ProPublica

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

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

ANNA, Ill. — The disturbing 911 call began with sounds of a struggle, then a voice that sounded like a child’s cried out, “Let me go.” When the police dispatcher in the rural southern Illinois community announced herself, no one responded.

She heard other voices, laughing and taunting, then a female voice said, “You want me to break your other finger?”

There was shouting, and someone crying “Let me go” at least a dozen more times.

At one point the victim — who was later identified as a 22-year-old resident of the Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center — said “I don’t like you.”

“I don’t give a shit,” a woman responded.

Almost five minutes passed on the June 2020 call before the dispatcher got the attention of someone on the other end of the line. Then the connection went dead.

With the audio recording in hand, the Illinois State Police launched an investigation. They learned that the call was made as Choate employees attempted to restrain a patient: A smart watch jostled in the struggle had accidentally dialed emergency services. They discovered that the voice heard pleading for help belonged to Alijah Luellen, who has Prader-Willi syndrome, a genetic condition that can cause severe childhood obesity, intellectual disability and behavioral problems. They also discovered that the other voices belonged to the employees paid to care for him.

Nonetheless, such incriminating evidence was not enough to hold anyone accountable.

Threat Caught on 911 Tape

Note: Audio includes screams from a person being restrained.

A section of a five-minute 911 call that recorded a Choate staff threatening a resident, who repeatedly begs “let me go” as they attempt to restrain him.

Such failures of accountability at Choate, which is run by the Illinois Department of Human Services, do not begin or end with the 911 call. Reporting by Lee Enterprises Midwest, Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica reveals a culture of cover-ups that makes it harder to reform the 270-bed developmental center for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and mental illnesses. In dozens of cases, records show that Choate employees have lied to state police and to investigators with IDHS’ Office of the Inspector General; walked out of interviews, plotted to cover up or obfuscate alleged abuse and neglect; and failed to follow policies intended to protect the integrity of investigations.

The findings follow stories by the three news organizations last month that exposed abuses patients have suffered at Choate. In response to those articles, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker issued a warning to state workers: Put an end to “awful” abuses or the state may be forced to shut the facility down.

IDHS did not dispute any of the news organizations’ findings, and it said in a statement that the agency requires employees to cooperate with OIG investigations and trains them on the need to be truthful with both the OIG and state police. Similarly, IDHS trains staff on preventing and reporting abuse and neglect on at least a yearly basis.

Alijah Luellen as a child (Courtesy of Benita Hunter)

But as the 911 incident reveals, cleaning up the facility’s practices may not be easy.

When police questioned several of the employees on shift that night, they all told the investigators that they believed it had been a routine restraint, something they did to Luellen several times a week. One worker also said the order for strapping Luellen to his bed was made after the patient was “verbally uncooperative” and reached for the shirt of an employee who told him he couldn’t stay up and watch TV after 10 p.m., according to the police report. Records show he remained in restraints for two hours. During a medical examination after the incident, a doctor found tenderness in his finger and bruises on his upper body.

The investigators played the audio recording of the 911 call to each employee and wrote down their reactions. According to notes from their interviews, one worker acted nervous and told them all the shouting was making her anxious; another told them he wished that they didn’t have the audio because it “sounds bad.”

Yet they all claimed they couldn’t recognize the voice of the worker who threatened the patient on the 911 call.

In addition, two employees cut their interviews with investigators short and walked out. (Law enforcement cannot compel employees to answer questions, according to state police; IDHS said that employees’ participation in criminal investigations is not mandated as a condition of employment.) Another employee, in internal paperwork, initially stated he assisted in the restraint. He later told police he had falsified the paperwork and wasn’t actually in the room, according to the police report.

The victim’s statement also wasn’t helpful in making the case: Because of Luellen’s severe speech impediment, state police investigators asked him to write down the initials of anyone who hurt him. He returned to them a page of illegible scribbles.

The page that Luellen gave to state police when they asked him to write down the initials of the people who hurt him. (Illinois State Police case file)

This June, two years after the incident, the Union County prosecutor declined to bring charges, citing insufficient evidence. State police interviewed six mental health technicians and one nurse who were working on the unit that night. Two of the mental health techs who participated in restraining Luellen were trainees; one was fired and the other resigned. Two permanent employees have been on paid administrative leave since the incident. None of the permanent employees were fired. The nurse who ordered the restraints left Choate in December 2021 and accepted a new job with the Illinois Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

Reporters obtained a copy of the 911 call by making a Freedom of Information Act request to Union County and provided the agency a copy of the recording and questions about their handling of the case. But when asked about the recording, the agency spokesperson said senior officials had not listened to the 911 call and that it couldn’t be released to them because it was part of an ongoing OIG review. That review could lead to discipline against employees.

Benita Hunter, Luellen’s aunt and legal guardian, also received the recording from reporters; hearing it for the first time left her stunned and heartbroken.

“They’re supposed to be there to support and help the clients that they have coming in,” Hunter said. “Alijah, he wouldn’t be able to explain everything because of his developmental delays, and they know that. He cannot defend himself and speak against them.”

Elusive Justice

While audio evidence of abuse is rare, the actions taken by Choate staff in the aftermath of the investigation were not.

The OIG cited Choate employees in more than four dozen cases between 2015 and 2021 for lying or providing false statements to OIG investigators; for failing to report an allegation within four hours of its discovery, as is required by law; and for other failures to follow department policy concerning the reporting and investigation of abuse and neglect, according to an analysis of OIG records by the news organizations.

Of the 1,180 allegations of abuse and neglect made during that time frame, OIG ruled that only a tiny fraction were substantiated — meaning that it found credible evidence to support the allegation. But records and interviews make clear that investigatory missteps and lack of employee cooperation can quickly derail an investigation.

Stacey Aschemann of Equip for Equality, a disability rights legal aid organization that officially monitors the facility for the state, said, “We commonly observe that no staff saw or heard anything, which is unlikely.”

She added, “We have reason to believe that there are multiple cases that would have been substantiated if additional evidence had been available.”

In an interview, Union County State’s Attorney Tyler Tripp said he was disturbed by the 911 recording in which Luellen was threatened. He was also troubled by the fact that he couldn’t make a case. He kept it open for two years, he said, hoping someone would come forward with more information.

It’s not the only case in which he has encountered stonewalling that has made prosecution difficult.

“In these types of situations, a select group of bad actors coordinate in anticipation of an investigation to get their stories straight, to obscure evidence and to frustrate the investigation,” Tripp said.

He said investigations are typically stymied if patient testimony is not corroborated by employee witnesses. In addition, he said, some patients aren’t even able to tell police what happened. Nearly 15% of residents at Choate have a developmental disability that is diagnosed as severe or profound, and about 10% are nonverbal.

Another case from the same year that has languished on Tripp’s desk involves a resident who alleges a Choate employee wrapped a towel around the patient’s neck until he passed out, according to two people who are intimately familiar with the investigation but not authorized to comment on it. A different staffer discovered the patient unconscious with a red mark on his neck.

The accused employee denied the accusation and refused an interview by police. Other employees claimed they didn’t know what happened.

Tripp has yet to make a decision on whether he will press charges, and he declined to comment on the details of the case. He said that in general, when he delays a decision, it’s because an investigation has brought forth some evidence but not as much as is needed to successfully prosecute a case.

Though uncooperative facility staff had long frustrated state police investigations, administrators became the target of an investigation in January 2020. It started when two employees reported that they witnessed a colleague, Kevin Jackson, remove his belt and repeatedly use it to whip a female patient. The employees, who worked in a neighboring building, reported that they saw the assault through the victim’s bedroom window.

After an OIG investigator notified state police of the allegation against Jackson, assistant administrators Teresa Smith and Gary Goins looked at the investigatory file and then sent a psychologist to speak with the patient while the police were still on their way, according to then-security chief Barry Smoot, in his testimony before a Union County grand jury. After the police arrived, the victim said that someone other than Jackson had hit her.

Longstanding OIG policy had prohibited administrative involvement in abuse and neglect investigations to avoid conflicts of interest. According to Smoot, facility director Bryant Davis also accessed the file, along with Smith, on a different occasion. And state police Sgt. Rick White testified before a Union County grand jury that the administrators’ interventions were unusual and threatened to derail the investigation, court records show.

Jackson, the mental health tech, pleaded not guilty to a felony battery charge and his case is pending. The administrators were also initially charged with felony official misconduct; the state’s attorney withdrew those charges but left open the possibility of filing new ones.

Senior department officials have defended the actions of the Choate administrators. Attempts to reach the administrators for comment, including facility director Davis, were not successful. Jackson declined to comment.

State Sen. Terri Bryant, a Republican from Murphysboro whose district includes Choate, said she was alarmed by the department’s handling of this case. Shortly after the reported assault, Bryant said, she received a call from a worker informing her that employees had placed paper over the windows on the unit where the incident occurred.

Bryant said she went to see it for herself, then called an IDHS administrator in Springfield to inquire about it. He called the facility and was told the paper had been taken down. He relayed that information to Bryant. But Bryant said she was sitting outside the building when he called her back and could see from her car that it was still up. In August, 20 months after the assault, the paper was still there.

An IDHS spokesperson said, “At times, paper was on windows because the window fixtures were on order. The paper would have been for privacy in resident bedrooms.”

Windows are covered with paper at Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center. (Whitney Curtis for ProPublica) Few Consequences

Serious consequences in cases of abuse and misconduct are rare. The Illinois State Police opened at least 40 investigations at Choate over the past decade. Of those, 28, including Luellen’s case, did not result in any criminal charges, with the Union County prosecutor most frequently citing insufficient evidence as the reason for not moving forward. The other 12 investigations resulted in felony charges against 26 employees, with most pleading guilty to misdemeanor charges or having their cases dismissed entirely. (A few are pending.) Only one employee was convicted of a felony — for hiding evidence, rather than for the underlying abuse. To date, no one has served prison time.

Beyond the lack of criminal sanctions, employees are also rarely fired for misconduct, including actions that obstruct investigations. According to a review of records where OIG cited Choate for problems, by far the most common response to the deficiencies cited was a recommendation for “retraining.” The response was included in cases where OIG cited employees for lying or otherwise impeding an investigation. One former official at Choate said the department’s retraining amounted to providing employees with a policy document and having them sign a form saying that they’d read it.

In one 2016 case, Choate planned a training for the entire staff that addresses “late reporting of abuse/neglect, staff members encouraging, bribing or coercing individuals regarding OIG investigations and obstruction with an ongoing OIG investigation,” IDHS records show. The department redacted details about what prompted the retraining.

In 25 cases, the department acknowledged a need to retrain workers in how to treat Choate’s clients with “dignity and respect.” IDHS’ policy for employees demands that they do not engage in dehumanizing practices, such as cursing, yelling, mocking or other cruel treatment.

Though the details of incidents were redacted in most of these cases, employees have been cited by OIG in recent years for using racist, homophobic and derogatory language toward people with disabilities, including calling them “retards.”

Code of Silence

C. Thomas Cook, who has worked with people with developmental disabilities for more than 50 years across four Midwestern states, including Illinois, said that it’s not uncommon for employees in large facilities like Choate to close ranks and protect one another in the face of abuse allegations.

When the code of silence is deeply entrenched, Cook said, it takes far more than retraining to change the culture. Things like cameras and monitors can help, Cook said, but employees also need to know that they will face strict sanctions, including criminal charges and dismissals, if they cover for abusive colleagues.

“There are ways to disrupt that code of silence,” Cook said. “It’s the responsibility of the people who run the programs to do it.”

It's especially problematic, he said, in communities where the employees are part of a tightly knit population with a common interest in protecting each other.

That characterization could perfectly describe the facility in rural Anna, a town with a population of about 4,200. Reporters identified numerous instances in which investigations involved two or more suspects who were relatives, friends or in romantic relationships with one another, according to the police records.

In one case, a Choate social worker offered to help police interview patients during an abuse investigation, but then police discovered she was the girlfriend of the technician who was the target of the investigation. Two recently charged employees are relatives of the current acting security chief, whose job is on the front line of investigations. He declined to comment. This August, a senior IDHS official grew concerned enough about the familial relationships between security officers and the employees they were investigating that he sent an email to select staff reminding them of the need to recuse themselves to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest, emails obtained by reporters showed.

When a facility is critical to a struggling local economy, Cook said, that can compound the incentives to cover up misconduct. Choate serves the poorest part of the state, and the facility has been Union County’s largest employer for decades. A former administrator once told The Southern Illinoisan that if Choate wasn’t there, “Anna would dry up and probably blow away.” The facility has employed generations of the same families, including that of longtime Anna Mayor Steve Hartline, whose mother and father worked there while he was growing up.

Hartline went on to serve for decades as head of security at Choate, where his officers were the first line of inquiry when there was an allegation of patient mistreatment. Hartline said he believed the scrutiny resulting from the recent staff arrests has given Choate an unfair bad rap; he rejected the premise that employees were protecting each other.

“There’s no such thing as a code of silence at Choate. If there is something found, such as a broken policy, it’s duly noted and dealt with by administration and labor relations,” he said.

But Hunter, Luellen’s aunt, said that it was upsetting that the employees who threatened and mocked her nephew did not face serious consequences for their behavior. Luellen has since moved to a different state-run center about 100 miles north. But during the more than two years the young man lived at Choate, Hunter said she believed staff restrained him too often and failed to teach him skills to manage his behavior. Every time she spoke with staff, “they promised that he was getting the utmost care,” she said. “But my heart and my spirit was not telling me that he was actually receiving that from them.”

The Numbers Behind Choate’s Cover-Up Culture

Between 2015 and 2021, the Office of the Inspector General for the Illinois Department of Human Services received 1,180 allegations of abuse and neglect at Choate. But late reporting, uncooperative employees, lack of video evidence, conflicting witness accounts and other investigatory missteps can result in the OIG being unable to obtain enough evidence to substantiate an allegation — even when there are unexplained patient injuries.

We requested these records, but OIG refused to send them all, citing state law that prohibits the release of details from unsubstantiated cases. They did send a stack of information from that same time period regarding substantiated cases, along with records from 184 cases in which the OIG identified problems and asked Choate administrators to respond with their plans for remedying the situation. These are cases in which OIG flagged serious issues, although they may not have had enough evidence to support the allegation.

The files they sent are a record of Choate’s required responses. Most of them were heavily redacted, but they offered a window into some of the problems OIG investigators face at Choate:

• In 29 cases, Choate administrators acknowledged that employees failed to follow department policy concerning the reporting and investigation of abuse and neglect.

• In 11 instances, Choate employees failed to report an allegation of abuse or neglect within four hours of discovery, as the law requires.

• In nine cases, the OIG found that employees lied or provided false statements to investigators.

• In more than one-third of the 184 cases where the OIG asked for a response, the only recommendation from Choate officials was to “retrain” employees.

• In 14 cases, employees were discharged, terminated or suspended.

Ultimately, the OIG revealed that over the seven years for which we requested data, it was only able to substantiate 48 cases — roughly 4%.

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Gabriel Sandoval contributed research.

by Will Sennott, The New Bedford Light

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

The U.S. Department of Justice has begun looking at possible antitrust issues in the New England fishing industry, amid growing concern about consolidation and market dominance by private equity investors.

Representatives of two fishing industry groups said that two DOJ lawyers interviewed them in September. “We focused on how this level of consolidation is a regulatory failure,” said Mark DeCristoforo, executive director of the Massachusetts Seafood Collaborative, who was interviewed. His organization represents a diverse coalition of fishermen and related businesses, all of whom he said have been impacted by regulations that favor only the largest companies.

Brendan Ballou and Richard Mosier, special counsels for the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, spoke on a conference call with DeCristoforo and a representative of the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, who asked not to be named. Apart from its law enforcement actions, the Antitrust Division often initiates policy discussions with experts and insiders to learn more about the competitive dynamics in a particular industry.

Following the interview, Ballou emailed DeCristoforo to request a copy of a controversial proposal that independent fishermen feared would enable private equity-backed companies to dominate the lucrative scallop market.

“We are looking forward to digging further into this general issue to understand the competition concerns and possible ways to address it,” Ballou emailed DeCristoforo.

In an earlier email, Ballou said he was inquiring based on an investigation published on July 6 by ProPublica and The New Bedford Light. The investigation found that labor conditions have deteriorated as an overhaul of federal regulations, adopted in 2010, has allowed private equity firms and foreign investors to dominate parts of the New England fishing industry.

One such firm is Blue Harvest Fisheries, which operates out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and is the largest holder of permits to catch groundfish such as pollock, haddock and ocean perch. The investigation traced the company’s ownership to a billionaire Dutch family via a private equity firm. Over the past seven years, records show, the company has purchased the rights to catch 12% of groundfish in the region, approaching the antitrust cap of 15.5%. It further boosts its market share by leasing fishing rights from other permit owners. There are no antitrust restrictions on leasing and very little transparency; the identities of specific lessors and lessees go unreported.

A spokesperson for Blue Harvest Fisheries said that the DOJ had not contacted the company. He said the company would welcome any inquiries. Ballou and a DOJ spokesperson declined to comment for this article. Mosier could not be reached for comment.

Blue Harvest has said in past statements that it is “dedicated to acting as a responsible steward of the vitally important domestic U.S. fishing industry and actively supports regulation for the benefit of the industry at large and the communities in which we serve.” The Coast Guard approved its “ownership and capital structure,” it said.

New Bedford, a small city on the southern coast of Massachusetts, is the heart of New England’s fishing industry and the top-earning commercial fishing port in the nation. Despite this growth, the number of employers in New Bedford’s fishing industry has dropped by more than 30% in the last decade, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Those still employed are working longer hours. In a federal survey published last year, 45% of fishermen reported working 18 hours or more per day, up from 32% in 2012.

After the investigation was published, three U.S. senators condemned what they described as lax government antitrust policies. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., urged a review by the DOJ.

“This alarming investigation raises serious concern about possible violations of federal law,” Blumenthal said in a July statement. “A powerful foreign private equity giant has gained huge power over a vital American industry.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is part of the Commerce Department, regulates the fishing industry. In September, the regional council that advises NOAA on fisheries regulation in New England shot down, by a 15-1 vote, the proposal that Ballou had requested a copy of earlier that month. Backed by Blue Harvest and other large companies, but opposed by many independent fishermen, the proposal would have lifted a prohibition on leasing of the rights to catch scallops.

“This is being driven by the largest companies on the East Coast,” said New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell, addressing the regional council before the vote. “This will lead to consolidation because it is intended to lead to consolidation.” He added, “Small businesses will go out of business and the port economy will suffer.”

“Private equity already has a grip on the industry,” council member Eric Hansen said after the vote. The proposal “would have given the largest companies more power to consolidate,” he said.

Congress is concerned as well. A recent bill passed by the Natural Resources Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, as part of an effort to reauthorize the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the primary regulatory framework for the fishing industry, would create more transparency in the opaque permit ownership and leasing markets. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August, also allocated $20 million to NOAA to “improve agency transparency, accountability, and public engagement.”

The DOJ has probed antitrust issues in the fishing industry before. An investigation by the department led to the 2020 sentencing of Chris Lischewski, the former chief executive of Bumble Bee Seafoods, to 40 months in prison for conspiring to fix prices of canned tuna. Lischewski was also a Blue Harvest director and investor. Lischewski resigned from the board during the investigation and his ownership stake was transferred to his wife, a Blue Harvest spokesperson said this week.

Ballou first contacted DeCristoforo on Sept. 8. “I read the recent ProPublica piece on consolidation in the New England fishing industry, and your organization’s recent statement on proposed changes to scallop fishing boat leasing regulations,” Ballou wrote. “We were wondering if you might be willing to talk about the general issues the industry faces, and potential policy solutions.”

On Sept. 13, DeCristoforo spoke to Ballou and Mosier over the phone from his office, which is stationed along Boston’s Fish Pier. The interview lasted about 30 minutes.

The DOJ lawyers “seemed to be in education mode,” said the representative of the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, a Massachusetts-based group that advocates for independent fishermen, who was also interviewed.

DeCristoforo said he was eager to air his organization’s grievances with a regulatory system that he said unjustly favors the largest companies. But he was also skeptical of the DOJ’s ability to address what he described as structural issues allowing private equity to take over the industry.

“This is not the fault of one Wild West company. This is a systemic issue,” he said this week. “What we need is true reform to the regulatory scheme that has forced this consolidation in the first place.”

“Our industry has been decimated,” he said. “We want it to remain an industry that a young person can enter and be able to prosper and thrive.”

by Melissa Sanchez

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 public has largely stopped paying attention to what’s happening inside shelters and other facilities that house immigrant children since President Donald Trump left office, and particularly since the end of his administration’s zero tolerance policy, which separated families at the southern border.

But the shelter system remains in place under President Joe Biden. The numbers can fluctuate but, as of earlier this week, more than 9,000 unaccompanied immigrant children were in custody, according to data from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees the privately run shelters.

The vast majority are children and teens from Central America who entered the country through the U.S.-Mexico border without a parent or legal guardian. The shelter system is designed to house these children temporarily — the average length of stay is about a month — until they can be placed with a relative or family friend or, in some cases, in foster care.

Last fall, ProPublica reported on one Chicago shelter’s failure to meet the language and mental health needs of dozens of traumatized Afghan children and teens who’d been brought to the country without family by the U.S. during its widely criticized military pullout from Afghanistan. Many of them had no one who could take them in; some tried to kill themselves, harmed others or ran away.

Months later, we saw those problems repeat themselves as the youths were transferred to other facilities. Office of Refugee Resettlement officials have said they’re doing their best to support the Afghan children by providing interpreters, mental health services and additional staffing. As of this week, some 84 unaccompanied Afghan minors remain in ORR custody, federal officials said. Some have been in custody for a year.

Another issue we’ve come across in our reporting is ORR’s system of “significant incident reports.” Shelter staff are required to report to ORR any “significant incidents” that affect children’s health, well-being or safety.

The system is intended to elevate serious concerns and protect children, but over the years, dozens of shelter staffers, advocates and children have told ProPublica that it has been overused and negatively affects children. For example, Afghan youth have expressed “extreme distress around how SIRs will be used against them,” said Neha Desai, senior director of immigration for the National Center for Youth Law, which is authorized to interview children in U.S. immigration custody.

“They’ve asked whether these reports will impact if or when their parents are evacuated” from Afghanistan, Desai said in an email. Some children “have been told by staff that SIRs will delay their release from custody.”

Last month, two prominent immigrant rights organizations that work with children in ORR custody issued a report calling for an overhaul of the incident reporting system. The report, “Punishing trauma: Incident Reporting and Immigrant Children in Government Custody,” is based on surveys last year of staff at ORR facilities and of attorneys and social workers who work with unaccompanied children.

An ORR official did not respond to the report’s specific findings. But, in a statement, the official said significant incident reports are primarily meant as internal records to document and communicate incidents for the agency’s awareness and follow-up. Last year, ORR revised its policies to limit the sharing and misuse of confidential and mental health information contained in SIRs. (For example, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was previously using notes taken during therapy sessions inside shelters against children in immigation court, The Washington Post reported.)

“ORR continues to clarify through technical assistance to care providers and ongoing policy development that SIRs should never be used by care provider staff as a form of discipline or punishment of the child,” the ORR official said.

I spoke with the primary authors of the report that calls for the overhaul of the incident reporting system. Jane Liu is senior litigation attorney for the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, and Azadeh Erfani is a senior policy analyst at the National Immigrant Justice Center. We discussed how significant incident reports are used inside shelters and the authors’ ideas for reform.

This is a condensed, edited version of that conversation.

What would you say are the biggest challenges that kids face when they’re inside ORR facilities?

Jane Liu: Children do best in a family-based setting, but the large majority of the children in government custody are in large congregate care settings, where they often face a lot of restrictions on their movement, monitoring and supervision. They’ve also likely just navigated a very difficult migration journey that may have included exposure to violence and traumatic experiences. They may have suffered traumatic experiences in their home country. They may have been separated from their families at the border. Then they go into custody and they’re navigating this completely unfamiliar environment in a large-scale setting where they often aren’t receiving the individualized care that they need. They may also be facing language barriers. And so it’s extremely stressful for them and disorienting.

What prompted you to look into significant incident reports, or SIRs?

Azadeh Erfani: They have been on both of our radars for some time now. They are a really central facet for children’s legal cases. A child’s placement level — where they end up within the security hierarchy of ORR — is greatly impacted by the number and the type of SIRs that they have.

On a personal level, I’ve represented kids with dozens of SIRs. I’ve seen up close how they really have widespread impact for kids who end up being branded as “problem children” and basically are stuck in the system with very little recourse.

What kinds of behavior can lead to a child accumulating these reports?

Erfani: It could be sharing food. It could be getting up and going to the bathroom at the wrong time. It can also be a child acting out, testing boundaries. It could be a child simply disclosing something about their past. If they disclose that they’ve survived trafficking, abuse or neglect, or have been preyed upon by gangs in their home country, those kinds of things can trigger an SIR. So the scope is really broad, which really leads to overreporting.

What are the consequences for children who accumulate SIRs?

Erfani: ICE has the authority to review every single child’s case when they are about to turn 18. They make a decision to either take them into adult custody or release them on their own recognizance. At that juncture, SIRs play a pivotal role.

We’ve also seen SIRs getting used in immigration court or in asylum interviews to basically put the child on the spot to defend something that was written up about them that they may not even have known was written up.

I’ve heard over and over from people who work in the system that the accumulation of SIRs makes it harder for kids to leave shelters, even if there is an available sponsor. Can you talk about how that happens?

Liu: It can create all sorts of barriers to release. It can lead to children getting “stepped up” [to more secure, restrictive facilities] and then it’s harder to step back down. Often a long-term foster care provider won’t accept a child unless they’ve had a period without behavioral SIRs. But even if a child has a potential sponsor, we’ve seen it lead to requirements for home studies where ORR will say that “These SIRs indicate that the child may have a need, and we need to investigate whether the sponsor can fill that need.” Ultimately, what that means is that it delays the release of the child to a family member.

In our reporting on unaccompanied Afghan kids in ORR custody, I was surprised to see how often shelter staff called police to deal with behavioral issues. How common is police intervention at shelters?

Liu: It’s a much bigger problem than the public may be aware of. Often those children are not getting the services that they need, such as mental health support. And by that I mean holistic services tailored to the unique experiences of each child. They’re also usually facing prolonged periods of custody, so they’re also experiencing detention fatigue. And it’s not surprising that they can act out and that there can be these sorts of behavioral challenges. But what is extremely troubling is that when these behaviors are documented in SIRs, they can sometimes prompt ORR facilities to report the incident to police, leading to unnecessary interactions for children with law enforcement and even arrests.

What should shelters be doing?

Erfani: One of our recommendations to ORR is to actually train staff in crisis prevention. For the most part, there’s a very passive approach to incidents. There’s not a lot of scrutiny with respect to how to prevent these crises from erupting in the first place.

SIRs very much lack the context of the child. Being in a congregate setting indefinitely can be incredibly, incredibly aggravating. And of course, they are bringing tons of trauma because of their backgrounds. So oftentimes these triggers, this background, if they receive bad news from the home country, those kinds of things are absent from the SIR and make it look like this child is incredibly erratic. That’s also really alarming from a trauma-informed perspective.

This makes me think about the dozens of Afghan children who remain in federal custody. Can you talk about what role SIRs have played in these kids’ experiences inside the shelters?

Erfani: The Afghan kids walked into a really terribly broken system right after escaping a war zone. The fact that they may not have had a sponsor lined up meant that they had to spend more time in custody. And every day they kept seeing kids leaving while they had to stay. That’s heartbreaking. Then you pile on the language barriers, the cultural competency barriers. A lot of their behavior is a manifestation of trauma that staff isn’t equipped to understand. And it was much easier to write up reports, or call law enforcement, than it was to try to put the system on trial itself, to see what’s really missing within the facility and address those needs on a systemic level.

Inadequate staffing and turnover at shelters seems to be a chronic problem. How do you see that playing into the SIRs?

Erfani: I think it’s really hard on staff. The SIR system is incredibly time-consuming. They have to dedicate tons and tons of resources into it. The rules are really intricate. When there’s turnover, for the new staff a compliance mindset can settle in, where it becomes less about that child’s needs, less about these child welfare principles, and instead about, “Well, I should probably be writing this report.”

Liu: It’s really critical that the government provides more support for facility staff, whether it be ongoing training or more funding for more staff with expertise in child welfare, mental health and the needs of immigrant children. I think it’s really up to the government to understand that children’s time in custody can be very difficult for them and figure out ways to prevent situations from escalating and being extremely harmful for children.

Have you shared your concerns or this report with ORR, and if so have you gotten any response yet?

Liu: We have shared the report with the government. It is not a new revelation to ORR that this is something of huge concern for those of us who advocate for children. We have been raising concerns about SIRs in particular with greater frequency in the last couple of years.

Erfani: We strongly believe that nothing short of a complete transformation of incident reporting is going to meet their duty to these children.

It really feels like issues affecting immigrant kids in ORR custody have just fallen off the radar since Trump left office. How do you get people to pay attention?

Erfani: That’s a tough one. We’re just trying to really put this problem on the map and then try to address it. And it’s not a Republican problem. It’s not a Democrat problem. It’s really something that’s in the system.

Liu: We know incident reporting is not a sexy topic. It’s not something flashy. It doesn’t involve Gov. Greg Abbott or Gov. Ron DeSantis. And so it’s hard to get people to see the urgency. But I think it sort of goes to the whole family separation thing. When that occurred, I think people could understand the humanity involved. That children are not being treated as children, and children are being traumatized by government actions.

I think a lot of people think of their own children. How would they want their own children to be treated? If your child was acting out or talking back to you, would you want a report written up and for that report to be used against your child for all sorts of purposes? The reality is that immigrant kids, particularly those in custody, are not treated like other kids. And that should be a concern to all of us. That’s a failure on all our parts.

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by Ed Williams, Searchlight New Mexico

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

Four years ago, kids in New Mexico’s child welfare system were in a dire situation. Kids were being cycled through all sorts of emergency placements: offices, youth homeless shelters, residential treatment centers rife with abuse. Some never found anything stable and ended up on the streets after they turned 18.

A lawsuit brought by 14 foster children in 2018 claimed the state was “locking New Mexico’s foster children into a vicious cycle of declining physical, mental and behavioral health.” The state settled the case in February 2020 and committed to reforms.

But two and a half years later, New Mexico has delivered on just a portion of those promises, leaving some of the state’s most vulnerable foster youth without the mental health services they need.

In a settlement agreement for the suit, known as Kevin S. after the name of the lead plaintiff, the state committed to eliminating inappropriate placements and putting every child into a licensed foster home. It also agreed to build a new system of community-based mental health services that would be available to every child in New Mexico, not just those in foster care.

Yet the Children, Youth and Families Department continues to make hundreds of placements in emergency facilities every year. Although CYFD has reduced the number of children in residential treatment centers, it continues to place high-needs children and teens in youth homeless shelters. Mental health services for foster youth, which includes all kids in CYFD protective services custody, not just those in foster homes, are severely lacking, lawyers and child advocates say.

The department said it has worked to build new mental health programs and services for kids. “Most of these efforts are successful and are on a path to expansion,” Rob Johnson, public information officer for CYFD, said in a written statement.

“This is an incredible amount of progress made in a relatively short time in a system that had been systemically torn down and neglected,” he wrote. “We’re not where we want to be, and we continue to look and move ahead to create and strengthen the state supports for those with behavioral health needs.”

A Push to Get Kids Out of Residential Treatment Centers

The Kevin S. lawsuit was filed amid a national reckoning over child welfare agencies’ reliance on residential treatment centers. Similar lawsuits in Oregon, Texas and elsewhere accused states of inappropriately placing kids in residential treatment centers, often far from their homes, and in other types of so-called congregate care. Kids placed in those facilities got worse, not better, the suits argued.

After Texas failed to comply with court-ordered fixes to its child welfare system, a federal judge said she plans to fine the state. The Oregon lawsuit is proceeding despite the state’s efforts to have a judge dismiss the case.

Several months before the New Mexico suit was filed, federal lawmakers passed the Family First Prevention Services Act, which redirected federal funding in order to pressure states into phasing out large residential treatment centers. In their place, the law called for a new type of facility to treat children with acute mental health needs: small, strictly regulated facilities called qualified residential treatment programs.

Child welfare advocates across the country welcomed these reforms. But they warned that shutting down residential treatment centers without alternatives could leave kids in an equally desperate situation — a scenario they said was reminiscent of the effort to shut down mental hospitals starting in the 1950s.

“I believe we do need a change in group care,” U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, said during a 2016 debate in Congress. “One has to ask where these children will go if those group facilities are no longer available.”

“We Know We Can Find Them Better Beds”

The first residential treatment center in New Mexico to close, in early 2019, was the state’s largest: a 120-bed facility in Albuquerque called Desert Hills that was the target of lawsuits and an investigation into physical and sexual abuse.

Many of the lawsuits’ claims — which Desert Hills and its parent company Acadia Healthcare denied or claimed insufficient knowledge of — remain unresolved pending trials. Other cases have been settled, with undisclosed terms.

A spokesman for Acadia said Desert Hills decided not to renew its license “given the severe challenges in the New Mexico system” and worked with CYFD on a transition plan.

Desert Hills in Albuquerque, which closed following abuse accusations (Kitra Cahana, special to ProPublica)

“Of course we are not going to drop kids on the street,” CYFD’s chief counsel at the time, Kate Girard, told the Santa Fe New Mexican soon after. “We know we can find them better beds.”

Some of the kids who had been living at Desert Hills were sent to homeless shelters. Others went to residential treatment centers in other states, which the CYFD secretary at the time publicly admitted put kids out of sight and at higher risk of abuse.

State officials have said they send kids out of state when they don’t have appropriate facilities in New Mexico, and they make placements based on individualized plans for each child.

Those out-of-state residential treatment centers included facilities run by Acadia. One foster teen was raped by a staffer at her out-of-state placement, according to an ongoing federal lawsuit. The facility has denied the allegation in court; Acadia has denied knowledge of the alleged assault.

In January 2019, a few months after the Kevin S. lawsuit was filed, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham took office after promising during her campaign to address the state’s dismal national standing in child welfare. She asked for an increase in CYFD’s annual budget, and the legislature complied, appropriating an 11% increase over the year before.

“A top CYFD priority is increasing access to community-based mental health services for children and youth,” Lujan Grisham said in a speech in June 2019. “We are expanding and will continue to expand these programs aggressively and relentlessly.”

State officials settled the Kevin S. suit in February 2020, agreeing to a road map for reforming its foster care system. Among them: a deadline later that year to stop housing kids in CYFD offices when workers couldn’t find a foster home.

That deadline passed, but CYFD didn’t stop. The practice continues today.

While the state is committed to do everything it can to keep children from sleeping in offices, sometimes — such as in the middle of the night — the best option is to let children stay in an office while staff search for an appropriate placement, CYFD spokesperson Charlie Moore-Pabst wrote in an email.

All of CYFD's county offices have places for children to sleep, he explained. “These rooms are furnished like a youth’s bedroom, with beds, linens, entertainment, clothing, and access to bathrooms with showers,” he wrote. "They’re not merely office spaces."

The state continued to crack down on residential treatment centers. In 2021, a facility for youth with sexual behavior problems closed after the state opened an investigation into abuse allegations. Some of those residents were moved to homeless shelters.

“From our point of view, it was almost clear that the state didn’t want us to be there,” said Nathan Crane, an attorney for Youth Health Associates, the company that ran the facility. Crane said that to his knowledge, none of the allegations against the treatment center were substantiated. “We mutually agreed to shut the door and walk away.”

Johnson said that when it learned of safety concerns at these facilities, it promptly investigated. “Following the investigations,” Johnson wrote, “CYFD determined that it was in the best interest of the children in its care to assist in the closure of the facilities and find alternate arrangements for each child.”

Meanwhile, the state lagged in meeting its commitments to build a better mental health system. The state had met only 11 of its 49 targets in the Kevin S. settlement as of mid-2021, according to experts appointed to monitor its progress.

Although the parties to the suit agreed to extend deadlines during the pandemic, the plaintiffs said in a November 2021 press release, “This dismal pace of change is not acceptable. The State’s delayed and incomplete responses demonstrate that children in the State’s custody are still not receiving the care they need to heal and grow.”

“Sick to My Stomach After They Put All Those Kids on the Street”

In December 2021, an Albuquerque residential treatment center called Bernalillo Academy closed amid an investigation into abuse allegations. The largest remaining facility at the time, Bernalillo specialized in treating kids with autism and other developmental disabilities.

“Being accused of abuse and neglect is a serious offense that questions our integrity and goes against what we are working hard for here at Bernalillo,” Amir Rafiei, then Bernalillo Academy’s executive director, wrote in an email to CYFD challenging the investigation.

Child welfare officials called an emergency meeting of shelter directors, looking for beds for the displaced kids. CYFD went on to place some of those kids in shelters.

”It’s important to note that placements were only made to shelters that fit their admission criteria,” Johnson wrote in the statement to Searchlight and ProPublica.

Bernalillo Academy (Kitra Cahana, special to ProPublica)

Michael Bronson, a former CYFD licensing official, said state officials had no plan for where to put the kids housed in those residential treatment centers.

“I thought it was almost criminal,” said Bronson, who conducted the investigations into Desert Hills and Bernalillo. “I was sick to my stomach after they put all those kids on the street.”

CYFD Secretary Barbara Vigil insisted in an interview that officials did have a plan. Teams of employees involved in the children’s care discussed each case in detail, she said: “Each of those children had a transition plan out of the facility into a safe and relatively stable placement.”

But Emily Martin, CYFD Protective Services Bureau Chief, acknowledged, “When facilities have closed, it has left a gap.”

There are now 130 beds in residential treatment centers in the state, less than half the number before the Kevin S. suit was filed.

State Says It’s Working on New Programs

Frustrated with the lack of progress, the Kevin S. plaintiffs’ attorneys started a formal dispute resolution process in June. The state agreed to take specific steps to comply with the settlement agreement.

The monitors have written another report on the state’s compliance with the settlement, which is due to become public later this year. Sara Crecca, one of the children’s attorneys involved in the settlement, said her team has been involved in discussions with the monitors about the report, but she’s not allowed to disclose them.

“What I can say is that my clients have seen no substantial change,” she said. “If the state was following the road map in the settlement, that wouldn’t be the case.”

Officials stressed that they are making progress. They say they have opened more sites that can work with families to create plans of care; expanded programs for teen parents and teenagers aging out of care; and made community health clinics available to foster children.

CYFD also has funded community health workers and created a program to train families as treatment foster care providers. Four families are participating in that program, Johnson, the CYFD spokesperson, wrote. The department plans to open two small group homes, with six beds each, for youth with high needs, including aggression.

Four years after the federal Family First Act was passed, New Mexico has not licensed a single qualified residential treatment program, the type of facility that is supposed to replace residential treatment centers. The state said in an email to Searchlight and ProPublica that it is “laying the foundation” to create those facilities.

In the meantime, because of the law, the state is on the hook to pay for any stays in congregate care settings that last longer than two weeks.

In August, Vigil appeared before New Mexico legislators to update them on the department’s progress in building a new system of mental health services. In response to pointed questions, she said the department is required by law to serve the highest-needs kids, but it wasn’t doing so. “Quite frankly,” she said, “we don't have a system of care in place to do that.”

Another deadline looms. By December, the state must have all of those new programs available to the children in its care.

“Will it be 100%?” Vigil said in an interview. “Again, I would say no, but that doesn't mean that the system of care is not improving tremendously under this administration.”

Help Us Investigate the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department

We're working to investigate the state’s treatment of teenagers who are in the custody of the Children, Youth and Families Department. To get to the bottom of what’s actually happening, we need help from the people who see the issues firsthand. Filling out the survey below will help us understand the situation and figure out where we should direct our investigation. We’re trying to reach as many people as possible who deal with teenagers in CYFD custody.

We take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these stories for the purposes of our reporting and will not publish your name or information without your consent.

We are the only ones reading what you submit. If you would prefer to use an encrypted app, you can reach out via Signal at 505-699-6401. You can also email ed@searchlightnm.org.

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Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Ed Williams, Searchlight New Mexico, with data analysis by Joel Jacobs, ProPublica, photography by Kitra Cahana, special to ProPublica

This story contains descriptions of mental illness and self-harm.

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

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

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

Hours after Jaidryon Platero attempted suicide, an employee of New Mexico’s child welfare agency visited the 16-year-old in the hospital to investigate whether he was a victim of child neglect.

Platero winced whenever he turned his head, a sharp jolt of pain emanating from the stab wounds he’d left in his neck during a mental breakdown.

The teen needed mental health care and was unsafe living on the streets, the state child welfare investigator concluded in a report. Platero’s mother, whom he had been living with, couldn’t be located. He was taken into foster care and transferred to a psychiatric hospital.

About a week later, doctors there deemed him stable enough to be discharged. Platero gathered his belongings — a bag holding a change of clothes, a pamphlet from the American Association of Suicidology and a prescription for an antipsychotic drug — and climbed into a silver van emblazoned with the New Mexico state seal.

He hoped that the worker with the Children, Youth and Families Department would take him to his grandmother’s home near the oil and gas town of Farmington. Instead, they pulled up to a youth homeless shelter.

Platero would spend six months at the San Juan County Emergency Crisis Shelter, sleeping on a metal-framed bed with a thin foam mattress.

Facilities like this, known as children’s crisis shelters, are licensed to temporarily house kids with nowhere to go. They don’t provide psychiatric care. But they are home to some of the foster system’s highest-needs teens, an investigation by Searchlight New Mexico and ProPublica has found.

After Platero’s mental breakdown, he was placed at the San Juan County Emergency Crisis Shelter in Farmington, New Mexico.

It’s not supposed to be this way. Two and a half years ago, the state of New Mexico settled a landmark civil rights lawsuit, agreeing to place teens in foster homes or with relatives instead of emergency facilities such as youth shelters. The agreement also called for the state to reduce its reliance on residential treatment centers — troubled facilities that had become hotbeds of abuse and assault.

The state has fulfilled part of its agreement, largely by shutting down several residential treatment centers. Due in part to those closures, the number of children in group facilities, which includes shelters and residential treatment centers, has dropped by about 60% over the four years ending in August, according to the state.

But New Mexico has yet to build the system it promised: “a statewide, community-based behavioral health system that all children and families will be able to access.”

With few other options, child welfare workers place youth in crisis shelters hundreds of times every year. Some of these teenagers are suicidal, police records show. Others have such diagnoses as PTSD, depression or developmental disabilities.

These teens spend days, weeks or months in dorm-like facilities that don’t offer intensive mental health treatment, according to state records and interviews with shelter employees. Often, youth are abruptly moved to another shelter. And then another. Sometimes those moves are precipitated by a fight or a breakdown. Sometimes the kids run away.

Youth advocates and attorneys call it the “shelter shuffle.”

The state acknowledges this is a problem. Most of the 1,800 or so youth in foster care — which encompasses all children in custody of CYFD’s protective services office — live with foster families in their own communities, said Rob Johnson, public information officer for CYFD, in a written statement. “However, a small number require a higher level of care that, in some circumstances, is currently not available in New Mexico,” he said.

To understand how this plays out, Searchlight and ProPublica interviewed staff at the nine facilities in New Mexico that house the vast majority of foster teenagers at shelters, as well as CYFD officials, current and former frontline child welfare workers, law enforcement, children’s attorneys, child advocates and current and former foster youth.

The toll on shelter residents is evident from records of hundreds of 911 calls made since 2019. Practically every day, someone at a shelter that accepts foster teens in New Mexico calls for help.

Some calls describe teenagers harming themselves or threatening suicide. Others involve youth who have attacked or threatened staff or other residents. Missing persons calls are frequent, often involving the same runaways again and again.

New Mexico is a window into challenges faced by many states dealing with a nationwide shortage of foster homes and a federal crackdown on residential treatment centers. Other states have turned to offices, hotels and sometimes shelters when no foster home is available. But the situation in New Mexico is particularly acute because the state ranks last in child welfare, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

New Mexico’s reliance on youth homeless shelters is not new. Though the state could not provide precise annual figures on shelter placements, shelter managers say they have seen more referrals for youth with severe behavioral problems since CYFD began closing residential treatment centers.

“We now have the kids most in need of help in the facilities least equipped to help them,” said Dr. George Davis, the former director of psychiatry for CYFD and a plaintiff in the Kevin S. lawsuit, as the civil rights suit became known.

The state said it has created new services like coordinated, family-driven care plans and has funded additional community health workers in an attempt to fill the gap in mental health services, which it attributes to the closure of more than a dozen behavioral health care providers after the state froze their funding in 2013.

“Building out a full array of children’s behavioral health services in communities across the state from an essentially non-existent system takes time — but we are building it,” Johnson said in a written statement.

Children’s attorneys said the new initiatives reach few kids, and not the ones who need the most help.

“We’re still at square one,” said Sara Crecca, an Albuquerque-based children’s attorney who was co-counsel for the plaintiffs in the Kevin S. suit. “It’s really, really, really frustrating because these young people deserve so much better.”

Platero experienced these failures firsthand. When he arrived at the shelter, he was immediately placed on suicide watch. Instead of sleeping in the dorms, he’d be on a mattress on the floor of the common room, where an employee could keep an eye on him through a window.

“I'm sitting in there like, ‘When am I going to get out?’” Platero said. “‘How long do I have to be here?’”

“It makes me be hella thankful for what I have right now, knowing that I went through that,” Platero said of his experience with CYFD. “Jaidryon, Stay With Me, OK? You’re OK. We’re Here to Help You.”

In the weeks before his breakdown, Platero and his mom were staying at a Motel 6 in Farmington. The two of them had run into trouble for drinking at a local park, police records show, and Platero had been caught smoking marijuana in a high school bathroom.

He had begun smoking a synthetic cannabis compound called Spice, which he suspects was laced with methamphetamine. He was becoming paranoid, shivering through freakish hallucinations and convinced that others at the motel would hurt him and his mother.

His grip on reality slipping, one afternoon he grabbed a large knife from his motel room and darted through traffic. Sheriff’s deputies and police chased him onto a nearby ranch, scattering turkeys as they ran. As night fell, he stood holding the knife to his throat, a police helicopter with a spotlight circling above.

When a sheriff’s deputy fired a series of beanbag rounds at Platero, he stabbed himself over and over. Officers rushed him, firing their tasers and knocking him onto his back.

Farmington Police Officer Cierra Manus, a crisis negotiator, cradled his head as he lay in the grass. “Jaidryon, stay with me, OK?” she said. “You’re OK. We’re here to help you.”

Platero was staying with his mother at a Motel 6 in Farmington when he ran outside into traffic holding a knife. Farmington Police Department crisis negotiator Cierra Manus responded to the call.

He was loaded into an ambulance and taken to a local hospital. Miraculously, he required only minor treatment for his wounds. A deputy who had responded to the scene called CYFD to report a case of possible child neglect.

In the span of nine days, Platero went from that hospital in Farmington to a psychiatric hospital across the state with an open bed, then to the youth shelter a few miles from where he had his breakdown.

Two psychological evaluations, including one four days after he arrived at the shelter, concluded that Platero needed intensive care and recommended he enter a residential treatment program. Though he was a “likeable young man” and a “resilient adolescent,” a psychologist noted, he had a history of making suicidal statements. He was diagnosed with substance abuse disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder and oppositional defiant disorder.

About a month after Platero entered foster care, his caseworker began looking for a bed in a residential treatment center. Platero, however, didn’t want to enroll in such a program; he wanted to go to his grandmother’s nearby on the Navajo Nation or, failing that, a foster home.

Platero said he hopes other teens will benefit from learning about what he went through — “to not feel alone.”

Platero’s grandmother couldn’t physically care for him, a CYFD worker wrote in his case plan. No foster homes were available, according to his attorney.

By the time Platero was taken into state custody in August 2019, the number of residential treatment beds in New Mexico was shrinking. A new governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, had been elected the previous fall on a platform of reforming the state’s child welfare system.

Fourteen foster youth had filed the Kevin S. suit, which accused the state of cycling foster kids through emergency placements such as shelters and residential treatment centers in violation of their civil rights and federal law. And Congress had enacted a law designed to limit the use of residential treatment centers, which have been tied to injuries, deaths and sexual assaults.

Between 2019 and 2021, three New Mexico residential treatment centers closed under pressure from the state. Several others shut down on their own during the pandemic. Now, aside from tribal facilities, three residential treatment centers with just 74 beds are left to house teens without histories of violence or sexual offenses.

CYFD began the closure of Desert Hills, the state’s largest residential treatment center, in December 2018 after investigators uncovered serious safety violations.

Meanwhile, teenagers who might otherwise have been placed in residential treatment centers have been referred to shelters, according to managers of those facilities.

“All we have left is shelters,” said Brooke Tafoya, chief executive officer of New Day Youth and Family Services. There are few residential treatment centers left, “and we barely have any foster placements,” she said. “So young people are in shelters and in offices and on the streets.”

Managers of shelters like the New Day Youth and Family Services shelter in Albuquerque say they are dealing with more severe mental health needs since the closure of many of New Mexico’s specialized residential treatment centers. “We Have Nowhere for Them to Go”

New Mexico has agreed to use shelters as foster placements only in “extraordinary circumstances,” according to the Kevin S. settlement. Three current CYFD employees, however, said workers are under relentless pressure to find a bed — any bed — for kids in state custody.

Those employees asked not to be identified because they fear retaliation.

Across the U.S., there’s a shortage of foster homes, and even fewer for teens. In New Mexico, the number of nonrelative foster homes willing to take teenagers has decreased 44% since 2018, according to CYFD.

Homeless shelters are one of the few options left for CYFD case workers, who contact one after another looking for a bed, according to children’s attorneys and the CYFD employees. If they can’t find one, the kids in their care typically sleep at CYFD’s main Albuquerque office, a nondescript building in an office park — sometimes for a night, sometimes longer.

If CYFD can’t find kids a bed, it typically sends them to sleep at the main CYFD office complex in Albuquerque. The photo on the right, taken in early 2022, shows a room in an office where kids were sleeping; it was taken by a CYFD employee assigned to supervise one of the youth housed there. (Left: Kitra Cahana, special to ProPublica; right: provided to ProPublica by Sara Crecca)

Bowen Belt, administrator of the San Juan County Juvenile Services Center, a complex that includes the shelter where Platero spent six months, has gotten those referral requests from CYFD.

The shelter was built in 2005 as a stopover for kids with nowhere to go, a place where police could drop off young people for no more than 72 hours while they tried to locate their families. Many other shelters have similar rules.

Shortly after opening, Belt said, CYFD staff started asking if the shelter could house kids who didn’t have foster homes. “I remember one of the first state-custody kids that we had was here well over a year, almost two years,” Belt said.

His facility is one of 10 emergency youth shelters across the state that are licensed to house teenagers in state custody. The shelters, which typically have about 15 beds each, are not medical facilities. Some offer counseling or therapy, but none are equipped for youth with severe mental health needs.

Employees at the San Juan County shelter try to make kids feel safe and comfortable, offering a video library and a foosball table in the co-ed lounge, a basketball court outside and chaperoned trips to nearby parks.

But the facility has a distinctly sterile feel. The walls are bare. Kids sleep in clusters of beds arranged in rooms without doors. Staff rotate between the shelter and the juvenile jail next door.

“We have long stays fairly frequently,” Belt said. “This isn’t somewhere that someone should live for weeks or months.”

Bowen Belt, the administrator of the San Juan County Juvenile Services Center, which includes the shelter where Platero spent six months

Managers at seven other shelters shared similar stories about teens being left with nowhere else to go.

According to a year’s worth of data for one shelter, 43% of CYFD placements stayed for more than two weeks. (A senior staffer at the shelter shared the data, which didn’t include any identifying information about residents, on the condition that the shelter not be identified, out of fear of retaliation by CYFD.)

Teens in CYFD custody make up the majority of residents in children’s crisis shelters across New Mexico, according to interviews with shelter managers.

“It breaks my heart when I have to take a teenager into custody,” said one of the CYFD employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Because I know we have nowhere for them to go. I know they’ll end up in a homeless shelter, and we’ll be trying in vain to find them a placement until they turn 18.”

CYFD Secretary Barbara Vigil acknowledged the difficulties workers face when trying to find beds for youth who otherwise may end up on the street.

“Our front-line workers are faced with very hard choices, and the first and foremost is to keep that child safe and secure in the moment,” she said in an interview. “We have to make very difficult decisions under extraordinary circumstances when a youth presents himself or herself to CYFD.”

CYFD initially provided figures showing shelter placements have dropped, but later acknowledged problems in the data. The department did not provide comparable data by Searchlight and ProPublica’s deadline.

But the agency acknowledges that it is placing too many kids in shelters. An appropriate stay in a shelter is “zero” days, said Emily Martin, head of CYFD’s protective services division: “Because it’s just another level of congregate care. It’s not family-based. It doesn’t always include the services that are needed.”

However, Johnson wrote, “CYFD does not impose placements on any shelter.”

Shelter managers agree, and sometimes they do refuse to accept placements — often because the teens were previously involved in some sort of altercation there or because the shelter is housing other high-needs youth who take a lot of staff resources.

Managers say they try to help kids placed at their shelters as much as they can, even though they’re not set up to deal with youth in need of psychiatric services. They accept many of those placements “because there is a need, and our job is to provide support to young people who are in need,” said Tafoya, of the New Day shelter.

Child welfare advocates like Leecia Welch saw this coming.

“If you close down facilities that are housing hundreds of kids and you haven’t done a detailed placement analysis of where the gaps are in your system and where you intend to place those children, it’s 100% predictable that they're going to end up in emergency shelters,” said Welch, deputy legal director for the advocacy group Children’s Rights, an organization that has pushed for federal foster care reform.

Sometimes teens head to shelters directly from psychiatric hospitals, like Platero did. At the one shelter for which data was shared, about 17% of the placements for one year came from such a hospital.

Professional assessments for more than a third of all the youth placed by CYFD at that shelter concluded they needed more intensive care, such as a residential treatment center or treatment foster care, a type of foster home that provides specialized care for traumatized youth.

“They go to Mesilla Valley and they’re there for days or weeks, then they’re deemed stable enough to be released,” Belt said, referring to one of the psychiatric hospitals in the state. “They still have these treatment needs, these mental health needs, just these basic life needs that no shelter is set up or equipped to meet.”

Calling 911 as a Last Resort

Without the staff or expertise to deal with youth in the midst of mental health crises, shelters often turn to the police.

Since 2019, there have been at least 465 calls to 911 regarding physical violence, disorderly conduct and mental health crises at the nine facilities that house most foster teens in shelters, according to a review of emergency dispatch records.

The records often don’t note whether a child is in CYFD custody, but shelter managers said most of their residents are in foster care.

At least 35 children have been the subject of 911 calls at three or more shelters, including reports that they had run away, in the same time period. At least 22 of them were wards of the state, according to dispatch records.

Last spring, staff at one shelter called police when a 13-year-old foster kid with a history of attempting suicide said he wanted to kill himself. The boy, who said he had been joking around, was placed in handcuffs and taken to a hospital emergency room, according to police records.

The next month, at a different shelter, the boy locked himself in a bathroom and attempted suicide, according to a sheriff’s department incident report.

Those calls are among more than 70 since 2019 involving youth whom callers or officers described as suicidal.

Police responded to multiple calls about one 14-year-old girl at two shelters over the course of four days. At a third shelter, she threatened staff and at least one other kid with a broken bottle and then slashed her own wrists. She was taken to a hospital.

Police bodycam footage shows first responders caring for a 14-year-old who had threatened staff and at least one other resident at the New Day shelter with a broken bottle. Image has been blurred by ProPublica to conceal the teen’s identity. (Obtained by ProPublica and Searchlight New Mexico)

Those records aren’t a complete picture of the continual crises in these shelters, according to managers. Staff are trained to de-escalate situations when a young person becomes angry, and they’re supposed to call police only as a last resort.

In some 911 recordings, employees describe fearing for their lives in the midst of a youth’s violent outburst.

In one case, a staff member climbed out a window to flag down officers as a 12-year-old girl tried to break down a door with a fire extinguisher, according to a dispatch call log and an audio recording.

“Does anybody else there need an ambulance?” the dispatcher asked.

“Not at this point, although we’re gonna need one pretty soon,” the caller said.

“For her?” the dispatcher asked.

“No, for us, if she gets in here.”

Often, kids’ mental health problems worsen in the shelter, according to employees.

Following one 911 call last year, a teenager at a shelter had to be taken to the hospital after drinking cleaning chemicals. Diagnosed with depression and PTSD, he had run away at least four times from previous shelters, records show.

According to a dispatch log of the call, the boy said he “does not want to harm himself, but said he needs to go to the hospital before he does.” The boy wasn’t from the area, according to the logs, “can not adapt and is stressed out.”

Davis, the former CYFD psychiatrist, said the problem isn’t just that these teens don’t have access to adequate mental and behavioral health care. It’s that living weeks or months in an emergency placement is itself destabilizing and traumatizing.

“What kids in this situation need is a caretaker, someone who gives them a safe home to live in and who thinks they are the most important person in the world,” Davis said. When those kids are placed in shelters, “trying to give them mental health care in that situation is useless.”

“I Needed Help”

More than a dozen young people who were once in the foster system told Searchlight and ProPublica they were exhausted and demoralized by the nonstop churn of temporary placements without any prospect for a permanent foster home.

So they ran away.

Living quarters at the Amistad Crisis Shelter in Albuquerque. When kids run away, staff pack up their belongings.

Since the beginning of 2019, at least 650 calls have been made to 911 to report runaways from shelters. Some kids return on their own within hours or days. Others are tracked down and brought back by CYFD staff or law enforcement.

In some cases, teens go missing for weeks or even months, police records show. Last year, a 16-year-old girl ran away from a shelter in Albuquerque. About a month later, a sheriff’s deputy found her with an older man outside the city. Her mother had told a police investigator her daughter was living in a house with men and drugs.

The girl was returned to the shelter by sheriff’s deputies. Less than 20 minutes later, she ran away again, according to the police incident report.

One day after school, about two weeks into his stay at the shelter, Platero decided he wasn’t going back. He walked past the school bus and headed toward town. He didn’t know where he was going; he said he hoped he could find his mom at one of their old hangouts.

Platero hasn’t seen his mother, Mathilda Silago, for approximately two years and has started to refer to her in the past tense.

Platero’s caseworker and another CYFD employee found him 11 days later at his grandmother’s house. “They’re like, we’re gonna call the cops if you don’t frickin’ go with us,” he said.

He hugged his grandmother and got in the car. He ran away again six months later, and again several days after that, building up a record in juvenile court along the way. All the while, he said, his drug problem deepened.

“I needed help,” Platero said. “My mentality was fucked up. I thought I was a lost angel; I looked at this place as hell and I thought I had to come up with my own gangster way of expressing myself to survive in this world.”

Finally, in October 2019, Platero agreed to enter a residential program. A bed had opened up at the Navajo Regional Behavioral Health Center, a facility run by the Navajo Nation in Shiprock that employs traditional healing methods to treat drug and mental health problems. He made it most of the way through the program before being kicked out for smoking marijuana.

The last time he saw his mother was when she visited the Shiprock treatment center. He started to walk away, but something told him to turn around and give her a hug.

“I’m so glad I did that,” he said. “I love her so much.” She later went missing and hasn’t been heard from since. He’s started referring to her in the past tense.

Platero spent six months at the San Juan County shelter, right, while in CYFD custody. He now has a subsidized apartment through New Day’s transitional living program.

After Platero was kicked out of the Shiprock treatment center, he spent four and a half months in shelters, another residential treatment center and a transitional living program.

Finally, after nearly two years of petitioning by his attorney, just shy of his 18th birthday, CYFD agreed to let Platero live with his grandmother.

He has since managed to get a subsidized apartment in Albuquerque, near the University of New Mexico. He’s gotten used to the scars on his neck. They’re reminders of how far he’s come. “I got something a lot of people don't get,” he said, “which is a second chance.”

“I wanted to age out the system, and I wanted to make my mom proud,” Platero said. “It sucks because I can’t really make her proud anymore.” His voice faltered. “I can’t see her beautiful face.” Help Us Investigate the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department

We're working to investigate the state’s treatment of teenagers who are in the custody of the Children, Youth and Families Department. To get to the bottom of what’s actually happening, we need help from the people who see the issues firsthand. Filling out the survey below will help us understand the situation and figure out where we should direct our investigation. We’re trying to reach as many people as possible who deal with teenagers in CYFD custody.

We take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these stories for the purposes of our reporting and will not publish your name or information without your consent.

We are the only ones reading what you submit. If you would prefer to use an encrypted app, you can reach out via Signal at 505-699-6401. You can also email ed@searchlightnm.org.

window.jQuery || document.write('') This form requires JavaScript to complete. Powered by CityBase Screendoor. // Uncomment this line and set it to the CSS class that your website uses for buttons: // FormRenderer.BUTTON_CLASS = ''; new FormRenderer({"project_id":"PKJPd5BcviX4RNIX"}); How We Analyzed 911 Calls at Homeless Shelters

To analyze 911 calls made from shelters serving homeless youth, ProPublica and Searchlight New Mexico asked central dispatch agencies and police departments for lists of all calls placed from addresses of the 10 shelters that take teenage referrals from the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department.

These lists of 911 calls include the time, date and nature of each call (for example, “assault” or “mental patient”), but few other specifics. To learn more, the news organizations requested detailed dispatch logs for roughly 1,700 of those calls since 2019, covering nine of the 10 shelters. The 10th, a small facility in Carlsbad, was excluded because it was just recently licensed as a shelter.

These logs note essential details provided by the caller, as well as when officers were dispatched and arrived. The logs sometimes include updates as the incident unfolds, such as whether the subject of the call has been transported to a hospital or was found after running away.

The call types that dispatch logs were provided for included runaways, violence, disorderly conduct and mental health crises, as well as calls of a general nature, such as welfare checks, general assistance calls and follow-ups.

For events that Searchlight and ProPublica described in detail, the news organizations obtained incident reports from law enforcement, and in some cases 911 audio and police body cam video.

Searchlight and ProPublica identified 650 calls for runaways and 465 other incidents involving mental health crises, violent outbursts or other disorderly conduct among shelter residents since 2019. Due to the time required to obtain the information, the amount of data provided for 2022 varied by location; 2019 through 2021 was complete across all jurisdictions. From 2019 through 2021, the nine shelters collectively averaged nearly one call per day.

When tallying these figures, Searchlight and ProPublica excluded duplicate calls for the same incident, as well as calls in which the logs indicated that the subject was not a resident of the shelter. Welfare checks and assistance calls were excluded if no mental health crisis or altercation was documented.

One of the facilities, San Juan County Emergency Crisis Shelter in Farmington, is located at the same address as a residential treatment center. Calls from that location were included only when logs indicated that the call involved the shelter. Two other shelters, Assurance Home in Roswell and Humphrey House in Hobbs, have group homes alongside the shelter facilities. Managers at those shelters said any 911 calls were likely to originate from the shelters.

The records do not always say whether a shelter resident is in CYFD custody. However, managers of shelters involved in the vast majority of calls said that most of their residents are in CYFD custody. All incidents described in detail in this story involve a youth in CYFD custody, according to the records.

Some call logs included the names of the residents involved in the incident, and 35 youth were found to be the subject of calls at three or more shelters. ProPublica and Searchlight have not disclosed those names.

This figure is likely an undercount, because some records did not include names, and children’s names were redacted in the majority of call logs for four of the nine shelters. When possible, the news organizations cross-referenced ages and birthdays in order to verify that different records referred to the same individual.

Kitra Cahana contributed reporting. Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Megan O’Matz

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.

Ever since claims of election fraud arose in 2020, Wisconsin has seen its share of quixotic attempts to taint the presidential results.

A group of phony electors tried to claim the state’s electoral votes for Donald Trump. Wisconsin’s top lawmaker launched a yearlong inquiry led by a lawyer spewing election fraud theories. And its courts heard numerous suits challenging the integrity of the 2020 election and the people administering it.

All those efforts failed, sometimes spectacularly.

But on a more fundamental level, the election deniers succeeded. They helped change the way Election Day will look in 2022 for crucial midterm elections in Wisconsin — and they are creating an even more favorable climate for Trump and Republicans in 2024.

This summer, the conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court banned most drop boxes for ballots, which had provided another quick and convenient method of voting during the pandemic, rather than relying on the mail. Until a federal judge intervened, the ruling also meant that people with disabilities could not have help delivering their ballots to their municipal clerks.

More recently, in Waukesha County, a judge sided with the Republican Party in a ruling that barred local clerks from fixing even minor errors or omissions — such as a missing ZIP code — on absentee ballot envelopes. The clerks could contact the voter or return the ballot to be corrected. In a state already known for limiting voter access, this was another example of a push toward more controls.

And the Wisconsin Assembly and the Senate, both dominated by Republicans, have passed a raft of bills that would tighten voting laws. Each was vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. But Evers is in a close race for reelection against Republican Tim Michels, who has said that “on day one” he will call a special session of the Legislature to “fix the election mess.”

Philip Rocco, associate professor of political science at Marquette University in Milwaukee, describes a dynamic he has seen across the country playing out on a large scale in Wisconsin. An onslaught of attacks on the voting process, he said, produces “an atmosphere of procedural chaos going into Election Day.”

“Just in general, it’s created a dangerous environment for elections to occur in.”

Republicans, who often benefit from lower turnout, frame the battles around issues of law, while Democrats argue that the fight is over voting rights. Neither side sees any benefit in giving in.

The seemingly daily news of legal machinations, legislative committee hearings, proposed laws or official investigations of Wisconsin’s election system have left many voters worried about what to expect when they next try to cast a ballot and unsure of whether their vote will count.

A swing state with 10 electoral votes and a history of razor-thin margins, Wisconsin will once again be a key prize in the 2024 presidential race.

Just how important the state is became clear in August, when the Republican National Committee announced that it will hold its 2024 convention in Milwaukee, a typically overlooked, Democratic-led city. The convention will saturate the state’s largest media market, reaching the conservative-leaning suburbs and the quiet towns and farms beyond.

But first comes November’s midterm election, with a chance to consolidate Republican power in the state and shape oversight of coming elections. Both ends of the political spectrum are keenly aware of the stakes.

“What can happen in 2024 is largely going to be determined by what happens this November,” said Wisconsin attorney Jeffrey Mandell, president of a progressive firm dedicated to protecting voting rights.

Endless Legal Battles

Nine attorneys, a parade of dark suits and briefcases, descended on a Waukesha County courtroom in southeast Wisconsin in September. Once again, the extreme minutiae of Wisconsin election law was being litigated.

The question before them: how to deal with absentee ballot envelopes that arrive with only partial addresses of witnesses?

Until then, municipal clerks had been able to simply fill in the information. Now, the Republican Party of Waukesha County argued that was unlawful and wanted to prohibit clerks from doing so. For some voters, that could mean having their ballots returned and figuring out how to fix them in time to have their vote counted.

A lawyer for the GOP-controlled Legislature favored a prohibition. Lawyers for government regulators, Democrats and the League of Women Voters argued against it. Ultimately, the GOP side prevailed.

In his ruling, Circuit Judge Michael J. Aprahamian added his voice to the doubts about absentee voting in Wisconsin and about the oversight provided by the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, which has seen its every move scrutinized since Trump and his allies started questioning the 2020 results in Wisconsin.

Aprahamian excoriated the commission, saying that “it is little wonder that proponents from all corners of the political spectrum are critical, cynical and suspicious of how elections are managed and overseen.”

As court scenes like these play out elsewhere in Wisconsin, a healthy slice of the litigation can be traced to one man: Erick Kaardal, a Minnesota lawyer and special counsel to the anti-abortion Thomas More Society, a nonprofit law firm.

Despite some high-profile setbacks in Wisconsin, Kaardal told ProPublica he plans to keep scrutinizing the fine points of Wisconsin election law, a subject that takes up at least 122 pages in state statute.

His ongoing targets include the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which interprets laws and gives guidance to municipal clerks around the state; the Electronic Registration Information Center, a voter roll management consortium; and the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonprofit that seeks to improve turnout.

“We’ll be litigating with the WEC and ERIC and CEIR for years to come,” Kaardal said.

A healthy slice of litigation over voting can be traced to Erick Kaardal, a Minnesota lawyer and special counsel to the anti-abortion Thomas More Society, a nonprofit law firm. (John Hart/Wisconsin State Journal)

Kaardal’s persistence is not appreciated by everyone. A federal judge admonished him for “political grandstanding” and filing bad-faith litigation against then-Vice President Mike Pence in December 2020 to prevent the counting of electoral votes. And in May, a judge in Madison said it was “ridiculous” for Kaardal to label pandemic-related grants to election offices as bribes.

In defending his tactics, Kaardal cited his years of legal experience and investigative abilities. He said he merely wants to hold government accountable and make elections fair.

Among Kaardal’s most passionate causes is his ongoing effort to document election fraud at nursing homes. During the pandemic, Kaardal alleges, an unknown number of cognitively impaired people ruled incompetent to vote under court-ordered guardianships somehow voted, perhaps with illegal assistance. He believes the voter rolls are not being updated to accurately reflect the court orders.

Kaardal brought lawsuits against 13 probate administrators across Wisconsin to force the release of confidential documents revealing the names of individuals under guardianship who have had their right to vote stripped by the court. His petition was denied in one case, but the others are ongoing.

Dane County Clerk of Court Carlo Esqueda worries that Kaardal’s quest is giving people the wrong impression. He points out that a person under guardianship can still vote. In some instances, that right is taken away because of extreme cognitive issues.

“Talk radio is saying everybody under guardianship should not be able to vote. That’s simply not true,” he said.

Election clerks, too, cite disinformation as they face mounting pressure over how they handle absentee ballots.

Celestine Jeffreys, the clerk in Green Bay, was forced to defend her integrity when a local resident represented by Kaardal filed a formal complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission this year, accusing her of “ballot harvesting” in the spring 2022 municipal elections by accepting multiple absentee ballots from an individual voter. The complaint is still pending.

Matt Roeser, the resident who filed the complaint, told ProPublica that the heavy reliance on absentee voting during the pandemic “opened up a door we’ve never had opened before. It created a lot of suspicion.”

Jeffreys said in a court filing that she had the discretion at the time to accept multiple ballots if they involved someone delivering their own ballot and a ballot for a disabled person.

Her legal brief called the complaint “another attempt by Attorney Kaardal to court scandal where there is none — intentionally undermining public confidence in legitimately-run elections in the process.”

Energized Activists

Wisconsin resident Harry Wait drew national attention in July when he announced that he’d gone on a state website and arranged for absentee ballots in the names of the Racine mayor, the state Assembly speaker and several others to be sent to his home.

The site requires only that voters enter their name and date of birth, and Wait claimed it had insufficient safeguards to prevent fraud.

The antic angered the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which held that it was a serious breach meant to undermine the state’s election system. Authorities charged Wait with election fraud, a misdemeanor, and misappropriation of ID information, a felony.

Notwithstanding the charges, Wait was treated like a hero a week later at a meeting of the right-leaning group he leads inside a Racine dive bar.

Harry Wait arrives in court for a September hearing in a criminal case against him. He said he’d gone on a state website and arranged for absentee ballots in the names of the Racine mayor, the state Assembly speaker and several others to be sent to his home. (David Kasnic for ProPublica)

Wait formed H.O.T. Government, which stands for honest, open, transparent, four years ago over perceived government misconduct in Racine. It’s now focused on rooting out what it sees as widespread election fraud throughout Wisconsin and is taking special interest in absentee ballots. The group even briefly considered a plan to steal leftover drop boxes in southeast Wisconsin to ensure they couldn’t be used after the state Supreme Court ruling.

Wait has made it clear he’s no fan of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. “I’m going to make a declaration today that WEC is our enemy,” he told the crowd inside the bar.

He was proud how, in his view, he had exposed the flaws in the state government’s MyVote website, set up to help Wisconsinites find their polling place, register to vote or order an absentee ballot. The website, he said, “really needs to be shut down.”

Supporters of Wait’s. Early on in the criminal case, the judge imposed a gag order on Wait. (David Kasnic for ProPublica)

Wait said in an interview that he plans to defend his action in court on the basis that, in his view, the MyVote system is “not a legal channel to order a ballot. It’s a rogue system.”

The administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, Meagan Wolfe, has defended the online system. It “requires a person to provide the same information or more information than he or she would have to provide if the person made the ballot request through traditional mail,” she said at a commission meeting.

Still, the commission agreed to a new safeguard: When it gets a request to send an absentee ballot to a new address, it will notify the voter via postcard. The commission also asked clerks to be on the lookout for unusual requests.

At a preliminary hearing on his case, in September, Wait was represented by Michael Gableman, a leading figure among Wisconsin election deniers.

Wait was represented by Michael Gableman, right. Gableman was a former state Supreme Court justice and a special counsel for the Wisconsin Assembly, tasked with investigating the 2020 election. (David Kasnic for ProPublica)

A former state Supreme Court justice, Gableman was special counsel for the Wisconsin Assembly, tasked with investigating the 2020 election. While spending more than $1 million in taxpayer money, he lent oxygen to election-fraud theories — including Kaardal’s accusations about nursing home irregularities — but couldn’t prove any. Attempts to reach Gableman for comment for this story were unsuccessful.

Even after being dismissed from that role by the Assembly speaker, Gableman has continued to exert influence within the state Republican Party to stoke the anger of citizens. Among hard-right activists, Gableman’s view of Wisconsin as a hotbed of election fraud is now taken for granted, as is the belief that voting options should be restricted, not opened up.

“I want it back to in-person, one day,” said Bruce L. Boll, a volunteer with We the People Waukesha, one of numerous groups supporting tighter controls. “Voting should not be a whim. It should be something you plan for and you do. Like your wedding day.”

A supporter holds up a sign for H.O.T. Government, a group formed by Wait whose name stands for honest, open, transparent. (David Kasnic for ProPublica)

Responding to this new atmosphere of distrust, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has proposed creating an Office of Inspector General to help it investigate the growing number of complaints and allegations of impropriety.

Chaos and Controversy

The chaos and controversy around voting rules has caught some Wisconsinites off guard. The drop-box ruling was especially disconcerting to people with disabilities and their relatives.

Before the August primary, Eugene Wojciechowski, of West Allis, went to City Hall to pay his water bill and drop off his ballot and his wife’s at the clerk’s office. A staffer asked him for ID and then told him he could not deliver his wife’s ballot. Not even spouses of the disabled could do so at the time, thanks to the state Supreme Court decision.

“I said: ‘What do you mean? She’s in a wheelchair,’” Wojciechowski recalled. He noted that the ballots were “all sealed and witnessed and everything.”

The voting constraints were “stupid,” he said, but ultimately he decided he would just mail his wife’s ballot for her, even though it was unclear at the time whether that was permitted.

A ballot drop box in Milwaukee in 2020. This summer, the Wisconsin Supreme Court banned most drop boxes for ballots. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

He has filed an official complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission and weeks later remains exasperated.

“I mean, what the hell is going on in this city? I’ve lived here all my life,” Wojciechowski said.

“They’re stopping people from voting, that’s all it is.”

The state Supreme Court decision came in response to a suit brought by a conservative group, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. An attorney for the group, Rick Esenberg, argued that regulators had issued unlawful guidance allowing ballots to be delivered on behalf of others, including potentially “paid activists, paid canvassers who go around and collect ballots and place them in a mailbox.” Those allegations echoed a widely circulated conspiracy theory about people, labeled mules, delivering heaps of fraudulent ballots.

Esenberg conceded in his oral arguments that he had no evidence of that type of activity in Wisconsin.

Four people with disabilities sued in federal court, including Martha Chambers, of Milwaukee, who was left paralyzed from the neck down after being thrown from a horse 27 years ago.

“Here they are making things more difficult for me, and my life is difficult enough,” she said.

Martha Chambers (Darren Hauck, special to ProPublica)

A federal judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered the state elections commission to tell local clerks that voters with disabilities must be allowed to receive help from someone of their choosing to return their absentee ballots. The clerks do not have to confirm that the voter is disabled or ask the emissary for ID.

Still, it’s not at all certain that the ruling will be followed uniformly.

The state has approximately 1,850 local clerks who administer elections in cities, towns and villages. Even before the federal ruling, practices were wildly inconsistent, said Barbara Beckert, director of external advocacy for Disability Rights Wisconsin.

“There is continuing confusion in Wisconsin as voting practices and policies continue to change in response to litigation as well as action by the Legislature,” Beckert said.

Political observers say there’s increased trepidation among all kinds of voters over whether their ballot will count and who will be watching at the polls.

“People are afraid,” said Milwaukee native Bruce Colburn, a union activist and lead organizer of Souls to the Polls, a traditional get-out-the-vote drive in Black communities. “Are they going to do something wrong? Then you have all these lawyers and people making complaints in the court system for nothing. And it makes it more difficult. It scares people. If they get something wrong or they don’t do it exactly right, something’s going to happen to them.”

Jeffreys, the clerk in Green Bay, described poll watchers on primary day this year as “aggressive and interfering.” Rather than being cordial and unobtrusive, she said, some observers were repeatedly questioning voting officials and disrupting the process.

“That, I think, is a really big change with elections in Wisconsin. There’s just a lot more of a gaze, and the gaze is not always friendly and cooperative.”

Unlike poll workers, who carry out official duties and must be local residents, poll watchers can come from anywhere. They are not required to undergo training.

“Observers are a very important part of the process,” Jeffreys said. “They lend transparency; they help educate people. They themselves become educated. But sometimes observers have anointed themselves as the people who will uncover problems. And oftentimes observers are not equipped with the information in order to do that.”

The result, she said, can be baseless allegations.

Pointing Toward 2024

If Republicans in Wisconsin want to find a way around the Democratic governor, Evers, and his veto pen, they have two choices.

They can unseat him in November or bulk up their legislative advantage to what is called a supermajority. Achieving supermajorities in both the Assembly and the Senate, which would make bills veto-proof, is considered the longer shot. Winning the governor’s race is not.

Michels, the Republican nominee, is the owner of a construction company and has never held public office. He was endorsed by Trump in the primary.

A “Meat and Greet” pep rally in September at the Republican Party of Waukesha County’s headquarters. People ate bratwurst and listened to political speeches. (David Kasnic for ProPublica)

Michels has embraced the idea that the 2020 election was not run fairly, even though a state recount showed Biden won and multiple courts agreed. Asked if the 2020 election was stolen, Michels told the “Regular Joe Show” on the radio in May: “Maybe, right. We know there was certainly a lot of bad stuff that happened. There were certainly illegal legal ballots. How many? I don’t know if Justice Gableman knows. I don’t know if anybody knows. We got to make sure. I will make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

A Michels victory would set the stage for reconsideration of a range of restrictive voting laws that were vetoed by Evers.

Among the bills passed by Republicans and blocked by Evers were proposals that would require the state to use federal databases to check citizenship status; remove voters from the rolls based on information submitted for jury selection; make it harder to request an absentee ballot; and classify it a felony to incorrectly attest that a person is “indefinitely confined” so they can vote absentee (a provision widely used during the pandemic).

The Republican Party of Waukesha County’s headquarters (David Kasnic for ProPublica)

Wisconsin already is a place that researchers have identified as difficult for voters to navigate. The Cost of Voting Index, a Northern Illinois University project that studies each state, lists it near the bottom, at 47th, because of a strict voter ID law, limits on early voting and proof of residency requirements that affect registration drives.

“Over the last several election cycles, other states have adopted policies that remove barriers to voting,” one of the researchers, Michael J. Pomante II, now with the election protection group States United Action, said in an email.

But Wisconsin, he added, “has continued to pass and implement laws that create barriers to casting a ballot.”

In 2024, all these factors — from who is able to vote to who runs the executive branch and who runs the Legislature — will play a role in determining which presidential candidate gets Wisconsin’s electoral votes.

The governor and the Wisconsin Elections Commission are part of the state’s certification process, with the secretary of state making it official by affixing the state seal. And the state Supreme Court stands ready to rule on election law disputes.

The Nov. 8 midterm election will determine which party holds the office of governor and secretary of state when voting occurs in 2024. Michels has proposed a “full reorganization” of the Wisconsin Elections Commission if he is elected.

He hasn’t explained what that would look like, other than to say in a primary debate that he envisioned replacing it with a board made up of appointees named by each of the state’s congressional districts. Wisconsin now has eight seats in the U.S. House, five held by Republicans and three by Democrats.

Evers, by contrast, backs the commission in its current form. He noted its origins in the state’s Legislature seven years ago.

“Republicans created this system, and it works,” he said in a statement released to ProPublica. “Our last election was fair and secure, as was proven by a recount, our law enforcement agencies, and the courts.”

Help ProPublica Investigate Threats to U.S. Democracy

Correction

Oct. 7, 2022: This story originally incorrectly referred to the Center for Election Innovation & Research as a “progressive nonprofit.” It is a nonpartisan group.

by Abrahm Lustgarten

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Barbados, the Caribbean nation whose prime minister, Mia Mottley, has championed the argument that small and developing countries desperately need debt relief and funding if they are to survive climate change, has reached an agreement with the International Monetary Fund that will make it among the first recipients of money from a new $45 billion resilience trust.

Under the program, Barbados is set to receive $183 million for climate-focused spending. It’s money that Avinash Persaud, Mottley’s top economic adviser, tells ProPublica will be used to replace segments of the island’s drinking water system and to shore up its supply of fresh water in the face of climate-driven drought. Barbados’ current water infrastructure was built by the British more than a century ago and loses about half of the water it carries. “This will go a significant way towards helping us start that project,” Persaud said. “These are not sexy things, but they are very important things in a world of climate change.”

The IMF has announced a similar agreement with Costa Rica for $710 million and has told ProPublica that another agreement with Bangladesh may soon be announced.

The trust funds are technically a loan, offered at low or “concessional” interest rates, to be paid back over 20 years after a grace period of a decade. The agreement is pending approval by the IMF’s board in the coming weeks. The money for Barbados is being paired with a $110 million IMF loan to support Barbados in continuing to reduce its debt and restructure its economy.

The announcement comes three months after an investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times examined how the high debt burden carried by small island nations made it impossible for them to pay for programs to defend against climate catastrophe. The investigation found that the IMF over decades had been slow to support Barbados’ climate initiatives as well as those of neighboring countries. Instead, the powerful global institution routinely used its leverage to impose strict economic criteria for financial health that wound up forcing countries like Barbados to spend money they might have used for infrastructure and other improvements to repay foreign banks and investors instead.

The story also pointed to the role of the World Bank, which funds development projects in needy nations, but which had designated Barbados and other Caribbean countries ineligible for aid because they were not poor enough. The World Bank’s president, David Malpass, appointed by former President Donald Trump, has come under fire in recent weeks for refusing to acknowledge that fossil fuels have driven global warming, stating that “I am not a scientist.”

Barbados’ leaders have been leaning hard on the IMF and the World Bank for greater access to concessional loans so that the government could invest in advance of disasters in more sustainable systems, thereby avoiding damages in the first place. “Giving us temporary access to funding when the disaster hits is just too late,” Persaud said. “It’s like paying for the undertaker.” The sort of investment the new trust helps make possible can pay back seven-fold in avoided costs when disaster does strike, but only “if we can invest today,” he said.

When the IMF first announced its intention to establish a resiliency trust in May, the plan had been criticized as not being specifically targeted for climate threats. It was also dismissed as not being large enough to address the needs of small countries. Its total is roughly one-tenth of what the United Nations estimates developing countries will require to fund climate programs each year.

An IMF spokesperson told ProPublica that the money from the trust can never be enough to meet the urgent burden that the fund now says Barbados and countries like it face from climate change, but that the program can help and may catalyze private investment. “We’re there and engaged,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “Others will have to follow.”

Although Barbados plans to spend some of the money on its water infrastructure, the trust is not earmarked for specific projects and can aid the country’s broader climate agenda. It is different from World Bank funding, which often pays for specific projects. The push for investments in infrastructure and resilience that Mottley has argued for is distinct from the question of whether the world’s wealthiest and most developed nations that have caused climate warming will pay for the enormous losses that warming is now imposing on poor countries. That question is expected to be a focus of the upcoming COP 27 climate conference in Egypt in November and has taken on new urgency after climate-driven floods destroyed much of Pakistan last summer.

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by Anna Maria Barry-Jester, photography by Braylen Dion, special to ProPublica

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On a Monday morning in mid-July, William L. Jeffries IV decided it was time to call a colleague for help. Jeffries is a senior health scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where he researches the ways that racism and homophobia impact health in the United States. Jeffries, who describes himself as a same-gender-loving Black man, sees the work as a way to serve his people and, by extension, God.

This call, however, was a personal one. He was sitting on his bed in pain, and he was angry.

Jeffries was angry for the hundreds of people, mainly gay and bisexual men, who were infected with monkeypox. He was angry that the burden was falling particularly hard on Black and Latino communities. He was angry that the federal government had been saying for eight weeks that it had the tools necessary to deal with the growing outbreak yet people were still struggling to find care.

And he was angry because he himself now had monkeypox and couldn’t find anyone to diagnose or treat him.

Jeffries told his colleague, who was helping to lead the CDC’s monkeypox response, about his ordeal. He knew then that he was a victim of the very failures of the American public health system that he studies.

“I myself am a trained disease detective. I have led outbreak investigations for HIV and syphilis. I am a published scientist. And I know a lot about public health and infectious disease transmission,” Jeffries said. “I emphasize my training and my experience because if I had to go to three different places before I got diagnosed, imagine what the average gay man has to do?”

By the end of September, more than three-quarters of people diagnosed with monkeypox in Georgia were Black, and Georgia had the second-highest rate of cases among all U.S. states, trailing New York. As the outbreak has spread, the federal government has been forced to reckon with the disease’s disproportionate burden on Black communities around the country. Black people make up more than half of monkeypox cases nationally, even as they represent less than 14% of the U.S. population. More than 26,000 people have been infected nationwide.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky recently acknowledged that she and other top public health officials anticipated these inequities; decades of tracking HIV and other infectious diseases made them predictable. Public health officials, who lost the trust of many Americans in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, had a chance to show that they had learned from their mistakes when monkeypox hit. Yet what happened to Jeffries and others in Georgia in the early months of the outbreak shows how federal officials, who suspected that communities of color would get monkeypox at higher rates, failed to intervene in ways that could have prevented — or at least lessened — that suffering.

“A lot of people got hurt,” said Dr. David Holland, the chief clinical officer for the Board of Health in Fulton County, which covers 90% of Atlanta. He too is angry about the first months of the federal response. “You can debate what the right thing to do would have been, but doing nothing is not on that list. And that’s kind of what was done.”

A dozen infectious disease experts told ProPublica that the likely trajectory of the virus in the U.S. was obvious once reports surfaced in May saying that monkeypox had found its way into communities of gay and bisexual men in Europe. They knew then that while it would most likely spread first among wealthier, whiter communities, Black and Latino men would soon bear the brunt of the disease. They knew this because it is the path that many infectious diseases have traveled before.

The reasons why are not a mystery either. Among other things, Black people are less likely than white people to have a regular doctor, less likely to have insurance coverage and more likely to have HIV, diabetes and other diseases that generally put people at greater risk for new infections. White people are more likely to have benefits that can lessen the effects of illness, such as jobs that allow them to take paid sick leave and wealth that can buy them better care.

Federal and state officials nevertheless failed to make testing readily available, slow-walked the rollout of vaccines and didn’t make it clear during the first two months of the outbreak that people of color, like Jeffries, were at elevated risk for harm. Those missteps amplified long-standing health inequities.

“Any time you fumble the response to an epidemic it will cut through the weakest seams in your society,” said Dr. Jay Varma, a professor at Weill Cornell Medical College and former CDC official.

When Jeffries was 9 or 10 years old, his father shared with him a book from 1928 called “Leaders of the Colored Race in Alabama.” Inside was a photo of his great-grandfather and namesake, Dr. William L. Jeffries. Jeffries was blown away that in the early 20th century, a Black man could achieve the level of education — a doctorate in divinity — required to earn him the title of doctor. He said as much to his father, who responded that Jeffries could be a doctor, too. From that moment on, he knew he would follow in his great-grandfather’s footsteps. “I had to be Dr. Somebody,” Jeffries said. “That was just part of my destiny.”

He was interested in the health of communities, and so in 2004 he moved away from his home in Polk County, Florida, for the first time and entered a doctoral program in sociology at the University of Florida. In his first year, he remembers a professor explaining how the CDC responds to infectious disease outbreaks. The professor described disease investigators as the “cream of the crop.” For Jeffries, this was an epiphany: “Immediately, I just knew that was what I was supposed to be.”

Four years later, with a Ph.D. in hand and a Dr. in front of his name, Jeffries entered the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service. There, he trained to be a disease investigator like the ones his professor had told him about. It was the only job he applied for. Jeffries has been with the CDC ever since.

Now 42, Jeffries is a senior health scientist in the Office of Health Equity in the Division of HIV Prevention. He investigates the factors that place vulnerable populations at risk for HIV and other diseases. On average, gay and bisexual Black men have fewer sexual partners than their white counterparts and are more likely to use condoms, and yet Black men have six times the rate of HIV. White people get earlier and better access to new treatments and prevention. Many Southern states have not expanded Medicaid to offer insurance coverage for all impoverished adults, leaving people there less likely to have a doctor and worse off when they do get sick.

“God has had me be here to fight for the oppressed and to be a voice for those who, in many instances in our society, do not have a voice that can be heard by people in positions of power,” Jeffries said. “And my voice is what I use to serve those who Jesus called the least of these among us.”

Jeffries understands that he is in important ways one and the same with the people he researches, and he knows what that means for his vulnerability to disease. So when reports of monkeypox began surfacing, he kept an eye on it. He understood himself to be at risk and wanted to get vaccinated because he knew that, unlike with HIV, condoms do not prevent transmission of monkeypox. He also knew the vaccine wasn’t available in Atlanta yet. At the same time, the risk seemed distant. Government officials said there were only a couple dozen cases in metro Atlanta — a city of over 6 million people — and they made it sound like they had the situation under control.

Jeffries knows when he got monkeypox. It was during a sexual encounter in the early hours of Saturday, July 9. Later that same day, Fulton County Board of Health staff finally held its first monkeypox vaccine clinic.

By Sunday night, Jeffries felt some itching and irritation. A couple days after that, he had a fever, chills and sores around his anus. So on Friday, he went to an LGBTQ-friendly health clinic, told staff that he thought he might have monkeypox and asked for a test and vaccine. They had neither.

Instead, he said they tested him for a range of sexually transmitted diseases and treated him for a suspected case of chlamydia, though results later showed he didn’t have any of those diseases. Jeffries was surprised that in Atlanta, where there were already more than two dozen known monkeypox cases, the clinic couldn’t test him for it. More than eight weeks had passed since the first case was diagnosed in the U.S., and testing was supposed to be widely available.

Frustrated, he went home and isolated from other people. The pain kept growing worse, so late on a Saturday night he sought comfort in an epsom-salt bath and lingered in the warm water until just after midnight. As he was getting out, he noticed a lesion on his chest, close to his left shoulder. Confused, he reached for an itch on his back and felt another bump. He looked down and there was another lower on his torso. They were spreading so fast.

The next morning, Jeffries lay in his bed, uncomfortable and exhausted, and prayed. He knew it was time to go to the emergency room.

He thought his best bet would be a hospital attached to a university, as they tend to have more up-to-date knowledge and connections to public health departments. And he knew just the place: Emory University’s renowned teaching hospital on Clifton Road, a stone’s throw from CDC headquarters. “Atlanta is this hub for Black, gay and bisexual men, and the CDC is right here. Surely, these factors would converge to lead you to have vaccine and treatment available,” Jeffries recalled thinking.

But at Emory it was more of the same. The ER doctor, Jeffries said, knew nothing about monkeypox. Jeffries said he brought a list of the two vaccines and four possible treatments, pulled from the CDC website, but the doctor didn’t know about any of them and, regardless, said they were not available at Emory.

The ER doctor, Jeffries said, swabbed one of his lesions to test it for the monkeypox virus. Jeffries couldn’t understand why the hospital didn’t send in an infectious disease specialist. The hospital, he said, sent him home with prescriptions for ibuprofen and a steroid foam.

And so, the following morning, in severe pain, he called a trusted CDC colleague, Dr. John Brooks. Brooks usually serves as the chief medical officer for HIV prevention but is currently helping to lead the nation’s monkeypox response. Jeffries was desperate to find treatment and thought Brooks could help. He also wanted Brooks to know just how bad the situation was. “I knew that gay and bisexual men in Fulton County, irrespective of their race, were going to be placed at harm because of the overall ignorance, the blundering and the lack of resources,” Jeffries said.

When Jeffries made that call, the U.S. was nearly nine weeks into the monkeypox outbreak. Officials from the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services assured the public that they were responding in full force and had all the necessary tools — a test, a treatment and a vaccine. But they showed little urgency to use them.

Take the vaccine. Concerned that terrorists may use smallpox as a weapon to attack the U.S., federal officials invested nearly $2 billion in the development and manufacturing of the Jynneos vaccine to safeguard against that threat. In 2019, the Food and Drug Administration approved that vaccine for use against both smallpox and monkeypox, which are in the same family of viruses, and health officials keep doses in the Strategic National Stockpile.

But they had a very limited supply when cases first appeared in the U.S. in mid-May. In the preceding years, as hundreds of thousands of doses expired, they waited to order more, holding out for a different preparation of the vaccine with a longer shelf life, as The New York Times previously reported. The 372,000 doses that were ready in vials were mostly in Denmark.

In late May, officials at the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, the arm of the federal government that develops and procures drugs and vaccines to safeguard against pandemics and other hazards, placed orders for 72,000 doses. “We are prepared with both the vaccines and antivirals needed to protect the American people,” Dawn O’Connell, the HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response, wrote in a blog post on May 24.

Three weeks later, O’Connell wrote that those 72,000 vaccine doses were in the federal government’s “immediate inventory.” Two more weeks passed, and HHS announced it would make 56,000 doses “available immediately.”

By then, it was the end of June, and Atlanta hadn’t held a single vaccine drive.

That wasn’t for lack of trying. With cases climbing in June and Georgians waiting for their first allotment of vaccines, Holland, the chief clinical officer for Fulton County’s Board of Health, made an official request for ACAM2000, an older vaccine made to ward off smallpox. It’s been available by the millions since 2008, when it was added to the Strategic National Stockpile, before the newer Jynneos vaccine existed. But the older vaccine can cause side effects, making it unsafe to use for many people, including those who are pregnant, have HIV, have weakened immune systems or have various skin conditions.

Federal officials said states could order ACAM2000, but they didn’t exactly endorse it. Holland said Georgia officials turned down his request. He understands the concerns and respects the decision not to use ACAM2000. But he’s frustrated that in the first months, it felt like the answer to every effort at prevention was just “no.”

In a written statement, Nancy Nydam, a spokesperson for the Georgia Department of Public Health, referenced the many potential side effects of ACAM2000 and noted that no other jurisdiction has used that vaccine during the monkeypox outbreak.

When Fulton County finally received its long-awaited shipment of vaccines in July, it included enough for just 200 people. More dribbled in over the weeks that followed.

By comparison, Canadian officials began vaccinating at-risk people in early June. In Montreal alone, officials vaccinated more than 15,300 people through the end of July, according to data provided to ProPublica by the city’s health department. A friend of Jeffries’ was able to get vaccinated at an outdoor walk-up clinic in Montreal’s Gay Village neighborhood on Aug. 1 while he was in the city for the International AIDS Conference. The health workers didn’t care that he wasn’t Canadian.

“We know we live in a global village. We thought making no barriers was the most effective strategy,” said Dr. Genevieve Bergeron of the Montreal public health department.

Georgia currently has more than two and a half times the number of monkeypox cases per capita as Quebec, the province where Montreal is located.

“The thing that is most galling to me is that this was predictable,” said Greg Millett, a former CDC researcher and current vice president and director of public policy at amfAR, a nonprofit dedicated to AIDS research and advocacy. Around the time Jeffries was infected and Atlanta held its first vaccine clinic, there were about 700 known cases in the U.S., nearly all among gay and bisexual men, and the cases were growing exponentially. And yet, Millett said, the U.S. was dragging its feet. To Millett, it’s hard not to see homophobia and racism as an underlying reason. “If this was another population, would they have moved this slowly?”

Within an hour of calling his colleague on July 18, Jeffries got a same-day appointment with Dr. Kimberly Workowski, an infectious diseases specialist at Emory University. She also helps write the treatment guidelines for sexually transmitted diseases at the CDC. In an Emory exam room, Workowski donned protective equipment — goggles, gloves, masks and gowns — to examine Jeffries.

The lesions definitely looked like monkeypox, Workowski told him. She gave him an hourlong work-up, checking his body and talking through his symptoms. He’d had bad experiences with the medical system before, like the time he went in for routine testing and a doctor told him he shouldn’t have sex with other men because that’s how you get sexually transmitted diseases. So he didn’t take it for granted that she was treating him with dignity.

Jeffries said she told him that in the ER, they only swabbed one lesion when they were supposed to swab two or three and that regardless, the sample could not be located. Jeffries was aghast. Workowski counted his lesions and swabbed several of them for a new test, which would ultimately come back as positive.

A spokesperson for Emory Healthcare did not answer questions about Jeffries’ care. (Jeffries signed a privacy waiver to allow Emory to discuss the care he received in the emergency room on July 17.) In a written statement, the spokesperson said Emory Healthcare remains “steadfast in providing excellent and equitable health care to all of our patients.” Emory’s emergency departments follow a standard protocol for suspected monkeypox infections that “includes triage, testing and if necessary, referral to a specialist,” she wrote. “If needed, patients will be admitted to the hospital.”

The day after Jeffries saw Workowski, her office called to tell him that an experimental antiviral drug known as TPOXX was ready for him to pick up.

Once he started on the medicine, the lesions quickly stopped growing and spreading. But the sores and inflammation in the lining of his rectum were causing the worst pain he’s ever experienced, so bad that he couldn’t sleep. Five days after his first trip to the emergency room, he drove himself to a different Emory ER, this one in Midtown, which quickly admitted him. He spent the next four days in the hospital on a cocktail of medications that finally dulled his pain.

He was in isolation but felt less alone than he had in days. The doctor leading his care put her hand on him while they talked and asked how he was doing. Staff chatted with him about his life outside of monkeypox. He knew the hospital was busy, but no one ever seemed rushed. “They took the time to talk to me and make me feel OK,” he said.

At that point, physicians wishing to give TPOXX to patients had to fill out over 100 pages of paperwork. The medication was initially developed by the federal government, and the U.S. holds more than 1.7 million doses in its stockpile. The treatment has been approved for monkeypox in Europe, but it is available only as an experimental drug in the U.S. In August, the CDC slimmed down its paperwork, but even today, it can take more than an hour to fill it out and TPOXX has been hard to get.

Through the end of June, HHS officials had sent out enough medicine to treat 300 people nationally. From around the time of Jeffries’ hospitalization in late July through the end of August, physicians in Georgia handed out just over 600 courses of the treatment, according to data provided to ProPublica by the Georgia Department of Public Health. That would have been enough to cover just half of the people diagnosed during that time.

The Georgia Department of Public Health did not provide data on the race and ethnicity of TPOXX recipients. But nationally, as of Sept. 28, white people make up 28% of cases and have received 34% of the courses of treatment, according to preliminary data released by the CDC. The share that went to white people during the early months of the outbreak was even higher, according to CDC research.

Jeffries feels certain he could have avoided the worst of his pain and his time in the hospital if he had received treatment sooner.

When Jeffries got out of the hospital, he called friends and colleagues. Georgia — especially its Black and queer communities — needed more resources. He wanted people to know how bad it was and that things shouldn’t be this way.

He phoned Justin Smith, his friend who was able to get vaccinated at the AIDS conference in Montreal. The director of the Campaign to End AIDS at a group of HIV clinics in the Atlanta area, Smith had helped organize a virtual town hall with other activists.

There, Joshua O’Neal, the sexual health program director for the Fulton County Board of Health, told attendees that it was OK to be angry about the government’s response so far, that he sure was. O’Neal shared alarming statistics: Cases of monkeypox in Fulton County had nearly doubled in the three days before the event, and more than half of the people there with monkeypox also had HIV. Of the people with both viruses, 80% were Black. “It is our responsibility to ensure that those folks are the ones we’re reaching out to,” he told the group.

O’Neal acknowledged that the scant appointments for the first two vaccine clinics were gone within minutes and that most who got them were white. Going forward, he vowed to partner with community organizations to get them out more equitably.

On Aug. 4, 10 days after Jeffries got out of the hospital, the Biden administration declared a public health emergency. When that happened, as Margo Snipe reported for Capital B, a nonprofit news site for Black communities, officials made no mention of the growing racial and ethnic disparities.

Jeffries was encouraged, though, that the White House appointed Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the head of the CDC HIV division where Jeffries works, to a top position on its monkeypox response team. Jeffries knows him and says he strongly believes that Daskalakis is committed to getting the disparities in check. The White House declined to make Daskalakis available for an interview and suggested ProPublica contact the CDC instead.

The CDC declined to make Walensky, its director, available for an interview. Walensky’s deputy press secretary referred a reporter to Walensky’s comments at a White House briefing on Sept. 15. “It is critical that education, vaccinations, testing and treatment are equally accessible to all populations, but especially those most affected” by the monkeypox outbreak, Walensky said. “CDC remains committed to collaborating with jurisdictions to reduce health disparities.”

A different CDC spokesperson, Kevin Griffis, followed up and said that the agency appointed an equity officer to its response team in May and did outreach to LGBTQ groups in the weeks that followed. On its website in early June, the CDC first published guidance for ways to avoid getting monkeypox and has been updating it ever since. “This was an issue that Dr. Walensky and Dr. Daskalakis both talked about really as part of essentially every discussion that would be had about the outbreak: ensuring that we were doing everything we can to reach diverse populations,” Griffis said.

By early September, the spread of new cases began slowing in much of the U.S. Experts largely credit that decline to behavior change among queer men. In an August survey, gay and bisexual men reported changing their sexual practices to protect themselves. It’s too soon to say whether vaccine drives, which were ramped up at the end of August, are playing a role, experts say. In an effort to understand potential treatments, federal officials began recruiting monkeypox patients for a clinical trial of TPOXX. And O’Connell, of HHS, told a Senate committee on Sept. 14 that she had made more than 1.1 million vials of Jynneos vaccine available to health departments.

The Fulton County Board of Health made good on its promise and partnered with various community organizations to get the word out to the Black community. As of Sept. 15, more than half of the first doses of the vaccine have gone to Black people, according to a county report. Nydam, the Georgia Department of Public Health spokesperson, wrote that the state worked with federal officials to give out more than 4,000 doses at Atlanta’s Black Pride festival on Labor Day weekend.

“High demand and limited vaccine supply created access challenges for vaccines in general during the early weeks of the response, but the partnerships with community-based organizations greatly helped us with addressing health disparities in our vaccine roll out,” Nydam wrote.

Still, Congress has not designated any money for the monkeypox response. The vaccine and TPOXX are provided for free, but Fulton County has had to use its STD budget to run its vaccine clinics. “We’re spending our entire STD budget for the year and hoping that at some point the federal government will reimburse us,” Holland said. That’s money that also needs to be used for the simultaneous epidemics of HIV and syphilis, both of which disproportionately harm Black men and women.

While the spread of monkeypox is slowing, Black Americans represent a growing share of the overall cases — from 37% on Aug. 28 to 51% of all cases just three weeks later, according to the most recent data available.

Jeffries is still dealing with complications from monkeypox. But his bigger concern, one he shares with many in the HIV prevention community, is that Black LGBTQ people will be left dealing with monkeypox infections even if it largely disappears from the rest of the population. That’s another pattern they have seen many times before.

Thinking about what should have been done differently in those early months, it’s clear to Jeffries that everything the federal government has done since August should have happened much sooner. That could have prevented a lot of harm.

But his work also tells him that stopping these predictable patterns altogether will require dealing with the racism, homophobia and economic inequality at the root of so many health disparities. Lately he’s been thinking about a lesson his grandfather taught him when he was young.

Jeffries’ grandfather worked 12 hours a day, six days a week in Florida’s citrus groves, and he was still poor. He kept a garden to feed the family, and he sometimes took Jeffries with him to teach him how to farm. One day Jeffries was pulling at the weeds, snapping them off at the top. His grandfather stopped him.

“That ain’t how you do it, baby,” his grandfather told him. “You’ve got to get it by the root. Because if you don’t get it by the root, it’ll grow back.”

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by Ian MacDougall

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As a new Supreme Court term began this week, many Americans are still feeling the aftershocks of the last one. In its first full term with a conservative supermajority, the high court overruled Roe v. Wade, substantially expanded the scope of the Second Amendment and scaled back the barrier between church and state. Abortion access, following the court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, has become a legal, political and medical issue to an extent not known in decades. Lawmakers and law enforcement officials in states with restrictive concealed-carry laws are still working out how to adjust their firearms regulations in light of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

So far, the justices have agreed to hear about half the number of cases they ordinarily decide in a term, with more to be added in the coming weeks. But already the court’s docket includes major cases concerning voting rights, election law, environmental protections and the constitutionality of affirmative action. As conservatives look for cases that can continue to shift the law in their direction, liberals look with trepidation to what the court’s right wing may do next.

To get a better sense of the term to come, I spoke with Will Baude and Dan Epps, law professors at the University of Chicago and Washington University, respectively. In addition to their scholarly and teaching duties, Baude and Epps host “Divided Argument,” a podcast about the Supreme Court, which is now in its third season. What makes “Divided Argument” stand out in the crowded field of popular legal commentary is its avoidance of a preaching-to-the-choir sensibility. Baude and Epps disagree on much, and often quite vigorously — Baude’s views tend to run conservative with a libertarian bent while Epps’ lean liberal — but they disagree in good faith and for intellectually honest reasons. These exchanges often illuminate the deeper set of beliefs and ideological tensions that shape how we see the law.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This term marks the first time in nearly 30 years that the court will be without Justice Stephen Breyer, and it’s Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s first term. That doesn’t change the court’s ideological makeup, but are there subtler ways in which this change in personnel might affect the workings of the court?

Dan Epps: Justice Breyer is a justice from the last era, where the court was divided along some lines but reached consensus in other areas and wasn’t ideologically predictable. He was somebody who got along with the rest of the justices. Justice Jackson is joining the court at a very different time, where the court is much more ideologically riven. I don’t know what that’s going to feel like for her. But I could imagine, as you see the justices from the previous era drop off, that you’re going to see a court that’s more sharply divided and less “Oh, let’s all be buddy-buddy and get along” — and not just on the law but also how the justices relate to one another. I have no reason to think that she personally is going to contribute to this. It’s more about the timing and the circumstances.

Will Baude: Even when a justice who’s routinely in dissent leaves the court — so we don’t think of it as changing the balance of power — they still have decades and decades of both institutional memory and personal friendships that affect the way the court talks about the cases, thinks about things, goes about its business. So, I think that will change in lots of little ways how the justices relate to one another. Then you never know whether there’s going to be some set of issues where Justice Jackson has slightly heterodox views that might produce a new majority. You see Justice Gorsuch and Justice Sotomayor sometimes voting together in ways people might not have predicted.

This will be Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s second full term on the Court. How have you seen her jurisprudence or her role on the court evolve since she joined? What implications does that have for this coming term?

Epps: There’s been some weird stuff. Just a few days ago, there was the Alabama death penalty thing where she was actually in dissent with the liberal justices. That was interesting, though it’s an unsigned order without reasoning, so it’s hard to know exactly what to make of it.

Baude: At her confirmation hearing, there was this concern about a law review article she wrote about Catholic judges and the death penalty and whether it implied she was going to be to anti-death penalty. Maybe that’s actually true.

Among the cases the court has taken so far, do you see any themes emerging? How do those build on or depart from the court’s areas of focus in recent terms?

Epps: It’s too early to say. But if you frame it at a high level — the law in flux, the court turning more conservative — it seems like this term is likely to be a continuation of that. Still, every time there’s a change in personnel, it’s basically a new court. The configuration changes. The dynamics change. And we’re still figuring that out.

Baude: The center of the court has changed a little bit. That means there’s a lot of cases that suddenly a lot of people don’t want to take to the court, and there are other issues where other people suddenly do want to go to the court. So, you see action on voting rights and Indian law, and of course the affirmative action cases.

One area of public focus so far is voting and election matters before the court this coming term. In Merrill v. Milligan, critics fear the justices will make it harder for plaintiffs to show that a redistricting plan dilutes the votes of racial minorities, and in Moore v. Harper, they fear the court will limit how much state constitutions and courts can check state legislatures when they enact laws that govern federal elections. Do you have a sense for where the court is heading here?

Epps: With a lot of what the court is doing, there is a pretty wide range of possible outcomes. There are some justices who seem to be interested in doing fairly consequential things in the voting rights — or lack thereof — space. But that’s also not guaranteed, so it’s very unclear.

Baude: I see these cases as a microcosm of the pattern at the court more generally. As for Merrill, we have a well-established doctrine for interpreting the Voting Rights Act, but it’s not particularly consistent with some methodological principles of this court, which is more skeptical of legislative history, more skeptical of race-conscious laws and so on. So, it’s a little unsurprising they’re going to reconsider that, and maybe dramatically. As for Moore, there’s an incredibly long, well-established practice of state legislatures being subject to their state constitutions. But that’s in tension with the constitutional text, which refers specifically to a state’s “legislature” regulating congressional elections. It’s very possible the court is going to upset that practice — either a little bit or a lot. So, we’re seeing the same willingness here as in lots of other areas of law to reconsider long-established doctrines. But the additional problem is that these are going to put the court’s legitimacy and appearance of neutrality to the test, because there’s a good chance these cases will be seen — not necessarily fairly — as part of a right-wing plot to steal America. That’s obviously a tough spot for the court to be in.

Speaking of appearances, the last term was a controversial one to say the least. Decisions like Dobbs and Bruen generated a lot of criticism, and the public approval of the court is lower than it’s been in decades — though, of course, those same rulings were cheered by many conservatives. You both clerked on the court. In your experience, to what extent do public reaction and concerns about appearances affect the justices?

Epps: Some of them definitely don’t care at all. The question is, how many — five or fewer? I don’t hear a lot of stories about, and I didn’t experience, justices saying, “Oh, gosh, this is going to make us look so bad.” But you’ve got to think that they’re all aware of it to some degree. There’s certainly good reason to think that historically the broad parameters of public opinion have imposed some restraints on what the court felt comfortable doing.

Baude: The justices are human beings in the world, so I suspect they can’t help but be influenced by these things. But I tend to think they’re influenced by them gradually and at the macro level. In any event, my prediction is regression to the mean, because not every term can have an above-average number of big, polarizing cases. After every June, it’s tempting to draw big conclusions about the direction of the court on the basis of two or five or 10 big decisions, and, of course, we all do that. But it’s easy to over-predict.

What cases that the court has agreed to hear this term have received less attention than they deserve?

Baude: It’s surprising there hasn’t been more attention to the court’s case about the Indian Child Welfare Act, a federal law on how state family law treats Native American children. The case has three or four major constitutional questions about the fundamental structure of federal Indian law. It raises federalism questions about the source of Congress’ power over Indian tribes and the ability to force states to implement federal policies. It also raises questions that go to the fabric of the whole field, such as whether regulations of Indians or Indian tribes are a form of race discrimination. Those are obviously important in their own right and also important for what they tell us about the court’s approach to big constitutional law cases more generally.

Epps: I’ll rest on Will’s submission.

What cases that the court hasn’t yet agreed to hear are you keeping an eye on?

Baude: I certainly think the court is about to wade into the constitutionality of the Texas and Florida social media laws, which impose limits on content moderation. The Florida law was struck down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, but the Texas law was upheld by another federal appeals court, the 5th Circuit. The court has already shown some interest in these cases.

Epps: I’m sure people are wondering whether there’s going to be something new related to the ongoing investigation of President Donald Trump that will work its way to the court. I’m not sure that the special master issue is going to. It seems like the 11th Circuit smacked that down, but potentially other things like that could pop up.

Baude: If the case proceeds to the point of criminal charges against a former president, it’s easy to imagine the court feeling it has to be the one to settle it, even if the issues aren’t that thorny. It’s an unusual enough thing, and the court is still one of our more legitimate institutions.

Much remains unknown about the leak of the draft majority opinion in Dobbs. But how do you foresee it affecting the workings of the court?

Epps: You’ve got to think there are going to be some changes to internal procedures. I don’t know what those are going to look like — whether they’re going to involve physical searches when people leave the building or they’re just going to involve individual justices telling their clerks to be more secretive. Related to that, you’ve got to think there’s going to be a little bit more of a culture of distrust and anxiety in the building. I’ve got to think that’s going to change the atmosphere and the day-to-day of what it’s like to work there.

Baude: It’s also possible that this will pass. After Bush v. Gore, quite a few law clerks breached confidences and talked to the press. A few years later, everybody recognized that was a once-in-a-generation case, and what happened there wasn’t going to become the new normal for everything. It could be that Dobbs was a once-in-a-generation case.

You were both involved in President Joe Biden’s commission on Supreme Court reform, which was prompted by calls from the political left to expand the number of justices. Professor Baude, you were a commissioner; Professor Epps, you testified before the commission. The commission issued a nearly 300-page report late last year, and you all dedicated a fascinating episode of “Divided Argument” to broader reflections on the commission. Looking forward, where do you see the debate over court reform going?

Epps: It’s not going away, and I think decisions like Dobbs are going to ensure that it doesn’t go away. There was a poll that came out about five days ago — and it’s just one poll — but it said 51% of respondents favored increasing the size of the court, which is a lot more than in prior polls. That’s coupled with significantly reduced public approval for the court. In that environment — if you get to a point where a majority of Americans favor court expansion, court packing — the conversation changes dramatically. We are far from the fringes at that point, and it’s something that you’re going to see even more politicians thinking about.

Baude: One funny thing is that you don’t see a huge amount more confidence in Congress and the presidency than you do in the court. When court reform is most likely is when you have an incredibly popular Congress with a huge mandate and a court with much less of a mandate getting in Congress’ way. We’re closer to a point where none of our institutions are popular or have a mandate, which doesn’t mean court reform is not possible or maybe even good. But it’s a very different environment.

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by Caleb Bedillion, Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal

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

Public defender Merrill Nordstrom walked into a Mississippi federal courtroom in May 2021 ready to challenge the no-knock search warrant behind her client’s arrest.

It had happened two years earlier, after an informant bought less than a gram of marijuana from Antoine Bryant. Police broke open Bryant’s door with a battering ram, shattering the glass. Three children sleeping inside were startled awake.

Police found no cache of drugs, but they did find a pistol Bryant wasn’t supposed to have.

By the time Nordstrom asked a judge to toss out the evidence against Bryant, a year had passed since the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor during a no-knock raid in Louisville, Kentucky. Taylor’s death and the tactic that led to it had caused widespread outrage.

It was time, Nordstrom said, for similar scrutiny of how these warrants were used in Greenville, the Mississippi Delta’s largest city.

She had learned that most search warrants issued in Greenville were no-knock warrants, which allow law enforcement to barge into someone’s home unannounced. She suspected that many of those raids violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches.

“When I saw that they had orchestrated a confidential informant to purchase $10 worth of marijuana, and based on that went and asked for a no-knock search warrant — that, to me, was really egregious,” Nordstrom said. “That’s not what the Fourth Amendment is for. That’s not what our government is supposed to do.”

She faced a major obstacle. Though she had the search warrant for Bryant’s home, she couldn’t find records for most other raids in the city. The search warrants and supporting documents weren’t at the courthouse, even though the state Supreme Court’s rules require law enforcement to return warrants to the court.

Instead they were at the Greenville Police Department, hidden from view because law enforcement agencies, unlike the courts, can claim a broad public records exemption over records in their possession.

Greenville isn’t the only place in Mississippi where many search warrant records are inappropriately off-limits to the public. An investigation by the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal and ProPublica has found that almost two-thirds of Mississippi’s county-level justice courts prevent access to some or all search warrants and related documents. So do municipal courts in at least five of the state’s 10 largest cities, including Jackson, the capital.

Justice courts handle misdemeanor crimes, small civil cases and, often, search warrants. The judges who preside over these courtrooms are similar to justices of the peace in other states and are not required to have a law degree.

Some of those courts violate state rules by failing to require law enforcement to return search warrants and related documents. Other courts do keep search warrant records but won’t let the public see them, defying well-established jurisprudence about the availability of court records.

The independence and integrity of the judicial branch of government requires openness, said William Waller Jr., a retired chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court.

“You should have transparency,” said Waller, who helped write the rules of criminal procedure that some courts are violating. “After it’s been executed, the search warrant should be returned to a judicial officer and that should be a part of the files and available for public inspection.”

On the Trail of No-Knock Search Warrants in Mississippi A no-knock search warrant allows police to enter someone’s home unannounced to conduct a search, even if they have to break down the door. Here’s what happens in Mississippi. First, law enforcement must go before a judge to justify why they want to search the property and why they’re asking for a no-knock warrant. After searching the property, the police must bring the warrant and a list of what they took back to the judge. The warrants are supposed to be stored by the court. But that doesn’t always happen. In some counties, law enforcement keeps the search warrants. That’s against the rules. Some courts have incomplete records. That’s against the rules, too. Other clerks claim that search warrants are off-limits to the public. These practices all block access to information about no-knock raids. (Illustrations by Anuj Shrestha, special to ProPublica)

The U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized the public’s right to view court records, though it hasn’t ruled on the accessibility of search warrants in particular. Although federal appeals courts agree the public generally can view search warrants at some point in the legal process, they disagree on when those records become public. Because of those differing rulings, plus poor record-keeping and orders that seal the documents, it’s often hard to get access to warrants. Similar issues exist in many state courts.

Even against this landscape, legal experts say recordkeeping and access problems in Mississippi’s justice courts are extreme.

“It would be very, very atypical to have a jurisdiction where you never see any warrant materials,” said Katie Townsend, legal director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “That’s just not how it works.”

After Taylor’s killing, which occurred as police tried to enter her apartment to search for drugs they believed had been hidden there by a former boyfriend, activists called for bans on no-knock raids. But researchers and academics have little data about how often and why police use no-knock warrants.

Limited access to court records is part of the problem. A recent Washington Post effort to identify how many people have been killed in recent years during the execution of no-knock search warrants was hampered by sealed, missing or otherwise secret records.

“You can’t do justice in a corner,” said retired U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Smith, who reviewed applications for search warrants when he sat on the bench in Houston. He’s a vocal advocate for greater transparency in the process. “You have to see what judges are doing. It goes to the legitimacy of our legal system.”

What Happens When Police Burst in Police raided Antoine Bryant’s home in Greenville, Mississippi, to execute a no-knock search warrant in June 2019. He was charged with possessing a firearm as a convicted felon. (Rory Doyle for ProPublica)

In Mississippi, no-knock raids have caused fear, injuries and even death.

Two federal lawsuits over people who were shot in no-knock raids have been settled this year; a third suit over injuries caused in a raid is ongoing. Another federal suit involves a dispute about whether sheriff’s deputies entered without knocking. And in 2020, a state appeals court upheld damages awarded over a botched no-knock raid conducted several years before.

“It’s so dangerous for these guys to go in there the way they do,” said Michael Carr, a lawyer who has represented both clients whose homes have been searched and deputies who have been sued over such raids. “I’ve seen them kicking in people’s doors, and you’ve got little kids in there.”

Lawsuits Filed Over No-Knock Raids in Mississippi

Shot 17 Times Coahoma County sheriff’s deputies shot Maurice Mason at least 17 times after breaking down the door to search the home where he was staying in March 2020. Mason, who survived, was not the target of the search, was unarmed and was never charged with a crime. Mason sued the county, which denied any wrongdoing; it settled the lawsuit this year.

Grabbed a Gun When Police Burst In In January 2020, Coahoma deputies (the same ones who would later shoot Maurice Mason) burst into Trekevious Hayes’ home and shot him. In a court filing, he said he retrieved a gun for self-defense after the police shot first. Coahoma County Sheriff Charles Jones, however, said that deputies announced themselves and Hayes shot first.

Authorities charged Hayes with aggravated assault for allegedly shooting at the officers. He has not been indicted.

Shot While Holding an Air Gun In October 2015, Monroe County sheriff’s deputies shot and killed Ricky Keeton during a 1 a.m. no-knock raid. In depositions, deputies said he fired a pellet pistol and they shot back; his girlfriend said he thought someone was breaking in.

In September 2022, Monroe County agreed to settle a federal lawsuit over his death for $690,000, though the settlement hasn’t been finalized.

Raided the Wrong House In April 2015, state narcotics agents raided the wrong house in Vicksburg, forcing Henry and Rita Hunter to the floor at gunpoint — even after local police tried to intervene. A judge awarded the couple $50,000 following a civil trial.

No-knock warrants arose at the onset of the war on drugs under President Richard Nixon. Proponents argued that police had to be able to enter buildings without warning so suspects couldn’t destroy evidence or open fire on officers.

Despite complaints about the violence associated with these warrants, their use grew. The debate eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which considered the issue in three key cases and ruled that no-knock warrants must be the exception, not the rule.

In a key 1997 ruling, U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court’s majority that if no-knock searches were broadly sanctioned, “the knock-and-announce element of the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness requirement would be meaningless.”

Those rulings mean police must not only show a judge why they have probable cause to believe that the search will yield evidence of a crime, but they must also explain why the circumstances of the case justify a no-knock warrant.

That’s why Nordstrom grew concerned by the frequency of no-knock raids in Greenville. In a court filing, Nordstrom wrote that she had identified one case in which Municipal Judge Michael Prewitt allegedly signed a no-knock warrant even though police hadn’t asked for one on the application. She wanted to see if the judge frequently approved no-knocks without sufficient evidence.

Nordstrom sent her investigator to Greenville Municipal Court. Although Greenville authorities acknowledged that most search warrants in the city were no-knocks, the municipal court had no records of any searches authorized by Prewitt, the city’s only municipal judge for most of the prior two decades.

Nordstrom and Prewitt sparred in the May 2021 court hearing over whether the no-knock warrant in Bryant’s case was justified. Prewitt took the witness stand and acknowledged saying that he could issue a no-knock search warrant even to look for a sweater, but he denied “rubber-stamping” applications for no-knock warrants.

His explanation for signing so many no-knock warrants? Police conduct a lot of drug investigations in Greenville.

In an email to the Daily Journal and ProPublica, Prewitt said he meant to suggest that a no-knock warrant might be necessary to recover a sweater if it had forensic evidence that could easily be destroyed. (He did not offer that explanation when he testified in court.)

Greenville Police Chief Marcus Turner said his officers don’t execute no-knocks now due to staffing turnover among his investigators, but he plans to reinstate the raids.

Nordstrom couldn’t convince the federal judge overseeing Bryant’s case to throw out the evidence obtained in the search. Bryant ended up pleading guilty, but he has appealed the judge’s ruling on the no-knock warrant.

“I was so appalled by the no-knocks and how prevalent they are in that county,” Nordstrom said. “It would have been nice to figure out if there was a pattern.”

Reasons for Missing Warrants Vary

In any court, the clerk’s office, with its shelves upon shelves of file folders, is the place to go if you’re looking for key records in a criminal proceeding. Arrest warrants. Bail bonds. Judge’s orders. But not, in some of Mississippi’s justice courts, search warrants.

These are important documents. The warrant itself identifies the place police will search. The application for a no-knock warrant says why officers believe they should be allowed to barge into someone’s home without announcing themselves. The property inventory says what police seized during the search. Waller, the retired chief justice, and Matt Steffey, an attorney and law professor, said all that paperwork is supposed to be at the courthouse.

Warrants issued by Greenville’s municipal judge must be returned to the court, according to rules issued by the state Supreme Court. An investigator for a federal public defender didn’t find any there. (Rory Doyle for ProPublica)

“We don’t keep those,” said Lamar County Justice Court Clerk Sandra Owen.

“Usually the return goes back to the sheriff’s offices,” said Jones County Justice Court Clerk Stacy Walls.

“I hardly ever see search warrants — before, during or after,” said Marion County Justice Court Clerk Wynette Parkman.

But Mississippi’s rules are clear: Law enforcement must bring search warrants back to court after serving them. Virtually all state courts in the country, as well as federal courts, have similar requirements.

“There needs to be a record that isn’t squirreled away in a law enforcement file,” said Steffey, who was involved in writing the rules of criminal procedure.

ProPublica and the Daily Journal surveyed all 82 county justice courts in Mississippi, as well as municipal courts in the state’s 10 largest cities. Although any judge in Mississippi can sign a search warrant, municipal and justice court judges commonly handle them.

More than a third of Mississippi’s justice courts are breaking rules that require them to keep all search warrant records. That includes 15 justice courts that have no search warrants among their records and 16 that have only some.

The reasons for the missing warrants vary because no two justice courts operate exactly the same way. Clerks say they don’t know when judges sign warrants, so they don’t know if police fail to bring a warrant back. In some counties, law enforcement agencies return some warrants but not others, and clerks don’t know why. Some counties have warrants only if charges were filed.

Few justice courts even keep a list of issued search warrants, making it easy for these documents to fall through the cracks.

Check If Your County’s Justice Court Lets the Public Access Search Warrants !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var a in e.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r

by Talia Buford

ProPublica’s Emerging Reporters Program, now in its eighth year, is focused on providing financial resources and mentorship to students for whom investigative journalism might otherwise be inaccessible, so they can pursue early career opportunities in the field.

Participants receive a $9,000 stipend, a trip to the annual NICAR investigative journalism conference, occasional training and presentations by speakers. They’ll also be paired one-on-one with ProPublica journalists, who can help counsel them on stories, build their connections in the industry and expose them to the varied paths for careers in investigative journalism. Past Emerging Reporters have gone on to work at The New York Times, The Atlantic, THE CITY, Vox and other outlets.

Our goal is to encourage the next generation of journalists who seek to shine a light on abuses of power and produce stories of moral force that provoke change. In choosing the class, we look for students who demonstrate an early dedication to journalism as a career, through internships, work at local news outlets or campus publications. And where those opportunities — which are often unpaid — aren’t accessible, we look for other ways the student has shown an eagerness and drive to learn the craft.

The 2022-2023 academic year’s class of outstanding student journalists are from Florida and New Mexico, Colorado and Shanghai. They represent a range of collegiate journeys, and their desire to learn and pursue ambitious, important stories inspired us. Through their work, the students have already shown not only their dedication to the craft, but a yearning to tell stories with the potential for impact.

They have investigated university labor disputes and inaccurate health insurance directories that can lead to big bills for patients. They’ve helped launch hyperlocal news outlets and worked as full-time reporters in addition to carrying a full course load. Some of them are editors and reporters at their school newspapers, while others are preparing to look for their first professional newsroom jobs.

We’re so excited to support them.

Meet our 2022 class:

Chad Bradley is a senior at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication majoring in journalism and minoring in American Indian studies. Bradley’s reporting focuses on indigenous communities and tribal nations, and he hopes to improve coverage and understanding of the issues Indigenous people face. They currently fact-check with PolitiFact Arizona for the 2022 midterm elections and previously reported for Carnegie-Knight News21 and Cronkite News. Bradley is from northwestern New Mexico and is a member of the Navajo Nation.

Kevin Palomino is a junior at the University of Oklahoma majoring in journalism and minoring in international studies. Palomino serves as the president of his school's chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. For the past two years, he was a reporter at Telemundo Oklahoma, covering news stories ranging from death penalty executions to Oklahoma's wild, severe weather. Palomino was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and immigrated to Oklahoma with his family in 2005.

Yiwen Lu is a senior studying economics and political science at University of Chicago, where she serves as the managing editor for The Chicago Maroon. Her reporting focuses on subjects at the intersection of business and technology. Lu previously worked at The Washington Post, USA TODAY, NBC Chicago and The Charlotte Observer. She also participated in the Politico Student Journalism Institute and the Asian American Journalists Association’s Voices program in 2022. Lu is from Shanghai, China.

Alexandra Caban-Echevarria is a senior at Muhlenberg College, majoring in both media & communication and English. She is a managing editor at The Muhlenberg Weekly and the assistant editor of the Allentown Voice, a nonprofit news project covering Allentown’s affordable housing crisis. She worked as part of the inaugural team of journalists on the project and currently runs the project’s social media channels.

Alex Perry is a junior at Northwestern University double majoring in economics and journalism with a minor in data science. Currently a part-time associate copy editor at Axios, Perry has interned at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Macon Telegraph and the Johns Creek Herald. She is also currently a managing editor at The Daily Northwestern. She’s passionate about investigative business journalism, as well as the business of journalism, and wants to report on the media industry.

Nadia Bey is a senior at Duke University, where she is digital strategy director and former managing editor of the daily student newspaper, The Chronicle. Bey was the first intern on McClatchy’s North Carolina investigations team, writing about health, policy and gun violence for The Charlotte Observer and its sister papers in summer 2022. Her interests include public health, data, education and labor. She is from Huntersville, North Carolina.

Cameron Pugh is a senior at Williams College, where he studies English and Africana studies. Pugh currently serves as the managing editor of The Williams Record, and before that he served as a section editor for the paper’s arts section. He has been an investigative reporting intern at GBH News — at Boston’s local NPR station — where he contributed to covering labor trafficking in Massachusetts and beyond. He is from Port St. Lucie, Florida.

Irie Sentner is a junior at Columbia University studying political science and creative nonfiction. He serves as the university news editor for the Columbia Daily Spectator, is an incoming intern on the NBC News digital politics desk and previously interned for the New York Post. He is originally from Durango, Colorado.

by Cezary Podkul

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

A new type of online fraud emanating from scam sweatshops in Southeast Asia is facing its first major crackdown. Cambodian authorities have stepped up raids on compounds alleged to house workers engaging in online fraud, seizing computers, phones and electric shock batons and freeing thousands of involuntary workers. And Apple has removed from its app store two popular trading apps that cybercriminal groups in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar have used to defraud people.

The moves are likely to disrupt — perhaps only temporarily — the lucrative global scam known as “pig butchering.” Named for its analogy to a farmer fattening up a hog before slaughtering it, the fraud relies on convincing people to deposit more and more money into fake online platforms controlled by swindlers. Once the targets become unable or unwilling to deposit more funds, they’re informed that they’ve lost access to their cash and can retrieve it only by depositing more money or paying a hefty fee, a process that compounds their losses.

As ProPublica reported in a Sept. 13 investigation, pig butchering scams have been fueled by human trafficking. Workers from around Asia are tricked into going to Cambodia, Laos or Myanmar for seemingly well-paid jobs that instead trap them inside scam sweatshops run by Chinese criminal syndicates. Those who resist directives to engage in online fraud face beatings, food deprivation or worse.

Several human trafficking victims who were tricked into such jobs told ProPublica that they worked on pig butchering scams that used a trading app known as MetaTrader to target victims abroad. ProPublica interviewed iPhone and Android users in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere who lost vast amounts of money — sometimes more than a million dollars — after fraudsters convinced them to download MetaTrader and deposit their savings into sham brokerages accessible via the app.

MetaTrader allows customers to access various online brokerages to trade foreign currencies and other financial instruments. However, MetaQuotes, the Cyprus-based company behind the app, allows brokerages that it contracts with to sublicense MetaTrader software to other brokerages with few checks to ensure the legitimacy of the sublicensed operations. This has allowed scammers to use MetaTrader as a front for fraudulent websites.

In late September, ten days after ProPublica spotlighted MetaTrader’s role in financial scams, Apple removed two versions of it, MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5, from its app store. However, already-installed versions remain active. The apps are also still available on Google’s Android app store. Apple and Google did not respond to requests for comment. MetaQuotes also didn’t respond, but a representative told the trading news website Finance Magnates that the company received a letter from Apple on Sept. 23 stating that its apps do not comply with the app store’s review guidelines.

Cooperation from tech platforms is one prong of a multistep strategy to fight the scams, according to Vitit Muntarbhorn, a United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Cambodia. Another prong — more aggressive law enforcement — is finally starting to happen in Cambodia, where authorities have stepped up their efforts to crack down on criminal syndicates perpetrating the scams.

Since mid-September, police raids in at least three Cambodian cities have freed thousands of workers from buildings where they were said to have been detained against their will, according to press releases and local news reports. The crackdowns followed escalating diplomatic pressure and rising scrutiny from local and international press, including ProPublica.

In Sihanoukville, a coastal city in Cambodia that has become the country’s de facto capital of online fraud, provincial authorities described finding almost 2,000 foreign workers from 11 countries when they inspected just four compounds on suspicion of human trafficking, illegal detention, torture or other crimes. Authorities identified people from China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh and other nearby countries, along with some from as far away as Russia. Most were released but were fined for working in Cambodia without permits or sent to an immigration detention center for deportation. Similar raids are ongoing.

In Phnom Penh, the nation’s capital, hundreds of foreigners were removed from buildings in at least 11 similar raids, according to local media outlet VOD News. The compounds dotted the city, including some prominent locations like a building across the street from the Australian Embassy.

The raids have confirmed the worrying nexus of cybercrime, human trafficking and torture that ProPublica documented in its investigation. A statement describing one police inspection of a building complex in Sihanoukville listed 8,776 phones, 804 computers, 16 laptops, four pairs of handcuffs and 10 electric shock devices among evidence seized in the raid. Video of the compound shot by a VOD reporter shows buildings with barred windows surrounded by barbed-wire fences, similar to locations visited by ProPublica in May where workers alleged illegal detention and torture.

The coordinated inspections are a big step up from the previous response by the Cambodian government. Authorities had previously spent months denying allegations of human trafficking linked to cybercriminal groups in Cambodia. When trafficked workers complained, police occasionally rescued individual workers, even as they sometimes made statements downplaying victims’ accounts.

The change is noticeable. On Sept. 29, Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, publicly acknowledged the problem, saying “do not let Cambodia become a haven of crime, a place of money laundering, a place of human trafficking,” according to VOD. Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry said in a Sept. 22 press briefing that Cambodian and Vietnamese authorities have saved over 1,000 Vietnamese citizens who had been tricked into working illegally in Cambodia. Jake Sims, Cambodia country director for International Justice Mission, a nongovernmental organization that has been helping rescue people trapped inside scam sweatshops, commended the efforts to end what he called the “scam-slavery phenomenon.” Sims said more action is needed to hold perpetrators accountable and to care for victims, and he cautioned that the task will become more difficult as criminal groups shift operations to more remote regions.

There’s evidence that’s already happening. Even as authorities raided some scam locations in Sihanoukville, others were busy packing up and busing their workers elsewhere, according to local news reports. Operations in Chinatown, an area notorious for allegations of scam-linked forced labor, emptied out their workers over the weekend of Sept. 17-18 before any police raid could take place. When local reporters arrived on the scene, they could freely enter what had once been a heavily guarded prison-like area. One reporter saw workers loading up a truck with chairs; a tuk-tuk driver told another reporter he’d witnessed five or six buses at a time leaving the area in recent weeks.

Some of the workers were relocated to remote areas on the Thailand-Cambodia border, according to three individuals who have been involved in rescuing human trafficking victims from scam compounds in Cambodia in recent months. One of the three shared coordinates provided by a person who was relocated from Sihanoukville, which matched that description. Myanmar, where upheaval in the wake of a military coup has created an opportunity for criminal syndicates to expand, is also emerging as a destination for relocating scam operations.

“It obviously raises concerns that these enslaved individuals are simply being moved around the country rather than being freed,” said Naly Pilorge, outreach director for Licadho, a Cambodian human rights organization that has also seen signs that scam operations are relocating to rural areas. She said there’s only one thing the world needs to know about the scam industry that’s taken root in her country: “It must stop altogether.”

by Hannah Dreyfus

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

This story was co-published with The Denver Post.

Elina Asensio had a restraining order in place against her father when she met with a court-appointed psychologist assigned to determine whether he should be part of her life.

She expected Mark Kilmer, the Colorado “parental responsibility evaluator” appointed to her parents’ custody case, would want to hear about the incident that had led to her father being charged with felony child abuse and pleading guilty to misdemeanor assault. The 14-year-old was surprised, then, as she talked to Kilmer on the front porch of her mother’s suburban Denver home in October of 2020, that he didn’t seem interested in learning about it.

A year earlier, according to police reports, her father had grabbed Elina from behind by her lucky charm necklace and hoodie and dragged her up a flight of stairs. “Dad, I cannot breathe. … You’re hurting me, stop it,” Elina had screamed, according to the police report. She was left with burst blood vessels on her eyelids and a deep cut from ear to ear where the necklace had dug into her neck, according to the police report. A child welfare investigator described the resulting scar as a “ligature mark,” the imprint left after strangulation.

It was Elina who first brought up the incident, mentioning it after Kilmer asked why, “if you love your Dad,” she was not attending therapy with him, according to notes that accompanied Kilmer’s report to the court.

“I still feel my dad’s hands around my neck sometimes,” she recalled telling Kilmer, who is the brother of actor Val Kilmer.

He responded with a blank stare, she said.

Elina told him about other violent incidents involving her father, including one directed at a sibling, according to Kilmer’s notes.

“Father’s parenting failure(s) ending in an assault conviction appear to be an aberration.”

—Mark Kilmer’s evaluation of the Asensio custody case

Colorado family courts began appointing parental responsibility evaluators, or PREs, to custody cases 14 years ago as a privately funded alternative to court-furnished evaluators. The litigants shoulder the cost, which can run into the tens of thousands of dollars, and in some instances the PRE is paid by only one of the parents in a dispute. The intent was to allow a broader range of psychologists, including those the court could not afford, the opportunity to lend their expertise to custody decisions. They have operated with little oversight.

Elina didn’t know at the time they met that Kilmer says he does not believe about 90% of the abuse allegations he encounters in his work, or that he himself had been charged with domestic violence. Kilmer was arrested and charged with assault in 2006 after his then-wife said he pushed her to the bathroom floor, according to police reports. Following the incident, the woman obtained a restraining order against him and he was required by the court to give up his guns pending resolution of the criminal charges, according to court documents.

The following year, he pleaded guilty to harassment and, in a separate divorce proceeding, temporarily lost decision-making power over his children because of concerns about his parenting. The court placed him on probation for 24 months while he completed domestic violence counseling. After he completed probation, the court dismissed the assault charge.

“Unfortunately, I had a conflicted divorce myself,” Kilmer said in an interview. “She made up these false allegations and had me arrested. It was pretty humiliating and shocking.” His guilty plea was the result of poor legal representation, he said, and he regrets not going to trial.

Kilmer, who received a doctorate in psychology from the California Graduate Institute, had also been previously disciplined by the State Board of Psychologist Examiners in 2009 for revealing confidential information about one client to another client in an effort to set them up on a date. He was required to have his practice monitored for a year but was allowed to continue working as a custody evaluator. (Kilmer said he obtained consent from both parties before introducing them, according to board records. The board noted clients “cannot consent to a boundary violation and/or breach of confidentiality.”) Today, Kilmer’s psychological license is in good standing.

Colorado’s State Court Administrator’s Office, which is responsible for vetting PREs, said a criminal misdemeanor conviction older than 15 years does not disqualify a custody evaluator from family court appointments. ProPublica found that four evaluators on the state’s roster of 45 PREs, including Kilmer, have been charged with harassment or domestic violence. In one case, the charges were dismissed. In the two others, it is unclear how the charges were resolved.

The court administrator’s office also said that discipline by the State Board of Psychologist Examiners does not disqualify an evaluator unless it currently affects their license. ProPublica found that 1 in 5 PREs, including Kilmer, has been sanctioned by the board, six times the rate of discipline among all psychologists with active licenses in Colorado.

One evaluator who works with victims of domestic violence was sanctioned after the state received a complaint alleging she had publicly referred to a domestic violence client as “full of shit,” and after she admitted to having a member of a domestic violence counseling group she oversaw do work in her neighborhood. Others were sanctioned for misrepresenting their credentials, and several failed to keep clients’ information private, including one PRE who revealed the home address of a domestic violence victim enrolled in the state’s Address Confidentiality Program, which endangered the client, the state board found.

None of the sanctioned PREs lost their licenses or had them suspended.

Prospective PREs are asked to disclose board violations from the past 10 years, which would “trigger” further investigation, according to a court spokesperson.

After Kilmer met with Elina and the rest of her family, he filed a report recommending that Elina’s father immediately gain equal custody of her siblings, and that he begin therapy with Elina and transition back to limited parenting time with her. Kilmer also recommended that he have equal decision-making authority over his children, including choices about their medical care, social activities and academic path. Kilmer described the father’s assault conviction as an “aberration” and noted that he had “considerable positive parenting skills and abilities.” He also recommended that Elina’s restraining order be modified so she could participate in reunification therapy with him.

Elina’s mother, Karin Asensio, who said she was fearful the judge would use Kilmer’s recommendations to reduce her parenting time, agreed to resolve the custody dispute through arbitration. There, the parents agreed to divide parenting time equally and to modify the restraining order so Elina could go to therapy with her father.

“Mark Kilmer’s decision affects every day of my teenage life,” Elina said in an interview. “They let him speak for me but they wouldn’t let me speak for myself.”

When Elina wanted to get a learner’s permit, she said her father refused to grant her permission. She later got a license over his objections. (Trent Davis Bailey for ProPublica)

Kilmer declined to comment on this or any case, saying it’s prohibited by the court. “I am — forever — under a statute and direction from the Honorable Court to hold all of my cases in the strictest of confidentiality and privacy,” he said in a statement to ProPublica.

But in an interview about his approach to custody cases, Kilmer said he does not believe a “great majority” of abuse allegations he encounters in his work.

“The #MeToo movement informs us that, you know, about 90% of all allegations are true, or something around there,” he said. “In my forensic work, that’s completely flipped on its head: About 90% of the allegations I hear are false.” Kilmer emphasized the estimates are based on his “own experience,” not scientific research.

“Sometimes the Judge Just Cuts and Pastes All My Recommendations”

In Colorado custody cases that trigger legal disputes, family court judges may appoint an evaluator to assess the best interests of the children. The cost of these child and family investigators, who are not required to be mental health professionals, is capped at $2,750, which can be paid for by the state or split between the parties.

But for parents willing to pay uncapped fees as high as $30,000, Colorado law permits the appointment of a parental responsibility evaluator from a roster of state-approved experts, most of whom have masters or doctorate degrees in psychology.

The two-tiered system was created at the urging of psychologists who argued the courts’ $2,750 limit on fees didn’t adequately cover their services, including in-depth personality testing for complex cases. As PREs, psychologists could work as court appointees without cutting their fees or curtailing their analytical methods.

PREs acknowledge that they wield tremendous influence over family court proceedings and are subject to little oversight or transparency.

This is by design, according to Bill Fyfe, who worked with the Colorado Supreme Court to draft procedures governing PREs and became one of the state’s longest-practicing custody evaluators. The more costly and highly trained professional advisers were given as much independence as possible while still functioning as appointees of the court.

Fyfe retired from serving as a PRE in protest last year, after a new law took effect requiring increased oversight and training for custody evaluators. “The court shouldn’t be involved in managing us. They’re good people, but they have no idea what we do or how we do it,” he said.

Kilmer and other PREs told ProPublica that judges accept their recommendations in the overwhelming majority of custody decisions, though that’s impossible to verify because their reports are filed under seal and seldom made public.

“At this point in my career, sometimes the judge just cuts and pastes all my recommendations and puts it into the court order,” Kilmer said.

Mark Kilmer (Nabil Nezzar, special to ProPublica)

Kilmer, 64, is tall and broad with blond hair, a square jaw and a beefy handshake. When he is not assessing parents in living rooms, in kitchens or on front porches, he sees clients at one of his several offices in the Denver area.

When Kilmer received his doctorate in 1998, the California Graduate Institute’s psychology program was not accredited by the American Psychological Association, according to a spokesperson from the organization. The program now goes by a different name and has received APA accreditation.

Kilmer said he was attracted to PRE work because “it’s lucrative — as far as things go in psychology.” His fee averages $14,000 per court-ordered report, but his charges can rise to more than $30,000, he said. “People have a lot of money, and they just keep sending stuff to me.”

The domestic dispute Kilmer was charged for occurred in August 2006. When a Boulder County police officer arrived at Kilmer’s residence to investigate a report of an assault, Kilmer had already left, according to the police report. The officer found Kilmer’s then-wife on the bathroom floor complaining of pain on her left side. Two days earlier, she said, Kilmer had also blocked the entrance to their home and only moved after she threatened to scream and call 911. Kilmer was 6’1” and weighed 225 pounds, according to the report.

An excerpt of the police report on the incident that led to Kilmer’s domestic assault charge (Obtained and annotated by ProPublica)

Asked if his criminal record comes up when he works with victims of domestic violence and abuse, Kilmer answered: “Just look at my resume, right? It’s like, look at what I’ve done and who I am and what I’ve been trying to put together for myself. Do you think, beneath all of this, I’m some kind of monster?”

Multiple parents said custody evaluators downplayed or omitted from reports to the court the traumatic and lasting effects of abuse they said they had experienced.

ProPublica also spoke to 45 Colorado parents currently or recently involved in custody disputes with allegations of child and domestic abuse. In cases evaluated by a PRE with a criminal or disciplinary record, parents told ProPublica they only learned about that record after the court had appointed the evaluator to their case.

According to the APA’s code of ethics, psychologists should recuse themselves if their personal histories could “reasonably be expected” to affect their objectivity or expose a client to harm or exploitation. Experts said it would be “highly unusual” for a psychologist who’s been charged with domestic violence or child abuse to evaluate custody cases involving domestic violence or child abuse, especially if those charges were not disclosed beforehand.

“I would question such a custody evaluator’s ability to look at claims of domestic violence or abuse in a fair and objective way,” said Helen Brantley, a clinical psychologist who chairs the task force that developed the APA’s guidelines for child custody evaluations in family law proceedings.

Kilmer’s then-wife made a voluntary statement to the police in 2006 about Kilmer. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Kilmer said he has never recused himself in 30 years working on over 600 court-ordered reports. “Once the court appoints me, that’s it. There’s no bailing out.”

His call to action: saving kids. “Like the whole situation in Uvalde, with the cops,” he said, referring to the mass shooting at a Texas elementary school earlier this year. Surveillance video showed armed officers waiting more than an hour to enter a classroom and confront the gunman.

“There’s no not going in,” Kilmer added. “Sometimes people are really disturbed and violent and it’s just like, that’s part of the job.”

A Colorado statute requires courts and court-appointed evaluators to consider claims of domestic violence and child abuse in child custody cases.

Karin Asensio filed a complaint against Kilmer with the State Board of Psychologist Examiners, alleging that he failed to take her ex-husband’s assault conviction into account when making his recommendations. The board dismissed the complaint, stating that it did not amount to a violation warranting disciplinary action.

Evaluators’ findings in custody cases are consequential: The Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence estimates that each year 58,000 children are placed in the custody of an abuser. Since 2008, 864 children have been killed in cases where a divorcing or separating caretaker has been accused of the crime, according to the Center for Judicial Excellence, which tracks news reports of child deaths; in 117 of those cases, a family court was involved prior to the death but failed to prevent it.

Kilmer said he’s particularly skeptical of abuse allegations from a person who stayed in a relationship for a long time.

A court document shows Kilmer temporarily lost decision-making authority over his children in 2007 during his divorce. (Obtained and annotated by ProPublica)

“People come in and say, ‘You know, this person has been terrible to me for 17 years.’ And you’ve just been hanging in there all that time and you had five kids? How was it really that bad all that time?” he said.

Then, he said, he’ll meet the partner who’s been accused of the abuse, “I look at their information and I’m like, ‘Oh, these allegations are really not even possible.’”

More often than not, he said, the accusers are exaggerating “to see what kind of legal advantage they can get.”

Conducting a Custody Evaluation During a Criminal Investigation

While the Colorado statute governing PREs requires evaluators to release their underlying case file to involved parties who request it, the files don’t include some aspects of how evaluators arrive at their recommendations. PREs frequently conduct in-depth psychological testing, but may refuse to release the results to clients, forcing parents to hire another psychologist to review the data. And parents are not immediately privy to what was included and omitted from their final report.

The day after Kilmer released his report, Elina’s mother requested the documentation used in his evaluation. Kilmer gave her his shorthand notes but refused to release recordings or transcripts of his interviews. When Karin continued to pursue the information, Kilmer sent her a cease-and-desist letter.

Sometimes the contents of evaluators’ reports are only disclosed if the PRE is subpoenaed and testifies in court.

That’s how one woman said she found out that Kilmer had not mentioned her ex-husband’s violence against her and her daughter in his recommendations. The woman asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from her ex-husband.

In that case, Kilmer was not acting as a PRE but as a court-selected investigator. The court appointed Kilmer in August of 2019. Midway through the evaluation, she said, she learned of Kilmer’s record of domestic violence but didn’t challenge his involvement for fear it would hurt her case.

In her initial interview, she told Kilmer that her husband had become increasingly violent toward her after she became pregnant with their child, according to the woman and Kilmer’s court testimony. When she was five months pregnant, her ex-husband was arrested and charged with assault after grabbing her hair and slamming her head into the ground, resulting in a concussion and a neck contusion, according to medical records. “Assault” is listed as part of the medical diagnosis. The woman was reluctant to pursue charges and the district attorney chose not to prosecute the case, according to court testimony.

Under cross-examination in the couple’s custody case, Kilmer said he knew about the incident and had reviewed the husband’s arrest records and the woman’s emergency room medical records. Explaining why he had excluded those details from his report, Kilmer said, “I don’t take medical providers’ consideration or determination of whether a crime happened or not. Allegations, documentation, validations are not reality.”

In the same custody case, Kilmer omitted witness accounts of the father grabbing his then-2-year-old daughter by the neck and lifting her off the ground. Under questioning, Kilmer acknowledged that more than one source had described the incident to him, but said he “didn't understand” if abuse “had actually taken place or not.”

The mother said that when she told Kilmer about the incident, he chastised her for not calling the police. No charges were filed.

“I don’t take medical providers’ consideration or determination of whether a crime happened or not. Allegations, documentation, validations are not reality.”

—Kilmer, in court testimony

In his final recommendations, Kilmer told the court that “both parents” appeared to have made “mistakes” and exhibited “poor judgment.” Among the mother’s mistakes, he noted, was “publicly disparaging” her husband. Kilmer did not specify mistakes made by the father.

In court testimony, Kilmer said he did “consider” in his evaluation the fact that the father had lied when asked if he’d been arrested for domestic violence, but Kilmer decided against mentioning it in his report. “It ultimately didn’t seem to be something that was germane to the issue of trying to figure out … what was the safest and most appropriate parenting plan for [the child]. … I made [recommendations] with the understanding that there were these allegations but they were just that, allegations.”

This month, the judge adopted most of Kilmer’s recommendations and awarded the parents joint custody. While Kilmer had recommended that the parents share decision-making authority, the judge awarded that power solely to the mother.

Legal and custody experts advise court-appointed mental health professionals against agreeing to participate in cases involving allegations of abuse if law enforcement is still investigating them. “It is not the place of a custody evaluator to determine if abuse took place, that’s a criminal matter,” said Brantley, the chair of the APA child custody task force. Brantley said that this is a best practice but not a formal guideline.

In 2020, Kilmer accepted a custody case involving allegations of spousal rape and child sexual abuse and issued a report while police were still investigating the allegations involving the child. (Police closed the spousal rape inquiry shortly before Kilmer’s appointment due to a lack of corroborating witnesses or DNA evidence, according to the police report.)

Kilmer did not speak to the detective investigating the case, according to his report. The police department confirmed to ProPublica that they have no record of Kilmer contacting them. The detective investigating the case also confirmed that the child abuse case remains open.

Kilmer also did not interview a social worker at a local children’s hospital who had reported suspected abuse of the same child to the Adams County Sheriff’s Office. According to police records, the hospital employee said that the then-2-year-old child was brought in for an exam because a caretaker reported she was“displaying abnormal behavior” after staying with her father, and the girl was “touching and rubbing her vagina.”

In his PRE report, Kilmer accused the mother of “knowingly making false allegations in order to further a legal position.” He also threatened — in the only portion of the report in capital letters, bolded and underlined — that he would advise the court to restrict the mother’s parenting time if she subjected the child to further physical examinations: “IF MOTHER CONTINUES, UNFORTUNATELY FOR THE CHILDREN A RESTRICTION OF HER PARENTING TIME SHOULD BE REVIEWED BY THE HONORABLE COURT, DESPITE HER OTHERWISE EXCELLENT PARENTING SKILLS.”

Lawrence Jay Braunstein, a former prosecutor and expert on child abuse litigation, said custody evaluators should not give an opinion as to whether abuse has or has not occurred. To do so would be unethical and inappropriate, he said. “Custody evaluators stay in their lane, that’s the theory,” said Braunstein.

Kilmer declined to comment on why he did not contact law enforcement investigating this case or why he deemed the abuse allegations to be “false.”

“People often ask me, ‘How can you tell if people are lying?’ That’s where my own clinical experience comes in,” he told ProPublica. “I know what it looks like when somebody’s telling me the truth.”

“So Easily Rigged”

A Colorado law that took effect in January requires court evaluators to receive additional training on how to identify domestic violence and child abuse and on how a history of abuse should be weighed in custody recommendations. The law also tasked the court with vetting PREs and reviewing complaints against them.

The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Meg Froelich, hopes it will spur improvements, but remains unflinching in her criticism of the system.

“Apparently, we don’t even have the ability to prevent convicted domestic abusers from being PREs,” said Froelich, adding that she was not referring to any specific PRE.

Despite the system’s problems, Froelich sees value in mental health professionals advising the court. “But what we don’t need are court professionals being hired and paid exorbitant sums of money by one of the parties.”

Colorado allows one party to a custody dispute to request and pay for a court evaluator, though the court must approve and issue the appointment.

“The PRE system is so easily rigged,” Froelich added. “PREs are racking up huge expenses, which of course benefits the more affluent spouse.”

Kilmer acknowledged that custody evaluators are put in an ethically complicated situation when one party pays them to do work on behalf of the court.

“Sometimes people are like, ‘Hey, I’m paying you! I hired you!’” said Kilmer. “And then, more often than not, the other party will complain and be like, ‘I’m not the one that wanted you. You’re clearly working for them.’”

Kilmer said he addresses this by encouraging both parties to be “upfront” about any concerns they might have about his objectivity.

“I charge time for preparation, travel and a four-hour minimum for expert witnessing.”

—Kilmer

PREs can earn even more by serving as expert witnesses in custody cases. And unless the court stipulates otherwise, the party who requests the testimony foots the bill.

“Payment for the evaluation will not cover testimony as an expert witness,” states a PRE contract reviewed by ProPublica.

“I charge time for preparation, travel and a four-hour minimum for expert witnessing,” Kilmer told ProPublica. He said his hourly rate is $325.

Robin M. Deutsch, a former chair of the APA Ethics Committee who trains judges, lawyers and court-appointed custody professionals in how to recognize intimate partner violence, was surprised Colorado courts allow PREs to act as expert witnesses while being paid by one party.

It is not unusual for an evaluator to testify in court if they are subpoenaed, she said. But “agreeing to shift from a parental evaluator role to be an expert witness hired by one side is absolutely an ethics code violation.” An evaluator is “the court’s witness” and should not appear to be working for one party by testifying on their behalf, she said.

Bill DeLisio, a spokesperson for the court, said Colorado law allows PREs to work as both a custody evaluator and an expert witness on the same case. The court is responsible for monitoring complaints about their objectivity and managing their testimony, he said.

Kilmer said he frequently acts as an expert witness on cases for which he also served as an evaluator. He dismissed as “ridiculous” concerns over the ethics of serving in both capacities.

“If you can produce a report, you can talk about it to the court,” he said.

Kilmer said acting as an expert witness is his “favorite” part of the job and he has improved his courtroom presentation through years of involvement in Toastmasters.

“Being in court is like being in Kabuki theater,” said Kilmer, who received his undergraduate degrees in dramatic literature and theater arts. “There’s a whole presentation — there’s a whole way that you can be more effective, by the way you talk and the way you present yourself. And you do all those things not because you’re being false, but just because that’s what the theater requires.”

“Questioning Every Bit of Reality I Had Fought to Reestablish”

In pleading guilty to misdemeanor assault, Elina's father, Cedric Asensio, avoided a trial on charges of felony child abuse and criminal neglect. He received a deferred judgment, meaning at the end of a probation period, the plea was withdrawn and the case dismissed.

Cedric Asensio’s attorney, Kimberly Diego, said in a statement to ProPublica that the initial charge of felony child abuse against her client was “very serious,” but noted that the case was ultimately resolved through a plea to misdemeanor assault and deferred sentence, which indicates “there is much more to the story.”

“In reaching this resolution, a host of information was provided to the prosecuting attorney,” Diego stated. “What was provided included text messages, social services records, police reports, medical records, emails, and a number of media files. It was after consideration of these materials that the case was resolved in the way it was.”

When the criminal case was resolved, Elina was living full time with her mother, was going to therapy and had started ninth grade.

“Things were starting to feel a little more normal,” she said.

Her interview with Kilmer — in which she recalls him pressuring her to forgive her father and saying that it would “ruin” her relationship with her dad if she didn’t — triggered what she described as post-traumatic stress and depression. The aftermath of the conversation left her “questioning every bit of reality I had fought to reestablish.”

She stopped going to school. She sat alone in her room for hours and went days without sleeping. She lost weight and wanted to be even thinner. She thought several times about taking her own life.

“I wanted there to be less of me,” she said. “And I was too scared to ask for help. I didn’t want to prove them right, that I was sick. That I was out of control. That this was, somehow, my fault.”

Elina’s father retains equal decision-making authority over his daughter.

Elina’s countdown app on her iPhone tracks the days, hours and minutes until she turns 18. (Trent Davis Bailey for ProPublica)

In June 2020, he refused to let her participate in a mentor and therapy program, according to court documents.

A few months later, when Elina wanted to get her learner’s permit, she said he told her no. Elina got her driver’s license over her father’s objections.

In May 2021, he denied her request to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, according to court documents. Elina said she got the vaccine anyway.

Cedric Asensio said he requested that his ex-wife wait a few weeks “to get more data on safety” before Elina got the vaccine.

Karin Asensio filed an emergency motion requesting that her daughter be allowed to address the judge directly about the parenting arrangement.

The court denied the motion, saying that she had not offered new reasons why the parenting arrangement should change.

Elina keeps a countdown app on her iPhone tracking the days, hours and minutes until she turns 18 and is no longer under her father’s control.

She never got back the gold necklace she was wearing the day her father assaulted her. The chain had been given to her by her maternal grandmother a few weeks earlier. The nurse who examined her in the emergency room swabbed the small four-leaf clover pendant dangling from the broken chain before giving it to police as evidence. Elina never saw it again.

“It’s really hard to think about the things I’ve lost,” she said. “But it’s scarier to think about how much more I could have lost, if my injuries that day hadn’t been bad enough for people to believe me.”

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Megan Rose

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

A military judge found Seaman Recruit Ryan Mays not guilty on Friday of setting fire to a $1.2 billion Navy ship.

Mays, 21, had stood trial on charges of aggravated arson and willfully hazarding a vessel for the four-day blaze that destroyed the USS Bonhomme Richard, an amphibious assault ship, in 2020.

The acquittal marks the end of a two-year ordeal for Mays, who spent 55 days in the brig after he was arrested.

“I can’t get everything I’ve lost back, but today is the start of my new life,” Mays told ProPublica in a statement. “I am grateful that the military judge saw me for who I am: an innocent man who wanted to serve his country. This fire was traumatic for me and a lot of other sailors. This court-martial is an added layer of trauma.”

On July 12, 2020, the Bonhomme Richard was moored at a San Diego Navy base and undergoing a major overhaul. That morning, an area of the ship known as the “lower V” caught fire, and the blaze quickly spread throughout the vessel. The warship was lost and had to be decommissioned.

A ProPublica investigation into Mays’ case found there was little to connect him to the fire. There was no physical evidence that Mays — or anyone — purposefully set the fire. The Navy had one witness who placed Mays at the scene shortly before the fire but whose story changed over time.

The criminal investigation into Mays also stood at odds with another Navy inquiry into the fire, which found that 34 people, including five admirals, either directly led to the loss of the ship or contributed to it. That investigation uncovered a litany of failures that put the ship at risk for a catastrophic fire, including poor training, insufficient oversight and dangerous storage of hazardous materials. Additionally, 87% of the ship’s fire stations were out of order.

The Navy continued to pursue Mays even after a military judge recommended this year that the case be dropped for lack of evidence after a probable cause hearing.

In closing remarks, Mays’ lead defense attorney, Lt. Cmdr. Jordi Torres, said the investigation was a “live-fire exercise in the dangers of confirmation bias.” He said investigators and then the prosecution discounted any evidence that didn’t fit the narrative of Mays as the arsonist.

The lead prosecutor in the case, Capt. Jason Jones, told the judge, “You’re allowed to use inferences and circumstantial evidence” in making a determination of arson. Jones said criminal cases are like puzzles, and even when there is a missing piece, the picture is still clear.

Jones also addressed some of the findings of the other Navy investigation in his closing remarks, saying the prosecution didn’t dispute that the ship was lost to firefighting failures. But, he said, the fire started as a “sucker punch from behind” that the Navy couldn’t have prevented.

In the nine-day court-martial, the Navy had alleged that Mays was a disgruntled sailor who had gone down to the lower V with a bucket of flammable liquid, set the fire and then snuck out a hatch, changed his clothes and slipped back among the sailors on duty.

Mays was 19 at the time of the fire, assigned to menial jobs such as mopping and painting. He had previously dropped out of SEAL training and had told fellow sailors that the special warfare program was where he thought he belonged. Being on a ship he disliked, the prosecution said, was his motive.

Investigators found a blue Bic lighter in Mays’ possessions and have pointed to it as the possible way the fire was started. Torres was dismissive, saying “apparently just having a lighter makes you an arsonist.”

The trial largely centered on two competing witnesses and arguments over whether a crime had even been committed.

Fire investigators with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ruled the blaze an arson that was started by someone putting an open flame on large cardboard boxes. But defense experts disputed that conclusion, saying that there were two other possible causes ATF investigators missed and that “undetermined” was the only reasonable conclusion. The defense experts testified that lithium batteries and arcing from an engine wire on a forklift could not be ruled out as causes of the fire.

Phil Fouts, the fire investigator who testified on behalf of the defense, said he could not with any scientific certainty say whether the batteries, the forklift or arson was more likely the cause of the fire.

An ATF electrical engineer testified that he did not take any pictures or notes about the batteries during his examination of the scene, even though the batteries were found in the area that the agency identified as the origin of the fire. The batteries were then stored in a Home Depot bucket by ATF investigators. The engineer also did not photograph the forklift. The engineer testified that upon further inspection and testing of both the batteries and the wire, he did not think either caused the fire.

Trying to rebut the defense experts’ findings, the ATF engineer showed the judge a presentation using a forklift photo to highlight why he thought it couldn’t have caused the fire — but the photo was of the wrong forklift. There were two in the lower V, and the defense expert had found evidence of arcing in the other forklift.

Jones said that arson cases are often based on circumstantial evidence and the government had done its due diligence in reexamining the possible causes brought up by the defense.

The prosecution’s key witness, Petty Officer 2nd Class Kenji Velasco, testified that while he was standing watch the morning of the fire, he saw Mays go into the lower V shortly before he spotted smoke. Velasco at first told Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents he couldn’t identify the person he saw, but over several interviews he changed his story to say he was sure it was Mays. Velasco said the person he saw was wearing coveralls, but several witnesses testified they saw Mays in a different uniform that morning.

In an unusual twist, the prosecution did not call the lead NCIS agent to the stand. However, defense lawyers did call agent Maya Kamat to testify. The defense mainly questioned Kamat about an alternative suspect she investigated for several months. Another witness told NCIS she had spotted the sailor, Seaman Recruit Elijah McGovern, sprinting from the lower V around the time she saw smoke that morning.

Miya Polion, who is now out of the Navy, testified she saw McGovern jump over a cone that had been blocking off the lower V. “It’s kinda weird to be running on the ship,” she said, so she kept looking at him the entire time he was in view.

The prosecution claimed that video evidence showed Polion could not have seen McGovern that day because there was too much contractor equipment, such as scaffolding and dumpsters, in the way.

When interviewed by NCIS agents, McGovern denied setting the fire. McGovern had been searching online for fire characteristics the morning of the blaze and had a drawing on his phone depicting steps to set a coffee shop on fire. McGovern had told agents that the searches were research for a book he was writing about dragons, and that the novel began with a ship on fire.

Kamat testified she stopped investigating McGovern because he left the Navy and NCIS no longer had jurisdiction. Several months later, the Navy charged Mays with the crimes.

In response to prodding by the prosecutor during cross-examination, Kamat agreed that she also stopped investigating McGovern because she had exhausted all leads.

In closing arguments, Jones dismissed McGovern as a sci-fi loving sailor who had been seen leaving the ship and had been properly cleared as suspect.

The Navy and Capt. Derek Butler, the military judge, have refused to release nearly all records in Mays’ case, citing Article 140a of the Uniform Code of Military Justice as well as a memo issued by the former Defense Department general counsel and Navy interpretations of that guidance. ProPublica has filed a complaint and motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to prevent the Navy from continuing to withhold court records in Mays’ case, contending that the Navy and the judge are violating the First Amendment and common law rights of access to court proceedings and records.

During the court-martial, exhibits also weren’t always visible, including photographs of key evidence, and stipulations of fact, sometimes to correct testimony, weren’t publicly available.

“There was never any evidence to support a conviction, and that’s about the only thing that makes sense about this court-martial, because Seaman Mays is innocent,” Torres told ProPublica on behalf of the defense team. “Thankfully, the military judge based his verdict on the evidence and not on mere argument and supposition. The Navy won today because an innocent sailor avoided a wrongful conviction.”

Update, Sept. 30, 2022: This story was updated with comment from Seaman Recruit Ryan Mays and Lt. Cmdr. Jordi Torres.

by Lisa Song and Alexandra Zayas

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

Two communities saw major impacts this month stemming from a first-of-its-kind ProPublica endeavor to map toxic industrial air pollution.

The Environmental Protection Agency will start monitoring the air in Verona, Missouri, where a manufacturing plant named BCP Ingredients emits a potent carcinogen called ethylene oxide. The mayor of Verona, Joseph Heck, has fought for air monitoring for nearly a year, since ProPublica’s analysis showed the company’s emissions substantially raised the local cancer risk. In some parts of the small city, the industrial cancer risk was an estimated 27 times what the EPA considers acceptable.

It feels “amazing” to finally see progress, Heck said in an interview. The EPA will install three air monitors in Verona to track ethylene oxide. The agency will also operate a mobile monitoring vehicle that can take additional samples.

Heck said the attention from ProPublica and local TV station KY3, which reported on ProPublica’s findings, helped spur these developments. Those stories have “prompted a lot of things. ... When a company or even EPA gets in the public eye, then they’ve got to look like they’re doing something about it. I couldn’t have done this on my own. There ain’t no way.”

In a statement, the EPA said the monitoring is expected to begin this fall.

BCP Ingredients did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During a surprise inspection in June, the EPA found multiple health and safety violations at the plant. The agency recently issued an administrative order for compliance on consent, which requires the company to update its emergency procedures and take other steps to fix the violations. The order does not include a fine; in a statement, the EPA said it “has reserved the right to seek penalties in a future action.”

Heck said the monitoring alone will not solve everything. He worries about the health effects of living near ethylene oxide and how the EPA might react if the monitoring shows high concentrations. His partner, Crystal Payne, was a breast cancer survivor and in remission when they moved to Verona eight years ago. Within a year, her cancer came back and spread to her brain and her liver. Payne died this month.

“She’s in a better place,” Heck said. “No more tests, no more suffering.”

Crystal Payne, left, and Sue Pikari hug after last December’s EPA meeting in Verona. Payne, the mayor’s partner, was battling breast cancer. She died this month. (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)

Also this month, residents of St. James, a Louisiana parish on a stretch of the Mississippi River known as “Cancer Alley,” won a yearslong battle to block the building of a $9.4 billion petrochemical complex that would have been one of the largest industrial projects in state history. As reported by Lylla Younes for Grist, a state district judge withdrew the air permits, finding that state officials did not adhere to the Clean Air Act when issuing them.

“The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality’s decision to authorize these potential public health violations, without offering evidence to show it had avoided the risk to the maximum extent possible, was arbitrary and capricious and against the preponderance of evidence under the agency’s public trust duty,” Judge Trudy M. White wrote in her ruling.

ProPublica found in 2019 that the air around the complex proposed by Formosa, a Taiwanese chemical giant, already contained more cancer-causing pollution than 99.6% of industrialized areas in the country. The proposed facility could have caused toxic air levels in some parts of St. James to triple.

“Formosa was wrong to even want to come in here and poison us because we’re already being poisoned,” Sharon Lavigne, a lifelong parish resident, told Grist’s Younes, who previously led ProPublica’s investigation. After Formosa announced its plans for the complex, Lavigne founded the grassroots group Rise St. James, which teamed up with the environmental watchdog Earthjustice to sue the state over its decision to grant the permits.

The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality plans to appeal the judge’s decision. An agency spokesperson said they had “no other comment on this active litigation.”

Formosa did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment. Janile Parks, the spokesperson for the Formosa unit in charge of the project, told Reuters it disagrees with the court opinion. “We believe the permits issued (by the state) are sound and the agency properly performed its duty to protect the environment in the issuance of those air permits,” she said in a statement, adding that it intends to “construct and operate it to meet all state and federal standards.”

Update, Sept. 29, 2022: This article was updated with a comment from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.

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.

Let’s get you ready to cast your ballot by creating a voting plan.

First things first: Have you confirmed your voter registration yet? You’ll need to be registered in order to vote by mail or in person.

All registered to vote? Let’s talk about your options.

See our simple guide to voting here.

Every county has at least a couple of options for casting a ballot — a combination of in-person voting on Election Day and an extended period for early voting, for example. Or maybe there’s expanded access to voting by mail and polling sites where you can cast a ballot in person. Those options will be handled differently depending on where you live because of our patchwork voting system, which has more than 10,000 jurisdictions that all run elections in different ways.

The good news is, the more choices that are offered, the likelier you are to find the one most appropriate for your needs. Here, we’re going to discuss voting options in broad strokes.

Voting Early in Person or on Election Day

Even as many states have expanded the ability to vote by mail, a lot of people prefer to do the job in person. Voters with who have difficult speaking or reading English may require an interpreter to help them with their ballot. Many people are wary about voting in any way other than an in-person system that allows them to see their ballot being physically cast. Some states make it challenging to vote any other way.

There’s a national campaign underway to recruit people to staff polling places during early voting and on Election Day, and you can find information on how to volunteer here.

Most states — 46 in total — offer some kind of early voting. The website for your election administrator has more details about the local rules and how many days of early voting you get (if it’s offered). But if you’re able to cast your ballot early in your state and are confident in your choices, consider voting as early as possible.

Here’s one reason: If you go to your polling place and there’s a long line, you can try coming back the next early voting day. But if you put it off until Nov. 8, then you’ll have no choice but to wait it out. That can help ease the Election Day crush for other voters and poll workers.

How to Vote in Person

Prefer to fill out your ballot in person at your polling location? Follow these steps to make a plan to vote in person.

1. Locate your polling place. It might not be where you voted last time. For some of you, your polling site won’t be sorted out until a couple weeks before Election Day. Check out the status of where you’re supposed to vote (and remember to double-check closer to voting time) at your county election official’s website or look it up here.

2. Decide whether to go early or on Election Day. Investigate early voting options at your election administrator’s website.

3. Figure out if you need ID. If you’re a first-time voter, you are required to show identification at the polls. And in some states, all voters have to present ID. But what you’ll need to bring varies by state. Sometimes drastically. You can check your state’s ID requirements here.

• Strict Photo ID: Some states require voters to show government-issued photo identification, like a driver’s license or U.S. passport.
• Strict Non-Photo ID: In some states, a non-photo ID with your name and address, such as a utility bill or bank statement, is required.
• Non-Strict Voter ID: Some states request either of these forms of ID, but ID is not required for you to vote. Under this category, you can still vote through alternative options like signing an identity affidavit, having election officials vouch for your identity or voting on a provisional ballot that is double-checked by your local election officials. (But, like all things on Nov. 8, your options come down to the state where you’re voting.)
• No Document Required to Vote: Finally, in some states, you don’t have to show any ID at all — unless you’re a first-time voter.

Once you know where and when you’ll vote in person, make sure to allow yourself enough time to travel to your polling location and possibly wait in line if it’s busy.

Voting by Mail

Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia currently allow anyone to vote absentee — that is, vote by mail. In most of those places you have to request an absentee ballot, although several send every registered voter an application for one.

Fifteen states require an excuse to vote by mail. In most of these states, you can still request an absentee ballot if you are going to be out of your county on Election Day, are sick or have a physical disability that makes it hard to get to the polls, are on active duty in the U.S. military or are working a required shift that coincides with polling hours.

See your election administrator’s website for details on how to get your ballot. If you live in a state where you have to request an absentee ballot, do it now. Election offices are slammed in the weeks before Election Day. And the sooner you request and receive your ballot, the sooner you can send it back.

Voting by mail has proven to be secure and effective.

In all states, voting by mail involves a ballot return deadline. As with practically every other part of the voting process, the absentee ballot deadline varies by state — but the U.S. Postal Service recommends that voters mail their ballot at least one week before the due date required by each state to allow for disruptions like severe weather and other unforeseen circumstances. The earlier you send it, the safer you’ll be.

If you want to bypass the mail, some states have ballot drop-off boxes — a secure, time-tested way to return your ballot. Others let you drop off your absentee ballot at the county election office or your polling place. To check your drop-off alternatives (if any), contact your local election office.

We have all heard again and again false claims of fraudulent mail-in ballots, stuffed ballot boxes and other outlandish statements meant to break our trust in election results. But cases of fraudulent voting are exceptionally rare.

How to Vote by Mail

1. Check the deadlines for requesting and submitting a ballot. See your election administrator’s website for details.

2. Find drop-off box locations that might work for you. Contact your local election office to learn about drop-off options for your absentee ballot.

3. Request the ballot! Why wait? The sooner you have your ballot, the sooner you can fill it out and turn it in so your vote can be counted on time.

4. Fill out your ballot. Be sure to follow all instructions for marking your vote and sealing the envelope.

5. Mail in your ballot by the deadline. Try to mail your ballot at least one week before Election Day. Or see if your state has ballot drop-off boxes so you don’t have to worry about it being postmarked on time.

Getting Help Voting — or Helping Others

The right to vote is protected for those who do not know how to read, and the Voting Rights Act entitles people who struggle with literacy to get help casting their ballots. This is also true for people who do not speak English and those with intellectual disabilities.

Our reporters recently dove deep on this in a stunning investigation titled “The Fight Against an Age-Old Effort to Block Americans From Voting.” Here’s what they found:

“For all of the recent uproar over voting rights, little attention has been paid to one of the most sustained and brazen suppression campaigns in America: the effort to block help at the voting booth for people who struggle to read — a group that amounts to about 48 million Americans, or more than a fifth of the adult population. ProPublica analyzed the voter turnout in 3,000 counties and found that those with lower estimated literacy rates, on average, had lower turnout.”

But you can help. Read our report on how to make voting easier, and share our simple guide to voting!

Clarification, Sept. 30, 2022: This story has been updated to reflect that the secretary of state does not administer elections in every state.

by Robin Fields

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

With the rollout this month of a new coronavirus booster, U.S. public health leaders once more face the challenge of persuading Americans that they should roll up their sleeves and get another, possibly better, shot targeted at the omicron strain.

This has become tougher with each successive vaccination campaign.

About 68% of the U.S. population has received either two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines or one dose of Johnson & Johnson, but only one-third has chosen to get a booster. In Canada, much of Europe, Japan and South Korea, people have chosen to get additional doses at far higher rates.

This summer, when COVID-19 vaccines were finally authorized in the U.S. for children under 5, they met with low demand. By mid-August, just under 5% of kids under 5 had received their first shots and only about 1% were fully vaccinated.

When it comes to the newest boosters, so far about 4.4 million people — about 1.5% of those eligible — had opted for the shots through Sept. 21, though reporting lags in some states.

This time around, the messaging also needs to overcome the publicly expressed qualms of some notable vaccine experts.

Several have said there’s inadequate proof that the reformulated booster shot will provide better protection than the original or that it’s been rushed out after being tested only on animals, not people. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky and other proponents of the new booster have countered that waiting for more evidence would have left the U.S. using a potentially outdated vaccine if, as expected, COVID-19 surges this fall and winter.

Among the most notable of the objectors is Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the Food and Drug Administration advisory committee that recommends whether to authorize vaccines and for whom. Offit has pristine pro-vaccine credentials: He’s the author of “Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All” and has been one of the nation’s most vocal advocates for childhood vaccination.

We spoke to Offit about where he thinks the public messaging about the COVID-19 vaccine and boosters has broken down. The key group for health officials to reach, he said, isn’t those adamantly opposed to getting the vaccine or those who’d happily line up for 10 doses. It’s everyone else, he said, the ones thinking: “Do I really need another dose? How badly do I need this dose?”

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services defended the CDC’s and FDA’s messaging on vaccines and promoted the new booster: “We know we can save tens of thousands of lives if we can encourage the public to get their updated booster vaccine.” (See full statement here)

The stakes go beyond whether Americans will embrace each new COVID-19 shot, holding the potential to damage public confidence in all vaccines, Offit said. He pointed to four moments when leaders at the CDC, the FDA or in the Biden administration failed to communicate clearly what to expect from the COVID-19 vaccine and when and for whom extra shots could make a critical difference:

1. Vaccine meets world

When the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were authorized in December 2020 and became available to an eager public, their makers and public health officials touted them as having efficacy rates of over 90% against mild, moderate and severe illness.

That was true, but temporary. What got lost in the messaging was that the shots’ protection against mild illness was bound to decline over time, Offit said. Public health officials should have made clearer that the principal goal was to prevent disease severe enough to lead to hospitalization or death. That’s what the vaccines delivered:

“If I could go back in time, right then when our committee was presented with those data in December [2020], I think we should have stood up or people should have stood up and said: ‘Realize that this protection is great. And we hope this protection holds up against severe illness and keeps you out of the hospital and keeps you out of the ICU and keeps you from dying. But this protection against mildly symptomatic illness is not going to hold up over time.’ And that’s what happened. Six months later, protection faded. Instead of offering a reasonable explanation for that, we did the opposite.”

2. Breakthroughs

By mid-2021, there was a flurry of stories about so-called breakthrough infections — cases of COVID-19 among Americans who were fully vaccinated. At the time, they were considered rare. Perhaps the most memorable: an outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, that began over the July 4 weekend and infected 469 people, including 346 who’d had the requisite vaccine doses.

Here, Offit said, was an opportunity to remind people that the vaccine’s protection against serious disease remained. Labeling mild cases or asymptomatic infections as “breakthroughs” was an avoidable error, he said:

“Four of the 346 were hospitalized. That’s a hospitalization rate of 1.2%. That is a vaccine that is working well. We should have stood up and said this is what you want from this vaccine. And the other 342 had a mild or asymptomatic infection, which we labeled ‘breakthrough’ infection. And that’s the CDC’s word, I mean, in their Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, that was the headline in that report of that outbreak, when it should have been the opposite. It should have been, ‘This vaccine is doing just what you expected it to do.’”

The fallout from not framing breakthrough infections this way continues to this day. A July survey of vaccinated adults conducted by Kaiser Family Foundation found that almost half, 48%, said they didn’t think boosters are effective because some vaccinated people are still getting infected.

3. Boosters for all?

In August 2021, the Biden administration announced plans to begin offering boosters to most fully vaccinated adults starting the following month.

The announcement was unusual, in part because the advisory panels that typically guide the CDC and FDA on vaccine decisions hadn’t yet weighed in on the booster question. Scientists who were convinced the data backed another shot quickly began debating those who thought that, at least for younger, healthier people, the first two were still plenty effective.

That September, the panel on which Offit sits, the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, rejected the notion that most adults needed a third dose, endorsing boosters only for those 65 and older or at high risk because of underlying health conditions.

“I mean, the most recent data, the data that were generated just a month before that, showed protection against severe disease was holding up. So what was [Biden] trying to do? Was he trying to protect against mild disease? Because that’s not doable. And so that came to our committee, and we voted no. We unanimously voted no.”

A CDC advisory panel came to a similar conclusion, recommending boosters only for limited groups. Ultimately, though, both agencies went beyond their advisers’ guidance. The FDA authorized boosters for any adult whose work or living conditions put them at higher risk of exposure. The CDC expanded its recommendations to match.

Said Offit: “So now you’re additionally confused. Should we get a booster dose or not?”

The landscape shifted again with the arrival in late 2021 of the omicron variant. Omicron was sufficiently genetically different from earlier versions of COVID-19 to spark worries about how well the vaccine’s protection would hold up.

Many public health experts who’d questioned the push to boost all adults became converts. CDC studies showed that fully vaccinated people who got boosters were less likely to end up in the hospital with COVID-19 than those who’d had only the first two doses of vaccine.

But certain subsets of people gained far more protection against serious illness from boosters, while others gained far less, Offit said. Public health officials should have articulated this more clearly:

“The question was, who was benefiting from that third dose or that fourth dose? Was it everybody? Was it a healthy 25-year-old? Or were there just certain select groups that were benefiting from that additional dose? And the answer is, just certain select groups. No. 1, far and away, older people. And by that, I mean really older people. People over 75. The other group was people who had the kind of serious health problems where even if they had a mild illness, they could still end up in the hospital. And then the third group, to a lesser extent, were people who were immunocompromised. That’s who was benefiting from that third or fourth dose.”

4. Omicron booster

Conveying a clear message about the benefits of the newest boosters has been more challenging than for previous shots, Offit said. “Even if you’ve been paying attention and reading everything you can, it’s been confusing,” he said.

As omicron became the dominant strain of COVID-19 worldwide, manufacturers began work on reformulated vaccines designed to provide better protection against it.

Some were what’s called bivalent, containing both the mRNA codes for the spike protein in the original virus strain that emerged in China and the spike protein in a strain of omicron.

In June, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna presented data from small-scale human trials to the FDA advisory committee on which Offit sits. The data showed that people who received a bivalent booster targeting the omicron BA.1 strain made somewhat more antibodies in response to Omicron BA.1 than people who received the original booster. (For all subjects, the boosters were their fourth shots overall.)

From Offit’s perspective, though, the increase in antibodies “did not translate to a clinically significant difference” in protection from severe disease. Other experts have expressed similar concerns.

Since the BA.1 strain of omicron is no longer circulating, the FDA asked manufacturers to develop boosters tailored to fight the now-prevalent BA.4 and BA.5 strains. The companies provided data from animal tests for this booster, showing it triggered a strong immune response to all omicron variants.

Ultimately, Offit voted against switching to an omicron-matched booster, but almost all his fellow panelists recommended that the FDA move ahead with these shots.

Though its counterparts in Europe, the United Kingdom and Canada have authorized the booster targeting BA.1, for which there was some human data, the FDA authorized a booster matched to BA.4 and BA.5.

The Biden administration has bought 171 million doses — possibly the last free doses of COVID-19 boosters Americans will get, as Congress has blocked the administration’s requests for more funding.

At this stage in the pandemic, after so many cases and so many shots, the HHS spokesperson acknowledged that “our communications strategy is different.” Still, the administration’s statement set a high bar for what the new shot would deliver, saying it’s “expected to not only improve protection against serious disease, but may also restore protection against symptomatic disease.”

Offit expects that by mid-October, additional data will become available on how people’s immune systems respond to the new U.S. booster, answering at least some of the lingering questions about the shots.

“We’ll see whether or not they were right,” he said of the booster’s advocates.

Offit fears that the federal government’s mistakes in explaining the purpose of the COVID-19 shots and boosters have the potential to undermine public confidence in other vaccines, engendering pushback even against those with decadeslong track records. That, in turn, could bring the return of devastating infectious diseases once thought vanquished.

He pointed to a recent case of paralytic polio in Rockland County, New York, the first in the U.S. in almost a decade. Rockland County’s vaccination rates, which have long lagged those of the state and the nation, dropped even further during the pandemic. Offit worries the rest of the nation could travel down a similar path.

“You’ll see these diseases come back,” Offit warned. “And believe me, that’s not a disease you want to see come back. I was in a polio ward when I was 5 years old. ... I didn’t have polio. I had a failed operation on my right foot. But that landed me in a polio ward for six weeks. And I remember those children. I remember iron lungs. ... I was in hell for six weeks. Nobody wants to go back there.”

We Want to Talk to People Working, Living and Grieving on the Front Lines of the Coronavirus. Help Us Report.

by Eric Umansky

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

Voters in Sweden this month gave a leading role to a far-right party with neo-Nazi roots. Italy is also on the cusp of putting a party in power that has fascist origins. And of course, in the United States, one party has increasingly embraced election denialism and attempted to undermine the legitimacy of the electoral process.

To try to understand what, exactly, is happening, I talked with Barbara Walter, a political scientist at the University of California San Diego who studies democracies across the world. Her book “How Civil Wars Start” has become a bestseller. Rather than talk about the prospects for political violence, we discussed why many democracies are retrenching and how the U.S. stands alone — and not in a good way.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you walk through the vital signs of democracy that you and other political scientists have been tracking and that are trending the wrong way in the U.S. and elsewhere?

So there are probably five big data sets that measure the quality of democracy and countries around the world. They all measure democracy slightly differently. But every single one of them has shown that democracies around the world are in decline. And not just the fledgling democracies, but sacrosanct liberal democracies in Sweden, the U.K. and the United States.

These indices are like vital signs, but instead of for your body, it’s for our body politic. What are the most important ones?

So, empirically, we can’t rank order them. But we know what the good things are, and if you start attacking them, you’re attacking the vital organs.

One is constraints on executive power. You want lots of checks and balances on the executive branch. Here in the United States, you want to make sure that the legislative branch is strong and independent and willing to check presidential power. You want to know that the judicial branch is the same. Another one would be rule of law. Is the rule of law actually respected? Is it uncorrupted? You don’t want a system where certain individuals are above the law. If you want to become, say, Orban 2.0, you place loyalists in the Justice Department who are beholden to you and not to the rule of law.

You also want a free and open press, so that your citizens get high-quality information and they can make good decisions. Another one is you really want a competitive political environment, so that there’s a level playing field for people who are competing for power. You could make a very uneven playing field by party. So you can restrict the vote, you can make voting more difficult.

So these are all vital: Do you have constraints on the executive? Do you have the rule of law, so that there’s accountability? Do you have a level playing field, so that there can really be popular participation?

Another warning sign you’ve talked about is when a party becomes less about policy and more about identity, a shift one can see in the Republican Party in recent years. Can you talk about it?

The Republicans have always had a challenge that they were the party of wealthy Americans and business. The problem is wealthy Americans will always be a very small minority of Americans. So for wealthy Americans, they have to convince at least some nonwealthy Americans to support their platform. How do you do that? Well, you do it with issues of identity, their sense of threat, their sense of fear, their sense of the world is changing and “I’m being left behind.” It’s very effective.

I want to get to why we see these dynamics playing out across so many countries. You cite three dynamics. One is that the dominant caste in many nations, white people, is trending toward minority status. Another is increasing wealth concentration, where rural areas are often losing out. And then there’s a new medium that has risen that is unregulated and unmediated: social media.

On No. 3, the new medium, I would state it stronger than that. It’s not that it’s unregulated per se. It’s that it’s being driven by algorithms that selectively push out the more extreme incendiary messages.

You also wrote about another concept that I hadn’t heard before: ethnic entrepreneurs. These are politicians like, say, Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian strongman, who recognize an opportunity in appealing to the fears of a particular group.

Yep. He was not a nationalist. He was a straight up Communist. And again, that gets back to the difference between a political party based on ideology and one based on ethnicity. He became the leader of the Serb party.

So he saw which way the wind was blowing and he put up a sail. And that’s what an ethnic entrepreneur does?

Yes, but it can also be more strategic than that. Milosevic really had a problem in that communism was over. And if he wanted to stay in power, he was going to have to compete in elections. How is he going to get elected? And then he’s like, “Oh, like the largest ethnic group, and in this country are Serbs. I’m Serb!” If I can convince the Serbs during this time of change and insecurity and uncertainty when everyone’s a little bit on edge that unless they support a Serb, the Croats are gonna kill them, then then I can catapult myself to power. That’s classic ethnic entrepreneurship.

I want to ask you a last question I’ve been thinking about a lot myself. Like a number of news organizations, we’ve created a team devoted to covering threats to democracy. But after I read your book, I stopped referring to it as that because it occurred to me that the term threats to democracy reinforces a story that we Americans tell ourselves: that we already have a true democracy, the best darn one in the world, and we just need to protect it.

Our American democracy, even when we were happy with it and thought it was doing really well, it already had a whole series of undemocratic natures that no other healthy liberal democracy has.

Our electoral college, nobody has that. That was a compromise to rural states. We have the fact that our elections are run by partisan agents. No other healthy liberal democracy has that. Canada, this enormous country, has an independent electoral commission that runs all of the elections. Every ballot is the same no matter if you vote in Prince Edward Island or the Yukon. Or that we allow so much money to be injected into our system. Nobody else has this.

So we have not only these undemocratic features but a whole number of vulnerabilities that if you really did want to somehow cement in minority rule, you could do this legally. So in many ways we have a terrible system that’s ripe to be exploited.

Help ProPublica Investigate Threats to U.S. Democracy

by Tony Schick, Oregon Public Broadcasting

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

Leavenworth is a charming tourist town, tucked in Washington’s North Cascades mountains and styled as a Bavarian village. I spent a weekend there, noodling around in souvenir shops, snacking on pretzels and soaking in faux-European culture. It wasn’t till after dark, when I headed to the banks of Icicle Creek just outside of town for an interview, that I saw a vestige of what the region once was.

Perched on a plywood scaffold over roaring waters, a Wenatchi father and son fished using long nets made by hand and under the cover of darkness so it’s harder for salmon to spot them.

Only a handful of their tribe still fish this way. Dams through the region’s system of rivers have electrified cities, irrigated crops and powered industry. But those dams also decimated salmon numbers and wiped out fishing grounds that were central to tribes’ ways of life.

“My people have had to sacrifice a lot of these things so everybody else can have that,” Jason Whalawitsa, the father, told me as he fished. “We pay for that with our culture.”

When Whalawitsa said “we pay for that,” he meant tribes like his throughout the Columbia Basin who consider themselves the “salmon people.” And when he said “so everybody else can have that,” he might as well have pointed right at me.

I live in Portland, Oregon, the city where I grew up. It sits just south of the confluence of the Willamette and the Columbia rivers on land taken from Indigenous people.

My dad’s foundry supply business — the one that housed me, fed me and put me through school — only existed because of the shipping and manufacturing industries enabled by the river and the dams.

I proposed to my wife on a stern-wheeler on the Columbia River, the tourist boat floating on a reservoir created between two dams, in a spot that used to be a series of rapids where tribes fished.

There’s no one in this region whose life isn’t touched by the fish, whether they think about it or not. We populated towns to fish for salmon and can them. We sacrificed them for cheap electricity. Even the region’s iconic farming and timber industries wouldn’t be possible without salmon, whose dying bodies have enriched the Northwest soil with ocean nutrients.

But for decades the injustice at the heart of that story has been systematically hidden. There was nothing in my history or social studies classes about Northwest tribes. It wasn’t until 2017 that the Oregon Department of Education required schools to teach Native American history. And the Army Corps of Engineers, which operates most Columbia River dams, has its own curriculum for use in schools around the region; it glosses over the damage done to tribes, talking instead about how they’ve worked alongside federal agencies to help salmon recover.

David G. Lewis, a professor at Oregon State University and a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde in Oregon, has spent much of his career compiling previously untold histories of tribal experiences in the region, rewriting the “white person’s history” he sees in most published works.

“Average folks just do not know how bad that history is,” Lewis said, “the trauma, the abuses, the loss tribes experienced for more than 150 years.”

Before the era of dam building, the most important fishing site for upper Columbia River tribes was a huge collection of waterfalls they called Shonitkwu (meaning “roaring waters”). Downriver tribes had Wy-am (“echo of falling water”). In a case from the early 1900s, the Supreme Court described Native peoples’ right to fish locations like these as “not much less necessary to their existence than the atmosphere they breathed.”

Both those iconic sets of waterfalls, known today as Kettle Falls and Celilo Falls, are gone. Also gone are other, smaller fishing grounds, destroyed by the dams. That’s a blatant violation of treaty language, signed by the U.S. government and tribes, that reserved the right to fish at all usual and accustomed places.

Tribes, who have never stopped fighting for salmon and their treaty rights, are now in negotiations with the Biden administration. Over the next year, the administration says it will decide whether to take the unprecedented steps of removing some dams on the Snake River and reintroducing salmon in areas of the Columbia where they’ve been extinct for nearly a century.

Scientists say that because of climate change, the time to reverse some of the damage on the Columbia and Snake rivers is, essentially, now or never.

In the early 1900s, after the salmon canning industry had begun to exhaust fish populations, Northwest states sought to preserve the supply for commercial catch — specifically by putting restrictions on fishing by tribes.

This wasn’t an anomaly. “From the time of the founding of the Republic, state governments have consistently maintained an adversary, if not openly hostile, posture towards the Indian tribes and their separate rights.” That was the conclusion reached by Alvin Ziontz, an attorney who spent 30 years representing tribes in the Northwest, in a little-known history of treaty fishing rights he assembled in 1977.

Both Washington and Oregon, according to Ziontz, found ways to allocate nearly the entire harvest of the region’s salmon to nontribal fisheries. They justified it by saying restrictions on tribal fishing were necessary for salmon conservation, even though there’s evidence that before European settlers, tribes actually increased abundance by actively managing salmon populations.

In 1947, as we previously reported, the Department of the Interior asserted that the “the present salmon run must be sacrificed” for the sake of dam building, but it added that “efforts should be directed toward ameliorating the impact of this development upon the injured interests.”

Columbia River tribes, whose traditional fisheries would be located behind many proposed dams, were the most injured interest. But they received almost none of the amelioration, which came in the form of 26 government-funded hatcheries along the Columbia. All but two of those were sited below the dams, to boost commercial and sport fishing nearer the ocean: The fish they made would never swim as far as tribes’ fishing grounds.

Around that same time, after returning from fighting in World War II, two members of the Warm Springs Tribe began hatching salmon to plant in Central Oregon rivers. State officials shut the effort down because they hadn’t authorized it.

For many years, states also tried to prevent tribes from ever harvesting fish produced at government hatcheries. As late as the 1970s, Washington argued in court that tribes had no right to harvest the salmon produced in its hatcheries.

Tribal members fought to assert their treaty rights. And they were jailed for it.

In an infamous case known as the Salmon Scam, 75 Native fishermen were arrested in a federal sting operation claiming their poaching was responsible for 40,000 fish missing from the Columbia River. Yakama fisherman David Sohappy, whom federal investigators cast as the ringleader, was sentenced to five years in prison. It later turned out the fish weren’t actually missing: As the Yakima Herald-Republic reported, they’d been driven away by pollution from a nearby aluminum plant.

In the middle of the last century, as dam building and state policies were driving Columbia River Indian people from their homes and ways of life, a national policy emerged to terminate Native tribes entirely: For 20 years, the U.S. aimed to erase its obligations to tribes by assimilating Native people into cities and white culture, and then eliminating recognized tribes, reservations and the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. (The policy was abandoned by the Nixon administration, which condemned it as “clearly harmful.”)

In the Northwest, tribes found ways to preserve their culture and adapt to the losses of wild salmon and sacred fishing grounds. They also faced backlash for it.

Richard Whitney, a wildlife manager at Colville Tribes Fish and Wildlife, prepares salmon immediately after an early morning salmon ceremony. The salmon is skewered and then placed over a fire, to be eaten for lunch just a few hours later. (Chona Kassinger for ProPublica)

When we reported on dwindling survival rates for salmon, I received emails blaming Native people for catching too many fish, despite the fact their harvest agreements with states are closely monitored. The same thing happened when Seattle TV station KING 5 reported on salmon and dams in the Skagit River, prompting the head of Washington’s Department of Fish and Wildlife to denounce such blame as “misinformation.”

Similarly, tribal hatcheries have come under scrutiny from federal regulators and wild fish advocates for diluting the health of wild salmon with fish bred in captivity. It’s an ironic dynamic given that the hatcheries were the government’s own stop-gap invention, and that tribes have pioneered hatchery techniques specifically designed to help wild populations.

“Tribes and salmon will not look as they did 200 years ago, so maybe stop expecting that of either, given what we live in now,” said Zach Penney, a fisheries scientist and member of the Nez Perce Tribe.

I spoke with Penney a few months ago while he was head of fisheries science for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, a coalition of four tribes that coordinates fisheries policy. He’s now a senior adviser for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency responsible for endangered salmon recovery. Penney said that back when he was a doctoral student, he was asked to explain the tribal perspective on salmon so often that he eventually developed a slide presentation.

In it, he draws a parallel between Native people, who were driven onto reservations, and salmon, who were driven into hatcheries. Both were forced to adapt to unfamiliar lifestyles. And for both, the changes did not bring good things.

As fishing disappeared, Ziontz wrote in his history 45 years ago, the river tribes’ economic position also changed: “From a life of relative plenty and ease, they moved to the position ultimately of poverty and want.”

The harms have outlasted the policies that caused them. Now, as state and federal officials look to address the region’s fish and rivers, they are seeking compromises — without acknowledging the compromises that have already been made.

In debating the merits of dam removal and other measures to save salmon from extinction, elected leaders in the region and Washington, D.C., are taking every measure to ensure that the river’s other users — like farmers, irrigators and power producers — are kept whole in the process.

Penney recalled sitting in meetings in the past few years where tribes were told they’d need to make compromises along with everyone else.

“I think that’s really insulting,” Penney said. “We’ve already compromised our way of life. This has all been compromised already. And you’re asking for more?”

Help Us Understand Pacific Northwest Salmon and Treaty Rights

by Alec MacGillis

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The property management subsidiary of Jared Kushner’s family real estate company has agreed to pay a $3.25 million fine to the state of Maryland and to reimburse many of the tens of thousands of tenants in the Kushners’ Baltimore-area apartment complexes for excessive fees and for rent they were forced to pay over the past decade despite serious maintenance problems in the units.

The agreement represents the settlement of a 2019 lawsuit brought against the subsidiary, Westminster Management, by the Maryland attorney general. The state alleged that the company’s “unfair or deceptive” rental practices violated Maryland’s consumer protection laws and “victimized” people, “many of whom are financially vulnerable, at all stages of offering and leasing.”

“This is a case in which landlords deceived and cheated tenants and subjected them to miserable living conditions,” said Attorney General Brian Frosh, a Democrat, at a press conference announcing the settlement Friday morning in Baltimore. “These were not wealthy people. Many struggled to pay the rent, to put food on the table, to take care of their kids, to keep everybody healthy, and Westminster used its vastly superior economic power to take advantage of them.”

Kushner Companies, which has since sold off most of the complexes, did not respond to requests for comment, but in a statement to the Baltimore Banner, it said: “Westminster is pleased to have settled this litigation with no admission of liability or wrongdoing. We look forward to moving past this matter so that we can focus on our ever-expanding real estate portfolio.”

Frosh took issue with that characterization. “You don’t pay three million two hundred and fifty thousand bucks if you’re not liable,” he said. “They may not have formally signed a piece of paper saying that they did it, but they did.”

The state lawsuit followed on the heels of a May 2017 article co-published by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine describing the Kushner Companies’ highly litigious treatment of tenants at the apartment complexes it started buying in the Baltimore suburbs in 2012. The 17 complexes contained a total of about 9,000 units and provided a strong cash-flow ballast for a real estate company better known for trophy properties in New York.

The article reported that the company had brought hundreds of cases against current and former tenants over unpaid rent and broken leases, including people who had moved out of the complexes before the Kushner Companies even purchased them. The company also pursued tenants who possessed evidence that they did not owe the money claimed, with all manner of court and late fees piling on top of the original claims.

The article also described the shoddy conditions that many tenants had to contend with at the complexes, including mice, leaky roofs and rampant mold.

At Friday’s press conference, Frosh and two former tenants elaborated on the deplorable conditions. Frosh showed images from squalid units, including one of a large cluster of mushrooms growing beside a toilet. Tiffany Dixon described the floor and wall damage in her family’s unit at a Kushner complex called Commons of White Marsh that she said was caused by a large hole under the kitchen sink of an adjacent unit. Dixon recounted the horrifying discovery, after her kitchen stove stopped working, of mice remains inside the oven. Vaughn Phillips described living in a unit in another complex, Fontana Village, that had water pouring out of the kitchen wall for months “to the point where there was a small pond in my kitchen and living area.” Phillips also said that gas leaked from the unit’s kitchen stove and that “mice that would come out and watch TV with me.”

Frosh displayed one of the many internal company emails that his office obtained during its investigation, showing that officials were well aware of the problems. “We desperately need your help at the Commons of White Marsh with the number of roof leaks that are still occurring due to the damage of the storm that was caused from the storm back in March,” the community manager at the complex wrote to the director of construction at Kushner Companies, in September 2018. “I am receiving at least 30 complaints per day and residents coming [in] and screaming in office. We have a large amount of drywall damage and potential for mold is becoming an issue.”

Before the state’s lawsuit in 2019, a group of tenants filed a class-action lawsuit in late 2017, alleging that the company was improperly inflating payments owed by tenants by charging them late fees that are often unfounded and court fees that are not actually approved by any court. That case made its way to the state Court of Special Appeals in early 2021, but a ruling has not yet been issued. (The Kushner entities have denied wrongdoing in that suit.)

The state case against the company won a major victory in April 2021, when an administrative law judge found that Westminster violated consumer laws in several areas, including by not showing tenants the actual units they were going to be assigned to before signing a lease, and by assessing them a range of “spurious” fees. The ruling came after a 31-day hearing in which about 100 current and former tenants testified.

The company had initially downplayed the lawsuit as a politically motivated stunt to embarrass Kushner, the highly influential son-in-law of then-President Donald Trump. But after the ruling by the administrative law judge, the company entered into negotiations with the state. “It became very clear that they had done wrong and we were not going to let them off the hook,” Frosh said.

Frosh said that the state was looking into whether other large landlords in Maryland have been engaging in practices similar to those employed by Westminster. The Baltimore Banner recently reported that Maryland landlords are far more aggressive in using the courts to threaten eviction as a routine practice for collecting rent than are landlords in other states.

Under the terms of the settlement, Westminster must make an effort to reach all of the estimated 30,000 tenants who resided in its Baltimore-area complexes to alert them that they may submit claims of restitution for rent they were forced to pay despite substandard conditions. Former tenants will be able to start submitting claims in three months and will then have a year to do so. The claims will then be assessed by a special master selected by the company with the approval of the state. Separately, the company will automatically reimburse former tenants for excessive court fees and late fees, based on its records; former tenants will not need to file claims for that restitution.

Westminster may end up paying considerably more than $3.25 million, since there is no limit on the amount of restitution the special master can order. (Of the $3.25 million fine, $800,000 will be treated as a down payment on the restitution.)

The former tenants at the press conference expressed satisfaction with the settlement. “I wasn’t looking for financial gain,” Dixon said. “I was just looking for justice. I was looking for someone to acknowledge the negligence so that other people didn’t have to endure what we did.”