, they realized he wasn’t just another money launderer. He was a pioneer. Operating with the acumen of a financier and the tradecraft of a spy, he had helped devise an innovative system that revolutionized the drug underworld and fortified the cartels.

Li hit on a better way to address a problem that has long bedeviled the world’s drug lords: how to turn the mountains of grimy twenties and hundreds amassed on U.S. streets into legitimate fortunes they can spend on yachts, mansions, weapons, technology and bribes to police and politicians.

For years, the Mexican cartels that supply the U.S. market with cocaine, heroin and fentanyl smuggled truckloads of bulk cash to Mexico, where they used banks and exchange houses to move the money into the financial system. And they also hired middlemen — often Colombian or Lebanese specialists who charged as much as 18 cents on the dollar — to launder their billions.

Those methods were costly, took weeks or even months to complete and exposed the stockpiled cash to risks — damage, robbery, confiscation.

Enter Li. About six years ago, federal antidrug agents in Chicago saw early signs of what would become a tectonic change. They trailed cartel operatives transporting drug cash to a new destination: Chinatown, an immigrant enclave in the flatlands about 2 miles south of the city’s rampart of lakefront skyscrapers.

Agents on stakeout watched as cartel operatives delivered suitcases full of cash to Chinese couriers directed by Li. Furtive exchanges took place in motels and parking lots. The couriers didn’t have criminal records or carry guns; they were students, waiters, drivers. Neither side spoke much English, so they used a prearranged signal: a photo of a serial number on a dollar bill.

After the handoff, the couriers alerted their Chinese bosses in Mexico, who quickly sent pesos to the bank accounts or safe houses of Mexican drug lords. Li then executed a chain of transactions through China, the United States and Latin America to launder the dollars. His powerful international connections made his service cheap, fast and efficient; he even guaranteed free replacement of cartel cash lost in transit. Li and his fellow Chinese money launderers married market forces: drug lords wanting to get rid of dollars and a Chinese elite desperate to acquire dollars. The new model blew away the competition.

“At no time in the history of organized crime is there an example where a revenue stream has been taken over like this, and without a shot being fired,” said retired DEA agent Thomas Cindric, a veteran of the elite Special Operations Division. “This has enriched the Mexican cartels beyond their wildest dreams.”

As they investigated Li’s tangled financial dealings, U.S. agents came across evidence indicating that his money laundering schemes involved Chinese government officials and the Communist Party elite. China’s omnipresent security forces tightly control and monitor its state-run economy. Yet Li and others moved tens of millions of dollars among Chinese banks and companies with seeming impunity, according to court documents and national security officials. The criminal rings exploited a landscape in which more than $3.8 trillion of capital has left China since 2006, making the country the world’s top “exporter of hot money,” said John Cassara, a former U.S. Treasury Department investigator, in testimony to a Canadian commission of inquiry.

Adm. Craig Faller, a senior U.S. military leader, told Congress last year that Chinese launderers had emerged as the “No. 1 underwriter” of drug trafficking in the Western Hemisphere. The Chinese government is “at least tacitly supporting” the laundering activity, testified Faller, who led the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees military activity in Latin America.

In an interview with ProPublica, the now-retired Faller elaborated on his little-noticed testimony. He said China has “the world’s largest and most sophisticated state security apparatus. So there’s no doubt that they have the ability to stop things if they want to. They don’t have any desire to stop this. There’s a lot of theories as to why they don’t. But it is certainly aided and abetted by the attitude and way that the People’s Republic of China views the globe.”

Some U.S. officials go further, arguing that Chinese authorities have decided as a matter of policy to foster the drug trade in the Americas in order to destabilize the region and spread corruption, addiction and death here.

“We suspected a Chinese ideological and strategic motivation behind the drug and money activity,” said former senior FBI official Frank Montoya Jr., who served as a top counterintelligence official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “To fan the flames of hate and division. The Chinese have seen the advantages of the drug trade. If fentanyl helps them and hurts this country, why not?”

More than half a dozen national security veterans interviewed by ProPublica expressed similar views, most of them speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive subject. But they acknowledged that the alleged state complicity is difficult to prove.

Beijing rejects such accusations. And the question of whether China actively supports money laundering and the flow of fentanyl and other drugs to the U.S. remains a matter of debate in the U.S. national security community.

“There is so much corruption today in mainland China it becomes hard to distinguish a policy or campaign from generalized criminality,” said an Asian American former intelligence official with long experience on Chinese crime and espionage.

The Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to a detailed request for comment for this story.

The takeover of drug-related money laundering by Chinese organized crime has drawn global attention. In Australia, authorities are investigating a Chinese syndicate that allegedly moved hundreds of millions of dollars around the world for clients, including a cousin of Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to news reports. (Xi’s cousin has not been charged with a crime, and the Chinese foreign ministry has dismissed reports about inquiries into his activities as “gossip.”)

Europol has warned that Chinese money laundering groups “present a growing threat to Europe.” The U.S. State Department estimates that $154 billion in illicit funds a year passes through China, calling it “of great concern.”

“We used to have a regular dialogue with the Chinese specifically on things like money laundering, counternarcotics policies,” Assistant Secretary Todd Robinson, who leads the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, said in an interview. “And since that has stopped, it has not been clear, we’ve not really been able to get a handle on how much of this is criminal organizations and how much of it is criminal organizations connected to or suborning Chinese government officials.”

Xi has led a well-publicized crusade against corruption, but it has been mainly a purge of rivals, according to U.S. national security officials and Chinese dissidents. In fact, they said, Chinese intelligence services have quietly expanded their ties with Chinese mafias, known as triads, for mutual benefit.

“There is no question there is interconnectivity between Chinese organized crime and the Chinese state,” said Montoya. “The party operates in organized crime-type fashion. There are parallels to Russia, where organized crime has been co-opted by the Russian government and Putin’s security services.”

The Li case led federal agents in an unexpected direction: an investigation of a possible Chinese covert operation to penetrate American politics. The DEA agents stumbled across Li’s enigmatic associate, an expatriate Chinese businessman named Tao Liu. After moving from Mexico to New York, he launched a high-rolling quest for political influence that included at least two meetings with President Donald Trump.

Xizhi Li’s associate, Tao Liu (right), met twice with President Donald Trump in 2018.

Both the DEA and FBI pursued Liu, suspecting he had ties to Chinese spy agencies. They wanted to know how and why a wanted Chinese criminal had gained access to the president of the United States.

Although authorities convicted Li and Liu of money laundering and other crimes, the political and diplomatic aspects of the groundbreaking investigations of them are still largely secret. Citing open investigations, the DEA declined to discuss the case or even the general issue of how Chinese organized crime launders profits for the cartels. The Justice Department and FBI declined requests for comment. Lawyers who represented Li rejected requests for interviews with them or their client.

To explore the full dimensions of the case, ProPublica interviewed more than two dozen current and former national security officials, as well as lawyers and others involved. ProPublica granted some of them anonymity, either because they were not authorized to talk publicly or because of concerns about their security. ProPublica also reviewed court files, social media, governmental reports and other material. Many details — about the suspected role of Chinese officials, the hunt across the globe, the links to U.S. politics — are being reported for the first time.

The Aura of Juan Lee

In 2008, Rigo Polanco met a cocaine trafficker who called himself Juan Lee. It was one of 17 aliases that Xizhi Li accumulated in a criminal career that was just getting started.

Polanco, a California anti-drug agent, had spent weeks undercover stalking Li, who was looking for a high-volume supplier. But the guy was a ghost. He used multiple phones. He hid behind intermediaries. Finally, he agreed to meet Polanco at a Denny’s by the Pomona Freeway in the suburban sprawl of the San Gabriel Valley.

(For ProPublica)

On June 24, Polanco’s Los Angeles County task force deployed surveillance around the diner. Polanco introduced himself as Alfredo, a corrupt Customs and Border Protection officer with access to cocaine. He sat down with Li, Li’s 25-year-old Mexican American wife and her brother.

At 35, Li stood 5-foot-7 and weighed about 135 pounds. But he was imposing. He spoke fluent, Mexican-accented Spanish, wore a Rolex and emanated menace.

“The aura of Juan Lee among the people around him was, ‘Don’t cross this guy,’” Polanco recalled in an interview. “There was some sense of fear of him among his associates.”

Li grew up in a unique subculture where crime spoke many languages and crossed borders with ease. The experience served him well.

He was born in a rural area of Guangdong province in 1973. About 10 years later, the family migrated to Mexicali, a Mexican city on the California border that is home to a large Chinese community. Chinese restaurants fill La Chinesca, the Chinatown. In the early 20th century, an underground tunnel complex was a refuge from the desert heat — and a site for gambling and cross-border crime schemes.

Li attended school and worked long shifts in a family restaurant. But one of his close relatives smuggled migrants and contraband into the United States, former investigators say. When Li was about 16, his family migrated to Southern California. He slid into crime in the 1990s and with help from relatives became an associate of the 14K triad, a Chinese criminal organization, according to law enforcement documents and former investigators.

Li obtained U.S. citizenship and had four children with a Chinese-born woman. In 2005, he opened the Lucky City Restaurant in the suburb of Monterey Park in Los Angeles County. The restaurant quickly became a den of drug trafficking and human smuggling, according to an affidavit written by a DEA investigator and sources familiar with the case.

By then, Li’s triad and family connections had helped him cultivate relationships with Chinese officials with diplomatic status in the United States, according to former investigators. He also recruited a corrupt U.S. border inspector to help with smuggling, according to law enforcement documents and former investigators.

Li’s hectic life bridged the Latino and Asian communities. He had two children with his Mexican American wife, whose family had useful cartel connections, according to interviews and court documents.

At the same time, Li maintained ties to his birthplace. Around 2007, he took Chinese relatives to Guangdong for the Qingming Festival, when families clean the tombs of their ancestors. Basking in the role of benevolent immigrant, he “funded the renovation of our village, transforming the muddy land into streets,” his sister wrote to a federal judge years later.

Back in the smoggy San Gabriel Valley, his prolific criminal activity drew investigations by the DEA and FBI. But Polanco’s team of Los Angeles County officers didn’t know about those open cases when they went after him in 2008.

During a second meeting at a seafood restaurant, Li told Polanco that he was smuggling 30-kilogram loads of cocaine through Mexico to Hong Kong, making $60,000 a kilogram. He also sent cocaine to Canada. And he had a sideline smuggling Chinese migrants through Cuba.

(For ProPublica)

This is no run-of-the-mill thug, Polanco thought. Mexico was violent. Cuba was a police state. Canada and Hong Kong were hotbeds of Chinese organized crime. You needed well-placed allies to navigate among those cultures and countries.

“It all added up to this picture of a very shrewd and cautious and sophisticated operator,” Polanco said. “There was a lot of sophistication in what he was doing, even then.”

After negotiations with the undercover agent, Li agreed to buy an initial 20 kilograms of cocaine. On July 14, he sent a young Asian man in a Mercedes to a supermarket parking lot to deliver $200,000. Polanco’s team captured the bagman and other accomplices. The bagman and Li’s brother-in-law pleaded guilty to drug trafficking offenses, while charges against the wife were dropped.

But Li fled south across the border. He soon proved Polanco’s instincts correct.

Chinaloa

In Mexico City, Li rebounded fast.

Qiyun Chen was from his hometown and worked in her family’s retail business. Only in her early 20s, she became his romantic and criminal partner, according to court documents and former investigators. Her charm and intelligence impressed gangsters and cops alike. (Chen could not be reached for comment.)

Chen introduced Li to her own network in the Chinese Mexican community, including a formidable trafficker known as the Iron Lady. In her online communications, Chen called herself Chinaloa. The alias fused the words China and Sinaloa, the state that has spawned many drug lords. It baptized her as a player in a multilingual subculture that she and Li created. Their text messages combined Chinese and Spanish. Li used the online handles JL 007 and Organización Diplomática (Diplomatic Organization).

The couple divided their time among luxurious homes in Mexico City, Cancun and Guatemala, making good money smuggling drugs and migrants. But they saw a new opportunity in money laundering.

(For ProPublica)

In 2011, Li went to Guatemala City to buy a casino. Located in a Holiday Inn, it had a ’90s-era decor that didn’t exactly conjure images of James Bond in Monte Carlo.

Nonetheless, Li struck an all-inclusive deal with the owner. He bought his casino, his casino license — and his identity. The U.S. fugitive became a Guatemalan gambling entrepreneur, according to court documents.

Along the way, Li had developed a complementary racket: selling fraudulent documents. Li himself had five passports from three countries. The fake papers were professionally done. Li infiltrated corrupt Latin American bureaucracies that sell real passports, identity cards, even birth certificates. He also had a government-connected source for passports in Hong Kong. Li charged about $15,000 per document, according to interviews and court files.

The same year Li bought the casino, a cafe owner in Mexico City introduced him to a wealthy Chinese expatriate who wanted a Guatemalan passport. The new arrival was a portly, baggy-faced 35-year-old named Tao Liu. It proved a providential encounter.

Li took his client in a private helicopter to the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas. They landed in the jungle and trudged across the border into Guatemala.

(For ProPublica)

“Bodyguards with weapons and vehicles were waiting on the other side,” said Liu’s lawyer, Jonathan Simms. “They take them to Li’s mansion in Guatemala. Li leaves him there and goes to get the passports. Tao spent time in that mansion waiting with other Chinese clients for Li to bring back the documents. He got to know the other people there pretty well.”

While at the safe house, Liu met a senior Chinese military officer who also bought a fraudulent document from Li, Simms said. Years later, Liu identified the officer in a photo shown to him by U.S. agents.

Investigators say that episode contributed to evidence that Li provided fake papers, and other criminal services, to Chinese officials in Latin America, where China is an economic and diplomatic power. Foreign passports and multiple identities enable Chinese operatives overseas to engage in covert activity, launder money or take refuge from their government if accused of corruption.

The national security threat posed by Li’s passport racket later caused the DEA to bring in the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service to conduct its own investigation, which continues today.

After the Guatemala expedition, Liu and Li became friends. They gambled at the casino and took women to the Bahamas. Although Liu had access to money and power, he was also an admitted brazen lawbreaker. Sometimes his dubious immigration status forced him to enter Mexico by car or bus, and he bragged about bluffing or bribing border officers, according to court documents, his lawyer and law enforcement officials.

The two men did not seem like kindred spirits. Li was thin; Liu was obese. Li was reserved; Liu was gregarious. It is hard to find photos of Li; Liu bombarded social media with scenes of his extravagant lifestyle.

But they were both globetrotting outlaws. And Liu played a crucial early role in building Li’s empire, according to current and former law enforcement officials and other sources. A U.S. indictment later alleged: “TAO [Liu] worked with LI to begin money laundering in locations including Mexico and Guatemala.”

In later conversations recorded by the DEA, Liu described himself as an influential mentor who taught Li how to launder money, according to court documents and interviews. Liu’s lawyer argued that his client’s admissions were exaggerations. But the investigators tended to believe Liu’s account.

“The DEA thought that they were partners in the money laundering,” a former national security official said. “And they were definitely working closely together.”

Investigators believe Liu used his connections in China and the diaspora to recruit rich people who needed U.S. dollars. A sign of Liu’s access to that underworld: he had another associate in Hong Kong, known as “the queen of underground banking,” who provided black market money services to the Chinese elite, according to Chinese court documents and press reports.

Stocked with cash and guns, Li’s Guatemalan casino became a base of his emerging venture. He started bringing Chinese nationals to the casino: some of them politically connected, others corrupt officials, others expatriates, according to interviews and court documents. They mingled with Latin American drug traffickers, the second essential element in his scheme. The casino was a showcase to demonstrate to both sides that Li could deliver, court documents say.

The wealthy Chinese “had a need,” Simms said. “The cartels had a need. Li put it together.”

(For ProPublica) Mirror Transactions

Many ethnic diasporas have developed informal systems for moving money and funneling cash — earned honestly or illegally — into the legitimate international economy.

For decades, underground banking systems served the elite of the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, especially after the totalitarian regime opened its command economy to global capitalism. Starting around 2013, Xi’s anti-corruption crusade pushed the elite to spirit more money overseas. A yearly limit of $50,000 on capital flight increased a demand for U.S. dollars.

“The underground banking system in China was pretty much self-sufficient just dealing with Chinese criminal organizations and the Chinese diaspora,” said John Tobon, the Homeland Security Investigations special agent in charge in Honolulu, who has written on the topic. “And it was then when all of these restrictions came in, when the CCP members could no longer count on doing it the easy way ... that the supply of dollars became an issue.”

Li and other enterprising criminals identified a seemingly limitless source of dollars: the Latin American drug trade. To amass the cash, Li offered the cartels unheard-of money laundering deals.

“With the Colombians, it had been an 18% to 13% commission,” said Cindric, the retired DEA agent. “The Chinese are doing it for 1 to 2% on average. And the speed at which they do it is unbelievable. The Chinese absorbed the risk. You know it will get paid.”

Li deployed dozens of couriers from Los Angeles to Atlanta. Just two couriers in Chicago picked up more than $10 million from cartel operatives in a seven-month period between 2016 and 2017, according to law enforcement documents.

“We saw the Chinese enter the market,” said Daniel Morro, a former senior HSI official in Chicago. “It was super-intriguing. We had never seen it before.”

If the couriers delivered, they collected a 1% fee. If not, they were on the hook with Li.

On March 11, 2016, Nebraska state troopers stopped a rental car on a desolate highway. They confiscated $340,000 and released the two couriers, who were driving from Chicago to Los Angeles. A courier called Li, who called a cartel representative in Mexico and sent a bank transfer to replace the lost load. The courier and his relatives rapidly reimbursed Li by depositing money in U.S. bank accounts, court documents say.

“He was a hard-ass,” said Michael Ciesliga, a former DEA investigator. “No nonsense. All business. Very strict, very hard even on his family.”

Li’s system generally worked like this: Cartel operatives in the United States would arrange a “contract” with him, often to launder about $350,000, a quantity of cash that fit into a suitcase.

Cartel transporters handed over the dollar loads to Li’s couriers, who sent Li or his lieutenants a photo confirming the handoff. Li then delivered the sums in Mexican pesos to drug lords from safe houses in Mexico stocked with that currency. The first stage, providing swift service to the cartels, was complete.

Li’s profits came from other players in the scheme: rich Chinese willing to lose money in order to obtain dollars outside China and Latin American import/export firms needing Chinese currency to do business in China.

Li’s couriers often drove loads of cash to New York or Los Angeles, which have large Chinese immigrant populations. Li “sold” the currency to wealthy Chinese clients or their expatriate relatives or representatives. As part of the deal, Li himself would sometimes turn the dollars into deposits in bank accounts or use front companies to issue cashier’s checks.

But the Chinese clients often had their own options, such as small businesses that handled cash without questions. Another method was gambling at casinos, which readily turned cash into chips. Many clients bought homes or paid U.S. university tuition.

In testimony to a Canadian commission of inquiry in 2020, Cassara, the former investigator at the U.S. Treasury Department, described the frequency of laundering in the U.S. real estate sector.

“Almost 60% of purchases by international clients are made in cash,” Cassara said, citing a report by the National Association of Realtors. “Chinese buyers have been the top foreign buyers in the United States both in units and dollar volume of residential housing for six years straight. ... In the United States, there is little if any customer due diligence by real estate agents.”

The next step in Li’s system took place beyond the sight and reach of U.S. authorities. He directed his wealthy clients to transfer equivalent sums from their Chinese bank accounts to accounts he controlled in China. Known as “mirror transactions,” these transfers enabled Li to “sell” the same money again — this time, as Chinese currency to the Latin American exporters.

How Xizhi Li Used “Mirror Transactions” to Launder Millions of Dollars Across the World

The transactions allowed Li to move millions among Mexico, the United States and China while evading law enforcement and charging steep commissions.

I. The Cartel

A Mexican cartel operative hands over $350,000 in cash to a courier working for Li on the streets of a U.S. city. The exchanges often take place in parking lots, motels and shops.

Li’s organization in Mexico delivers an equivalent sum in pesos to the cartel within a day and Li takes a 2% commission. The process is much faster and cheaper than traditional money laundering methods. Now that the dollars have been converted into pesos, it’s easier for Mexican drug lords to use the cash.

II. The Wealthy Chinese

Wealthy Chinese who want to get around limits on moving money out of China “buy” the $350,000 from Li’s couriers in the U.S. They often use the U.S. dollars to buy real estate or pay for U.S. college tuition.

The wealthy Chinese complete the trade by transferring $350,000 in Chinese currency from their bank account in China to a bank account controlled by Li in China. They pay Li a commission of 10% or more.

III. The Foreign Company

Li sells the $350,000 in Chinese currency to a foreign company, often Mexican, that needs Chinese currency to buy goods in China.

The company pays Li in U.S. dollars or Mexican pesos, plus a fee. This makes it easier to evade customs duties and taxes on goods shipped to Mexico, because the company obtained the Chinese currency on the black market. Now the drug money has been introduced into the legal economy in three different countries.

(Graphic by Lucas Waldron, ProPublica)

There were variations on the system. Li sometimes washed funds through companies owned by confederates in the United States and Latin America who sold seafood and other goods to China. Taking advantage of the $80 billion in trade between Mexico and China, launderers also sent goods from China to Mexican front companies connected to drug lords. Those companies would sell the products for pesos, creating a legitimate paper trail for money initially earned from the sale of drugs.

Li’s network used Chinese banks including the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Agricultural Bank of China, court documents say. Those state institutions were among the banks that moved millions around the world with little apparent scrutiny in this case and others, according to court documents and interviews. Prosecutors did not accuse any bankers of wrongdoing. But investigators suspect that some bankers looked the other way. (The banks did not respond to requests for comment.)

“They had to know it was illegal,” Ciesliga said. “Just the sheer amount of money, and the volume and consistency and frequency, there’s no legitimate businesses that are moving that kind of money. Any alert anti-money laundering investigator would have detected this kind of activity.”

In other cases, authorities have sanctioned Chinese banks for offenses related to money laundering. In 2016, New York state regulators fined the Agricultural Bank of China $215 million for anti-money laundering violations. A Spanish court in 2020 convicted four Madrid executives of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China of a brazen setup in which they received tens of millions of euros in cash day and night, and moved the funds illegally back to China. The Bank of China has paid fines and endured criminal penalties in Italy and France for the alleged illegal repatriation of proceeds from tax evasion and customs fraud.

On the streets of the Americas, turf wars and rip-offs were rare among the money laundering crews. But for Li, reality intruded eventually.

In 2016, gunmen ambushed Li near his casino in Guatemala City, shredding his armored Range Rover with more than 20 rounds. He survived unscathed. The attackers got away. Li suspected rival Asian gangsters, according to former investigators and others familiar with the case.

He was deep in treacherous territory.

(For ProPublica) The Streets of Memphis

By 2017, Li’s empire had grown to span four continents. It operated below the radar, with startling impunity. A Memphis-based U.S. drug agent was about to change that.

Peter Maher was a sharp, voracious investigator who had only been with the DEA a few years, colleagues say. (Maher declined an interview request.) He teamed up with Ciesliga, a Tennessee state agent assigned to a federal task force. As they traced drugs on the streets of Memphis back to their source, they discovered that the Sinaloa cartel of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was supplying cocaine to a major Memphis drug crew. Markings on cocaine packets pointed at Marisela Flores-Torruco, now 52, a Mexican drug lord known as the Iron Lady.

Maher’s team learned that, because Flores had a Chinese grandparent, her organization was known as “Los Chinos,” or the Chinese. Based in Chiapas, she imported tons of cocaine from Colombia for the Sinaloa cartel, interviews and court documents say. (Flores could not be reached for comment.)

Soon, the agents identified a woman in Mexico who was one of the Iron Lady’s “principal coordinators of illicit money laundering operations,” court documents say.

It was Chen, Li’s paramour, using the handle Chinaloa. The DEA Special Operations Division, which specializes in international cases, began intercepting her communications, according to court documents and interviews. The agents figured out that Chen had introduced Li to Flores, who encouraged other traffickers to launder their money with his organization.

Chen’s communications led the DEA to Li, who was laundering for the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels. Tracking his U.S. couriers, agents picked off loads across the country.

In May 2017, agents arrested one of Li’s trusted money managers, a Brooklyn-based mail carrier and Chinese immigrant who had lived in Belize. He recorded about $2 million in illicit transactions in a ledger and sometimes received cash deliveries in his U.S. postal uniform, court documents say. The mail carrier pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder money and got a 60-month sentence.

(For ProPublica)

The Memphis agents toggled between leads in the U.S. and Mexico as the Iron Lady’s ferocity kept them on alert. When Flores ordered her enforcers to kidnap the family of a man who owed her money, the agents warned Mexican counterparts. Later, she threatened to kill rivals with a bombing at a racetrack, Ciesliga said. DEA agents hurriedly obtained an Interpol warrant, and police arrested Flores in Colombia in July 2017.

Later that month, the agents captured Chen during a visit to Los Angeles. They seized five phones from her, along with airline tickets to visit accomplices in Portland, Oregon, who oversaw more than 251 Chinese bank accounts, according to interviews and court documents.

The next morning, Maher and Ciesliga drove to the Santa Monica Pier. Sitting in their rental car by the Pacific, they scoured Chen’s phones. They hurriedly took screenshots, worried that an accomplice could remotely erase the contents at any moment.

Looking at Chen’s smartphones, the agents were able for the first time to read the suspects’ most sensitive conversations on WeChat, an application for messaging and commerce. WeChat is ubiquitous in China and the Chinese diaspora and impenetrable to U.S. law enforcement. Because it uses a form of partial encryption allowing the company access to content, WeChat is closely monitored by the Chinese state, according to U.S. national security veterans.

U.S. officials view the brazen use of WeChat for money laundering as another suggestive piece of evidence that authorities in Beijing know what is going on.

“It is all happening on WeChat,” Cindric said. “The Chinese government is clearly aware of it. The launderers are not concealing themselves on WeChat.”

Chen’s arrest was a devastating blow to Li. Agents mapped out the structure of his organization and sifted through a global labyrinth of transactions.

“It made us realize how big Li really was,” Ciesliga said. “He was definitely one of the first. We were talking to 40 different agents around the country and around the world, and for them it was a new thing what he was doing.”

The Fall of the Boss

The investigation gathered momentum as the DEA launched Project Sleeping Giant, a campaign against China-connected drug activity.

The agents dug through phone data and old cases to find Li’s ties to the 14K triad. That all-important discovery helped explain his “sprawling spider web of connections” in Asia and the Americas, Ciesliga said.

The 14K connection also pointed at the Chinese power structure. The triad’s former boss in Macao, Wan Kuok Koi, allegedly mixes crime, business and politics to advance China’s interests overseas, according to public allegations by the U.S. government. He is an influential member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference of the Communist Party, according to Treasury Department anti-corruption sanctions filed in 2020. A former senior State Department official, David Asher, described him as “an ambassador of organized crime.”

Wan and a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson have denied the U.S. allegations.

(For ProPublica)

The alleged state-underworld alliance surfaces elsewhere. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, triads attack political rivals of Beijing. Canadian national security chiefs have warned for years about an alliance of Chinese spies, triads and oligarchs. U.S. gangsters assist the Communist Party’s overseas intelligence and influence arm, the United Front, according to national security experts.

The party “uses organized crime-linked money laundering networks to get money to United Front actors and to help them fund their activities,” said Matthew Pottinger, who served as U.S. deputy national security adviser from 2019 to 2021. In return, triads gain “a sense of political security,” he said.

In the Li case, agents learned that clients for his money-moving services included powerful figures in the party, the Chinese government and the diaspora, according to Ciesliga and other former law enforcement officials and people familiar with the case. But it was hard to gather evidence because, as prosecutors said in a court filing, “United States law enforcement rarely, if ever, obtains assistance from Chinese officials in criminal investigations.”

Chinese authorities permit criminals like Li to operate because dark money benefits the elite, strengthens China’s economy and weakens the West, U.S. national security officials say.

“There is a strategy; it’s not individuals acting on their own,” Tobon, the Honolulu HSI chief, said. “The amount of money coming out of China via the underground banking system is so significant that it would be virtually impossible for a government that has as much control of their people as the government of China to not be aware of how it's happening.”

Some critics of Beijing say that analysis applies to another threat: fentanyl. China is the top producer of the lethal drug that has killed tens of thousands of Americans. Although pressure by the Trump administration caused Beijing to reduce the direct flow of the drug to the U.S. in 2019, China’s pharmaceutical sector still sells fentanyl precursors and analogues that reach Mexico, where cartels produce opioids — and work with Chinese money launderers.

In late 2019, Li finally fell. Making him think he would meet an associate, the DEA lured him to Merida, Mexico. Mexican federal police captured him and delivered him to DEA agents at the Houston airport, court documents say. He spent four and a half hours answering questions in English, admitting to “financial transactions involving ‘bad money,’” prosecution documents say.

Prosecutors charged him with leading a conspiracy that washed at least $30 million, a number backed by direct evidence. The full amount was likely in the hundreds of millions, according to law enforcement documents and interviews.

Xizhi Li (Alexandria (Virginia) Sheriff’s Office)

Li pleaded guilty and received a 15-year sentence, according to court records. Chen and half a dozen others also pleaded guilty and went to prison. Colombia extradited Flores, who pleaded guilty and got 16 years.

Li’s high-powered connections put him at risk. His old friend Liu feared for his safety, Simms said, because Li “was involved in Chinese organized crime, in Mexican money laundering, in activity in China that goes to higher levels of the power structure.”

And in this case, the fall of the boss was not the end of the story.

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Jeff Kao and Cezary Podkul contributed reporting.