ProPublica

by Jennifer Berry Hawes, photography by Sarahbeth Maney

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The spry 76-year-old woman finds her spot at the dining room table, prepared to discuss a problem her family has confronted, in one form or another, for half a century. Back when Samaria “Cookie” Mitcham Bailey was a teenager in 1964, she was among the first Black students to desegregate public schools here in Macon, Georgia. She endured the snubs and sacrifices with hope that future generations would know an equality that she had not.

All these years later, that equality remains elusive. Cookie’s hope now centers on the child across the table.

Her 13-year-old great-granddaughter, Zo’e Johnson, doesn’t say much at first. Last year, when she was in sixth grade, Zo’e struggled at the public middle school, which she felt was “chaotic.” Her family canvassed their options for another school in Macon, most of them still largely segregated by race. They chose First Presbyterian Day School, known for its rigorous academics and Christian worldview. It also has a strong tennis program, a draw for a family of tennis standouts.

But FPD isn’t just any private school. It was among the hundreds that opened during desegregation as white children fled the arrival of Black students. Black students like Cookie.

Researchers call these private schools “segregation academies.” Macon was — and is — especially saturated with them. Using archival research and an analysis of federal data, ProPublica identified five that still operate in the city. They include the three largest private schools in town. For generations, they have siphoned off swaths of white families who invested their more plentiful resources in college-sized tuition, fees and fundraisers. Today, most of Macon’s public schools are nearly all Black — and, because of the city’s persistent wealth gap, they grapple with concentrations of poverty.

At the dining room table on this March day, Zo’e’s family is torn over whether to keep her at FPD for another school year — whether they can afford it and whether the cost makes sense.

All of the schools founded as segregation academies in Macon, a majority-Black city, remain vastly white. FPD, with 11% Black enrollment as of the 2021-22 school year, has the highest proportion of Black students among them. Tuition at these schools can be insurmountable to many Black families. In Macon, the estimated median income of Black households is about half that of white ones.

Zo’e’s family makes it work largely because FPD helped them apply to get almost half of the roughly $17,000 seventh-grade tuition paid through a state voucher-style program — and because Cookie has been able to pay the difference. That’s about $900 a month.

But she isn’t sure she can keep paying. She recently cut her work hours as a medical laboratory supervisor with hopes of retiring in the next few years. At the table, her tone unusually subdued, she notes she’s had COVID-19 twice. Her memory sometimes falters.

“I’m older,” she says. “I’m getting old.”

Zo’e’s mother, Ashley Alexander, is a single parent who works part time and cannot foot the extra bill. She and Zo’e live with Cookie and her husband, a retiree who once worked as an attorney.

Ashley takes a seat between Zo’e and Cookie. “I feel like you get the better opportunity at the Caucasian school. The education is better,” Ashley says. “It’s just so expensive. We’ve been looking for some alternatives.”

But Zo’e doesn’t want to leave FPD. She likes the Christian emphasis. And she appreciates the structure and the calm, both important to a family that’s deeply protective of her.

Zo’e and her great-grandmother, Samaria “Cookie” Mitcham Bailey, after a game of tennis. A love of the sport runs deep in the family. Zo’e in her bedroom. Among the things that she likes about FPD is its tennis team. Her old school doesn’t have one.

When Zo’e was 6, her father was shot and killed a mile away from this house. A mural of his face stretches across a nearby building, where she sometimes goes to take pictures and to pray. Her father had supported sending his now-adult son, who plays in the NFL, to another private school in town. It’s one reason Zo’e thinks he would be proud of her succeeding at FPD.

She also has made good friends — Black and white. She likes the challenging academics, the orderly classes and, especially, its tennis team. Her old school doesn’t have one.

At the table, Zo’e speaks up: “I love FPD.”

Watch a Short Documentary This 12-minute documentary examines one family’s struggles with Georgia’s segregated schools.

Once sleepy, depressed even, downtown Macon is enjoying a rebirth in this city that is home to almost 157,000 people. Mercer University, Cookie’s alma mater, brings collegiate vibrance. Several grand churches, Catholic schools and a hospital add to the bustle, along with the gleaming Tubman African American Museum. In a first-floor exhibit, Cookie’s high school graduation photograph hangs on a long wall that pays tribute to students’ work desegregating Macon’s public schools.

Just beyond the downtown streets lined with coffee shops and restaurants, and the circles of poverty that surround them, Cookie’s brick home sits in a mostly white middle-class neighborhood. She has lived in this house for three decades, trodding its handsome wood floors and adorning it with family photographs.

A few weeks before the dining table discussion, she arrives home wearing a green tracksuit from Florida A&M University, where one of her three daughters played tennis. Cookie just left a tennis tournament. In a tight match, Zo’e beat a fellow FPD player who had bested her several times before. The other player smacked her racket on the court, then kicked it. Cookie was thrilled. She and her husband met playing tennis, and they have multiple collegiate tennis players in their family.

Ashley and Zo’e walk in later with diminished enthusiasm. Zo’e lost her final match, and she’s exhausted and grumpy. She heads to her bedroom where a brown teddy bear awaits along with a poster labeled “Vision Board.” She decorated it with words like “Forgive” and “College” and “God Only.”

“She did good!” Cookie calls down the hall.

Zo’e first dabbled in tennis when she was 6, around the time of her father’s murder. On the court, she could live in the moment, thinking only of the match at hand. It provided relief and focus, especially when anxiety crept in.

She keeps with her a newspaper clipping about her father’s death at 39. To some who read news coverage of his killing, he was a gang leader who spent time in prison. But she and many in the community knew the man who wanted his children and others in the neighborhood to dodge the traps of life — traps she’d begun to encounter at the public middle school.

After Zo’e enrolled at FPD, Ashley began driving her each morning in the opposite direction of the public middle school, which sits a mile away past a strip mall anchored by a Family Dollar.

Instead, they cruised for 15 minutes toward the leafy neighborhoods to the city’s north. At a stretch of white ranch fencing, they turned and drove over gentle hills and then veered onto the main drive into FPD’s campus. Red flags emblazoned with its crest hang on street lamps that line the road as it passes brick buildings, an athletic center, expansive ball fields and a tennis complex along its 248-acre campus.

Although she felt strange there at first, Zo’e made good friends and came to like FPD.

Zo’e isn’t the first in her family to attend private school. Her older half-brother on her father’s side who plays football went to Stratford, a similarly elite school in town that also was founded as a segregation academy. And a cousin who coaches her in tennis and is now playing on a scholarship at Tuskegee University went to FPD his junior and senior years. He had a mostly good experience, a big reason Cookie took a chance on the school.

Even so, Zo’e felt strange arriving on campus. At her old school, almost 90% of her classmates were Black. Classes were in one building, all near one another. FPD looked like a small college bustling with white students. She worried about what they would think of her.

Yet, she felt welcomed. Most of the kids seemed nice. And they weren’t all white. About 1 in 10 was Black.

She didn’t know it, but after George Floyd was killed in 2020, the head of school had issued a letter warning: “I will not allow racism or a lack of respect of any kind towards anyone.”

As Zo’e settled in with a diverse new group of friends, academics proved her toughest adjustment. So she focused on learning study skills and discipline — and set out to prove herself on the tennis court, which only made Cookie prouder.

Zo’e has lived with Cookie most of her life. She calls her great-grandmother sweet nicknames like Precious. “You are the cookie to my monster!” Zo’e wrote in Cookie’s birthday card.

Much as she respects Cookie, the history of school segregation wasn’t at the forefront of her daily concerns as she assimilated at FPD. But she did notice that she hadn’t seen a single Black teacher at the school. The only Black staff members she saw worked as janitors or in the cafeteria.

Cookie’s own journey into the world of white education began in 1964 with an announcement over the loudspeaker at her all-Black high school. The voice sought volunteers to transfer to a school for white girls. Cookie raised her hand.

Her mother, Annie Mae Mitcham, had grown up in a rural outpost called Cat Ridge. As a child in the 1930s and 1940s, Annie Mae walked from her segregated all-Black school with its hand-me-down books to go clean the white kids’ classrooms. She and her husband, who had a third-grade education, raised their 10 children to focus on school achievement.

Cookie holds a photograph of her nine siblings and parents. Scholastic achievement was at the heart of their upbringing.

By volunteering to enroll at the white school, Cookie wanted to see if she was as smart as everyone said she was. She also wanted to know what advantages the white kids were getting — and that Black students ought to have, too. She enrolled her senior year.

When she arrived at the white high school, Cookie didn’t suffer the violence that many Black children who desegregated schools across the South did. But there was one day in English class that still, 60 years later, hurts.

A white girl turned to ask: “Do you have a tail?”

At her old high school, Cookie was an A student. She’d been in the marching band and the concert band. She’d played piano and was a stellar singer. Yet this white girl was comparing her to a monkey? It cut deeply enough to scar.

Something similar happened to Zo’e a semester into her own experience at a mostly white school. She came home from school one day upset. She told Cookie and her mother that she had found a friend, who is Black, crying in a hallway saying that a white boy had just called her a “monkey.”

A month later at the dining room table, the family revisits the monkey comment. Zo’e says she has since heard the boy who said it was suspended. Her mother points out that one student’s comment doesn’t define a school.

“Let’s not make too big an issue of it,” Ashley says. But for Cookie, it rips open the old wound from English class. She grows furious. “They’re still calling Black folks monkeys!”

At the white high school, Cookie’s teachers and most students had treated her well enough. The headmistress did not. The guidance counselor was the worst, with her pursed lips, pearls and horn-rimmed glasses. When Cookie told the counselor she wanted to apply at Mercer University, the woman replied with a sneer and an insult.

“Go to your own school,” the woman said. In other words, a college for Black students.

Cookie stormed from the office and marched to Mercer with a friend. She enrolled on her own and ultimately graduated, among the first Black students to do so from the private university. Yet, even by then, only a smattering of Black students had been admitted to Macon’s white public schools. White Maconites were battling full integration at every turn, especially in the courts.

First image: Cookie looks through her 1966-67 yearbook from Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. She was among the first Black students to graduate from the private university. Second image: Cookie’s graduation regalia from Mercer.

More quietly, they were also busy forging another kind of resistance: They were organizing new private schools for their white children.

Macon sits 90 miles south of Atlanta in Georgia’s stretch of the Black Belt, a sickle-shaped swath of rich soil across the Southeast that once fueled cotton plantation riches. To preserve their control after emancipation, Georgia’s white leaders segregated every facet of life, including the classroom. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court upended that when the justices ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that state-mandated public school segregation is unconstitutional.

White residents responded with staunch resistance.

“Klan Urges State-Wide Private School System,” a Macon Telegraph headline announced in January 1960. Two months later, the newspaper reported that a local attorney was leading the charge to create an alternative to the county school system that served Macon. He planned a closed-door meeting with dozens of “persons interested in establishing a private school in case the public schools of Bibb County are closed by the desegregation crisis.”

That fall, Stratford Academy opened. Its leaders chose the name “because of the association of the name with Robert E. Lee and Shakespeare,” officials said at the time. The school — still among the city’s largest and most prestigious academies — was “besieged with applications.”

As white residents fought integration, Sylvia McGee was growing up in the segregated city. She had started her education at an all-Black public elementary school in Macon just a few years after the Brown ruling. She was about to start middle school in 1963 when Black parents sued the local school board in what became Bibb County’s key desegregation lawsuit. The case slogged on for almost seven years.

Finally, in February 1970, an appeals court forced local schools to desegregate — within days. McGee was a high school senior. Whites had fought integration for so long after the Brown decision that she had gone through her entire public school education during that resistance.

That fall, five private schools, including FPD, opened in Macon, doubling the number in town.

Their leaders rarely said publicly that the schools opened to preserve all-white education. Instead, they nodded to “quality” and “Christian” education.

Yet in fall 1970, leaders of the Southern network of the Presbyterian Church urged members to keep their children in public schools. In a statement, they called enforced racial segregation “contrary to the will of God” and warned against undermining public education by establishing and supporting private academies “whose deliberate purpose or practical effect is to maintain racial isolation.”

And even back then, some Southern newspapers called the new private schools “segregation academies.”

An article from The Macon Telegraph in January 1960. Two months later, the newspaper reported that a local attorney was leading the charge to create an alternative to the county school system that served Macon. (Newspapers.com)

“Only the very gullible could deny that race was a factor,” Andrew Manis, a local resident and history professor, wrote in his book “Macon Black and White.”

But FPD’s current spokesperson denied the school was founded as a segregation academy. She told ProPublica it “was established based on the desire of Macon families to provide their children with a strong education, grounded in biblical principles.” The school has a tuition assistance program and a nondiscrimination policy, she added. She did not answer additional questions.

Indeed, in 1975, several years after it opened, FPD’s headmaster likewise told a newspaper reporter that the school had a nondiscrimination policy. FPD was willing to admit a Black student, he said, “but we’ve never had one to apply.”

To Black residents like McGee, that felt disingenuous. “The climate and the culture of the time said you don’t apply to FPD,” she said. Black parents would have feared for their children’s safety at the academies. Private schools also had to adopt such policies or risk losing their tax-exempt status.

McGee graduated in 1970 with the final class before full desegregation. Because so many white students had fled to private schools, by fall 1973, the Bibb County public school system was predominantly Black for the first time.

McGee, who became a social worker and ultimately acting superintendent until 2011, watched the district’s infrastructure crumble. Gone were many of the white parents who had money to pour into PTA fundraisers and time to fill volunteer needs.

In the early 2000s, decades after they opened, FPD, Stratford and most of the other academies in Macon reported that about 1% to 2% of their students were Black each year.

Even in recent years, Black children have made up only about 6% of most academies’ students — in a county that is 57% Black.

“It holds everybody back,” McGee said. “I think people miss that point.”

One morning in May, with the end of seventh grade approaching, Zo’e arrives on FPD’s campus and heads to a hallway of art classrooms. It stretches quiet, the walls lined with impressive student artwork, classes not yet starting for the day. Several students sit on the hall floor, backs against the wall, engrossed in the papers or cellphones in front of them.

For weeks, Zo’e had been living in a tortuous state of uncertainty about whether she would return to FPD in the fall. She tried hard not to complain. She didn’t want to put extra financial pressure on Cookie, who is about to turn 77, or her mom, who has enough on her plate.

Ashley was doing her best to try to make things work for Zo’e. She was in the running for a full-time job at the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office that would give them more of a financial cushion — and enable her to pay FPD’s tuition.

Now, this morning, Zo’e is about to burst with joy. She spots a friend in the hallway and hurries over, stifling her smile. When they get close enough, she whispers, “You know how I told you if my mom doesn’t get the job, I’m not going to be able to stay?”

Her friend looks pensive. Zo’e wrings her hands in front of her.

“She got the job!”

Zo’e with classmates during lunchtime at FPD. She isn’t the first in her family to attend private school. Her older half-brother on her father’s side went to one in town and a cousin went to FPD his junior and senior years.

Her friend lets out a high-pitched squeal of joy, then glances down the hall.

Zo’e adds, “So I’m gonna be able to stay.”

But as the next few weeks pass, her hope fades. Delays creep in. Ashley’s starting date gets pushed back.

The multiple generations of women in Cookie’s family are quick to debate the bigger reasons why public schools struggle, including Miller Fine Arts Magnet Middle School, the one Zo’e went to.

“There’s a reason why the teachers at Miller are stressed out,” Cookie’s youngest daughter, Alyse Bailey, said after joining her family at the dining room table back in March. “There’s a reason why the kids are not acting how they’re supposed to act. What are those reasons? What are the root causes?”

“They’re a product of the environment,” Ashley responded.

“Right, but then, why?” Alyse asked. “It’s like you got to constantly be asking, why?”

Black children lack resources, Alyse argued, because of the wealth gap stemming from slavery and Jim Crow. “The more you go back, the more you see where it is rooted in systemic injustice.”

To many local families, Miller is the best option among public middle schools. While it functions as a regular neighborhood school, Miller also draws students from across the district who attend its fine arts magnet component. It often tops the district’s six middle schools on the state’s standardized tests. Almost three-quarters of its eighth graders read on grade level or above compared with the district average of 62%. (Private schools don’t have to release such data.)

Schools like Miller will soon find it even harder to retain top students, particularly those with more resources.

Starting next year, private schools will skim another layer of students from the public schools. In April, as part of a nationwide Republican push, Georgia adopted a new program that, similar to the existing one, uses taxpayer dollars to fund private school tuition. At least 21,000 more students could receive up to $6,500 each. Last year, almost 22,000 students tapped into the current program. The average tuition grant was about $4,600.

While it functions as a regular neighborhood school, Miller also draws students from across the district who attend its fine arts magnet component.

Supporters often tout these programs as means for students to escape low-performing public schools. But the reality is, the tuition grants don’t often cover even half of private school tuition bills, especially for college prep-style schools like FPD and Stratford. (Stratford was the only of the four other academies that responded to ProPublica. Its head of school noted it gives $1.5 million in financial assistance a year and is “contributing to moving middle Georgia and the Macon community toward a future that looks very different than the past.”)

But tuition assistance and voucher-style programs often don’t pay the whole bill. Families like Cookie’s must come up with the difference — and, if they can, decide if the financial hardship is worth it.

As they wrestle with this question, Zo’e’s family puts her on a waiting list for a charter school that performs well and, like many of the private schools, draws large numbers of white children. But 40 students are ahead of her.

By the time summer break arrives, Zo’e faces reality. Her mom almost certainly won’t start the new job in time to pay looming tuition bills. Zo’e will return to the public school her family felt had fallen short of her needs. And FPD will have one fewer Black student.

In late June, Cookie’s birthday approaches. When her oldest daughter arrives from Florida for a visit, they lay in bed watching tennis together. In dispirited tones, Cookie mentions that she cannot afford Zo’e’s tuition anymore.

But her daughter presses her to think beyond FPD’s benefits to what public school can provide, if Zo’e works hard and stays focused: “It’s nothing she can’t get somewhere else.”

Cookie concedes, “She can get it somewhere else.” Including Miller. She decides that the family must focus on reinforcing the academic and social self-discipline that Zo’e will need to succeed at Miller. They can help train her in tennis.

In the next room, Zo’e watches Disney Channel cartoons in her bedroom while making a poster for her mom, who shares a birthday with Cookie. She glues photographs onto it along with a message of love in sparkly lime green letters. Then she writes her mother a birthday note. “You’re not only a life-giver but you are a hard worker,” she writes. She thanks Ashley for so much love. “You were the one to step in when my father had to step out. You have been my best friend, a laughing buddy and a role model.”

Zo’e works on the floor below her vision board. It includes a cutout of a tiger’s eyes, intent and fixed. They remind her of focus. As she accepts the likelihood of returning to Miller, she becomes determined to take the discipline she learned at FPD with her. She also remembers that, at this time last year, she had wanted to stay at Miller.

A few weeks later, in mid-July, Ashley gets the formal job offer. She will become a sheriff’s deputy with a start date of July 29. She is overjoyed and relieved.

It comes too late to send Zo’e back to FPD. Public schools are about to begin the new year. So, the family firms up their plan for her. Zo’e will return to Miller for eighth grade to give Ashley time to save money for tuition. After that, when Zo’e begins high school, they plan to send her back to private school.

Zo’e will return to Miller for eighth grade to give her mother time to save money for tuition. After that, when Zo’e begins high school, her family plans to send her back to private school.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Heather Vogell

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As U.S. parents struggled to find baby formula during a nationwide shortage in May of 2022, the Biden administration frantically sought ways to restock empty store shelves. Among the options was lifting steep tariffs on formula imported from other countries.

But as White House lawyers drafted a proclamation to remove the import tax, one federal agency resisted: the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

With supplies of baby formula falling precipitously across the country after a major production plant shut down, staffers from the USTR repeatedly argued against lifting the tariff on imports, citing, in part, a concern that it would raise “lots of questions from domestic dairy producers,” according to documents obtained by ProPublica. Cow’s milk is a primary ingredient for most baby formula, and the dairy industry has long supported protections for U.S. manufacturers.

“Situation at retail appears to be a combination of transportation/shipping and panic buying by consumers, not an issue of inadequate domestic production,” wrote Julie Callahan, an official with the USTR, in a May 11 email to an official with the National Security Council, which was helping coordinate the administration’s response.

The next day, she told colleagues, “I tried to convey to NSC in very strong terms yesterday that removing tariffs from infant formula will not result in increased access to infant formula for U.S. consumers.”

The White House never released the proclamation, and the tariffs stayed in place for 10 more weeks, until Congress suspended them temporarily on July 21.

That delay was too long, according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

“Such action should have happened more quickly,” the report said, a finding that raises questions about the assessment from the president’s chief trade advisers. A panel of experts found “suspending tariffs was helpful for bringing product into the United States during the shortage.”

In fact, the report recommended Congress create a “trigger rule” to automatically suspend import taxes again if the market is substantially disrupted. “Quick removal may be important to providing rapid response in the future,” said Katheryn Russ, a member of the expert panel that produced the report and an economics professor at the University of California, Davis.

It’s unclear why the White House did not issue its proclamation; it did not answer our written questions about the subject.

A spokesperson for the USTR, however, defended the administration’s response, saying in a statement that it “was committed to using all tools, including trade tools, to address the formula shortage and ensure American families were able to access infant formula.” Officials were in close contact with Congress, which ultimately voted to remove tariffs with the administration’s support, it said.

“To be clear, any implication that USTR stood in the way of addressing the crisis is completely false,” the statement said.

This year, ProPublica detailed how the U.S. government has repeatedly used its diplomatic and political power to advance the interests of formula manufacturers overseas, thwarting public health measures around the globe that posed financial threats to the companies’ business. But the documents from the height of the U.S. formula shortage show some of the same trade officials — at the USTR in particular — flexed that muscle to protect the formula industry and its allies at home, even during a national emergency that put children at risk.

The crisis escalated quickly in early 2022, after Abbott stopped formula production at its Sturgis, Michigan, plant, which had been making 20% of the formula sold in the U.S. Four infants had fallen ill or died after drinking formula made there, and federal inspectors later found bacterial contamination and lax safety protocols at the plant. By April, nearly a third of the normally available formula products were out of stock. By late May, that number was 70%.

The shortage caused widespread panic. Many infants who had to switch formula brands because of it developed symptoms such as fussiness, spitting up or diarrhea, and nearly half of parents in one survey said they’d resorted to at least one unsafe feeding practice, such as watering down formula.

Jennifer Smilowitz, a researcher at the University of California who studied the impact of the shortage, called those findings “alarming.”

“Parents were not offered many safe alternatives,” she said.

The U.S. struggled to replace the lost production with foreign imports in part because of strict regulations on nutrition and safety as well as high tariffs that rise at greater volumes.

The new report said those “extremely high trade barriers” leave the U.S. formula market “almost completely closed to imports” — a condition that endangers supply when a major domestic producer encounters trouble. The U.S. normally produces 98% of the baby formula that consumers here use.

To encourage more imports in 2022, the Biden administration — which was also flying in formula from Europe — readied a plan for tariff relief, records show.

“My understanding is that there is a trade proclamation that would temporarily suspend tariffs on baby formula imports,” an administration lawyer wrote in a May 15 email thread. The White House Counsel at the time, Stuart Delery, wrote five minutes later: “We were instructed to prepare a proclamation to be ready for tomorrow, which we have done.”

When Callahan, the USTR official, responded, her concern focused on the companies that would be affected by the measure. The biggest dairy industry groups, she said, should be given “a heads-up right before any press release goes out, so that they don’t feel blindsided.”

Trade officials were also unhappy with the Department of Health and Human Services, which, according to the records, appeared to be criticizing the formula tariffs in conversations with congressional leaders.

“We are hearing from the Speaker’s office that HHS is blaming a 17 percent tariff on formula as the reason for the shortage,” wrote USTR official Allison Smith to colleagues on May 16. “Obviously, that’s a problem.”

She added: “Definitely want to push back on messaging coming from HHS and generally fill the information void.”

Later that day, USTR staff circulated draft talking points saying the administration was “pursuing all avenues” to increase the availability of formula and that domestic companies had ramped up production. The document did not mention cutting tariffs as an option and suggested officials dodge questions on the topic.

“If asked on tariff reductions,” it instructed, say: “We are hoping that this additional action taken by the Biden Administration will result in easing of the current supply shortages.”

Callahan, Delery and Smith did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the Department of Health and Human Services.

As Congress began to consider acting, dairy and formula trade groups weighed in.

The National Milk Producers Federation signaled a willingness to embrace “time limited flexibility for imports during this specific crisis,” according to a USTR email, which quoted a message the dairy group had sent Capitol Hill. But the group warned: “We wouldn’t support a permanent or long term” lowering of tariffs.

That position appeared to align with the Infant Nutrition Council of America, a formula trade group, which dramatically ramped up its lobbying at the time, records show. “INCA members did not oppose the temporary lifting of tariffs during the 2022 shortage,” the group said in a statement.

Abbott said it also supported suspending import taxes “during times of shortage, so long as those products are held to the same stringent quality and testing standards as products manufactured in U.S. facilities.” In a statement, the company said that “no sealed, distributed product from our facilities have tested positive for the presence of Cronobacter sakazakii,” referring to the type of bacteria that made the four infants ill.

The bill to lift tariffs for imported baby formula was enacted in July 2022. Under the legislation, the exemptions would expire at the end of the year.

“The legislation’s time-limited nature was to make sure that the United States doesn’t create a permanent dependence on formula produced in foreign facilities,” Shawna Morris, an executive vice president for the National Milk Producers Federation, said in a statement.

The new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that formula’s availability remains at risk. Among the reasons: concentrated production among a handful of companies and a lack of understanding by federal officials and formula makers of both the risks the U.S. formula supply faces and the investment needed to prevent such disruptions.

The analysis urged federal officials to cut red tape during emergencies, develop risk management plans to address supply threats better and encourage the modernization of U.S. formula plants.

The report also advised studying removing formula tariffs or lowering them for U.S. manufacturers with plants in other countries. Russ, the panel member, said policymakers need more information on what would happen if trade barriers such as tariffs were removed long term. The U.S. industry might relocate overseas as a result, for instance, which she said might make it harder to address supply chain disruptions.

The panel said it intended its recommendations to help “ensure that the United States is better positioned to respond to any future shortage.”

The Infant Nutrition Council said its members are reviewing the report and will work with federal officials to ensure there’s an adequate supply of safe formula.

A bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation to eliminate the taxes on some foreign formula permanently last year, but it has not progressed. The National Milk Producers Federation opposed the bill, saying, “Congress should focus its efforts instead on better supporting the American companies, workers, and farmers who supply nearly all of this country’s formula and formula ingredient needs.”

The dairy group told ProPublica that it would also fight a proposal to create a “trigger rule,” as the report recommended, that automatically lifts tariffs in a crisis, saying, “Congress has shown it can act swiftly when needed.”

by Danielle Ohl, Spotlight PA; and Jessica Lussenhop, ProPublica; and Irina Bucur, Tracy Leturgey and Eddie Trizzino, Butler Eagle

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He’d warned them.

Butler Township Police Officer Drew Blasko paced angrily along the AGR building, where just minutes before a gunman had clambered atop the roof, aimed an AR-15-style rifle at Donald Trump and fired, striking the former president.

As Blasko and other officers stood guard near a loading bay behind the building, he recounted a meeting earlier in the week with the Secret Service.

“I told them that fucking Tuesday,” he said. “I told them to post fucking guys over here.”

The Trump rally shooting that day, which killed one man and injured three others, including the former president, has been called the largest security failure in 40 years. It has led to the resignation of the Secret Service director, a congressional investigation and questions from lawmakers about how such a lapse could have occurred.

But an investigation by Spotlight PA, ProPublica and the Butler Eagle has revealed that the weaknesses that led to the assassination attempt were not unique to the July rally, but the inevitable breakdown of an already vulnerable system.

The newsrooms spoke to dozens of officials across all levels of law enforcement and in several states who have provided security for presidents and presidential candidates, as well as local party officials and academic experts in security.

The newsrooms did not speak directly with Blasko but obtained body-camera footage showing him and other Butler Township officers in the aftermath of the shooting. Efforts to reach Blasko were unsuccessful.

The reporting found the steps taken in the days leading up to the Butler rally largely mirrored the process the Secret Service has used for years to collaborate with local law enforcement before visits by presidents and other high-profile individuals under their protection — a process that the shooting revealed to be susceptible to attack.

“It’s pretty clear that it wasn’t just one screw-up here,” said Andrew Vitek, a professor who teaches about terrorism at Penn State University. “This is indicative of multiple systemic failures all coming down around their ears at once.”

The Secret Service did not respond to questions.

Large events involving presidential candidates are delicate, officials said, involving rapid coordination on little notice among federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.

Because the Secret Service is stretched thin, with 3,200 agents and another 1,300 uniformed officers to divide among more than 30 protectees, the agency relies on local law enforcement officers to help secure campaign events, though they do not have the same specialized training as federal agents.

The Secret Service holds a planning meeting with these partner agencies before an event, the same meeting Blasko described in released body-camera footage.

In Butler, attending officers described the meeting as informal and disorganized, said Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger, whose office oversees the county’s specialized emergency services unit that provided support on July 13. It left local officials to create their own operational plan for the day.

As a result, communications between multiple levels of law enforcement were a cobbled combination of radio command centers and cellphones.

Such difficulties are compounded when campaign rallies occur at open-air venues like the Butler Farm Show, where thousands of people gathered to hear Trump speak.

The newsrooms analyzed data from nine years of Trump rallies, which revealed that Trump’s signature campaign stops have evolved from largely indoor affairs in hard-to-penetrate arenas to include more public, outdoor spaces. This has shifted local law enforcement’s responsibilities from traffic control and intersection monitoring to guarding rooftops and anticipating potential shooters’ sightlines.

“If you’re not able to fully communicate that the guy with the gun is right there ... then all of a sudden everyone is looking around trying to figure out how the hell this guy got a couple of shots off,” Vitek said.

A perennial swing state, Pennsylvania is a favorite stop for presidential candidates vying for its 19 electoral votes. The former president is no different, holding his signature rallies in Pennsylvania at least 30 times since his first presidential campaign in 2016, more than any other state.

Initially, the Trump campaign had wanted to have the July rally somewhere more secure: the Pittsburgh-Butler Regional Airport, a tiny airstrip he’d used in 2020. The campaign reached out to the Butler County Airport Authority for permission.

But there was a conflict.

A local firehouse was slated to hold its annual Mega Car Cruise on the same day. The airport authority’s board knew how important the fundraiser was to the small volunteer department. So it rejected the Trump campaign’s request.

Instead of the easier-to-defend airport, with a single entrance and exit and fewer easily accessible buildings, the campaign picked the wide-open fields of the Butler Farm Show.

During his unsuccessful 2020 reelection campaign, Trump visited mostly airports, holding rallies either under cover of a hangar or on a tightly controlled airstrip directly after landing from a military plane or helicopter. But as his rally schedule became more crowded, it also became more varied.

In the years since he left office, nearly half of Trump’s rallies have been outdoors. Of these outdoor events, most have been in public spaces such as fairgrounds, downtown shopping districts or parks.

Indoor events pose their own complications, said Paul Eckloff, a former Secret Service agent who served under three presidents, including Trump. Arenas and convention centers are often in dense, urban areas near highways that could present a possible threat if someone wanted to turn a vehicle into an explosive device.

Outdoor events, though, are where your threat level “goes through the roof,” said a former officer with the Secret Service uniformed division who requested anonymity to discuss his service.

Outdoor locations are often built from scratch just for an event, making it more difficult for law enforcement agencies to control who gets in and out. Consequently, there’s a higher risk that a local law enforcement partner may encounter a threat they’re not prepared to meet.

As a former president and current candidate, Trump is entitled to some protection from the Secret Service. But it is not as extensive as that afforded to the sitting president and no longer includes access to the military.

This means as he has continued campaigning over the past three years, he has done so with less protection in more challenging environments.

While the Secret Service can raise security concerns about a venue, those warnings can go ignored by candidates and their campaigns, former employees of the agency said. It is unclear if Secret Service officials raised such concerns ahead of the Butler rally.

“We will remind them, ‘Respectfully, sir, ma’am, if you do this, you may not have a candidate, you may not have a leader, we may not have a leader, so please reconsider that,’” the former officer said.

Trump arrives for a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July. (Evan Vucci/AP)

It was 1 p.m.

The stage was set; the red, white and blue bunting hung; and the doors opened to Trump supporters eager to see the former president.

The local police, including SWAT teams from Butler Township and surrounding counties, had been in place for hours. But they still had not heard from the Secret Service, according to local police and Goldinger, the district attorney.

Initial security planning is often spearheaded through one of the Secret Service’s regional offices, which will reach out to state and local departments to request officers and assets, like a bomb unit or explosive-sniffing dogs. There is not typically a formalized, written agreement between them.

Local law enforcement officers are there to support the mission, said Ryan Windorff, president of the Wisconsin Fraternal Order of Police, but “it’s ultimately the Secret Service’s planning and decisions and experience that runs the day.”

In the days before an event, local, state and federal law enforcement will have a planning meeting to go over protocol, said Adam Reed, a spokesperson for Pennsylvania State Police. Officials described a similar sequence of events ahead of campaign outings over the past 12 years, regardless of the candidate or political party.

Close coordination is especially important in states such as Pennsylvania, home to more local police departments than any other state in the country.

But the pre-rally Butler meeting did little to assuage security concerns, according to local officials.

During the week leading up to the rally, representatives from all of the local police departments that had been asked to help secure the Trump event met in nearby Connoquenessing Township to coordinate.

The Butler County Emergency Services Unit, a special weapons and tactical squad, had toured the Butler Farm Show during the week and had identified the AGR building as a threat. In the meeting, Butler County officials raised the issue with the Secret Service, said Goldinger, the Butler County District Attorney, but ultimately, the agency did not post anyone on the roof.

“This was their ballgame,” Goldinger said of the Secret Service.

Local officers didn’t receive a written plan from the Secret Service until 1:30 p.m. on the day of the rally, according to Goldinger — 30 minutes after the doors opened. In the absence of such a plan, local supporting officers set up their own.

On the day of the event, local counter-snipers met with their counterparts in the Secret Service. But they had not been asked to secure or set up a perimeter, said Adams Township Sgt. Ed Lenz, who commands the Emergency Services Unit.

“I’m not sure that it was very clear to the overall Secret Service command what they had actually asked us to do,” Lenz said.

At 4:26 p.m. on July 13, a Beaver County Emergency Services Unit sniper leaving his shift texted the remaining county officers stationed inside the AGR building.

“Someone followed our lead and snuck in and parked by our cars just so you know,” the text reads.

In the days since the rally, news reports and testimony before Congress have revealed the communications gaps that allowed Thomas Crooks to evade law enforcement for more than 90 minutes after the text was sent.

But the chain-link communication structure used in Butler was not new.

Local law enforcement officials providing security for past campaign events involving presidents also relied on a relay system to communicate because the different agencies do not share radio frequencies with the Secret Service or one another.

“And that creates communications problems,” said John Kiel, assistant chief of the Superior Police Department in Wisconsin.

Kiel heads a 58-officer department that provided support for an event for President Joe Biden on Jan. 25 alongside agencies from different jurisdictions and states, all with different radio frequencies or even different wavelengths.

“So generally, what happens is we have to have somebody from our agency directly working with, meaning you’re working hip to hip, with Secret Service,” he said. “And then, you know, that’s where the technology, with use of cellphones, really plays a big part.”

To coordinate, officials said, the Secret Service establishes a command post at a site such as the airport where the president or candidate is landing. Typically, leadership from every involved agency is present so they can relay information immediately.

But at Butler, two command centers were set up, Lenz said, one for State Police and the Secret Service and one for local police. Lenz and his officers communicated to the State Police, which passed on information to the Secret Service.

When the local sniper spotted Crooks and texted his unit, Goldinger said, other officers stationed inside the AGR building had to relay that information back to the local command, who then told the State Police, who then told the Secret Service.

But testimony from the acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe has revealed that the information never made it to the people who could take action to stop Crooks.

“It appears that that information was stuck or siloed in that state and local channel,” Rowe told U.S. senators in July. “Nothing about man on the roof, nothing about man with a gun. None of that information ever made it over our net.”

Bodycam footage shows a police officer moving toward the AGR building after Thomas Crooks shot at Trump. (Obtained from the Butler Township Police Department by Spotlight PA)

Since the assassination attempt, Trump has held eight rallies, all indoors at the urging of the Secret Service.

Ahead of his scheduled rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the Secret Service approved a new security plan, including bulletproof glass to shield the former president at outdoor events, according to reporting in The Washington Post.

On Aug. 12, a month after Crooks shot him, Trump said he plans to return to Butler to finish his speech.

During a conversation with billionaire Elon Musk broadcast on X, the social media platform Musk owns, Trump said he would be back to the rural Pennsylvania county sometime in October.

If Trump does return, Butler officials would like better coordination from the Secret Service, including a unified command post, Lenz said.

But despite Trump’s announcement, local officials had little information. They have a lot of worries.

Butler County Commissioner Leslie Osche said in a statement that although many residents would be excited to see Trump return, the community may not have completely healed from the trauma of the shooting.

“While this county has overwhelmingly welcomed and supported former President Trump, a return visit will place additional stress on law enforcement and the community,” Osche said. “I am angry. I am sad. I am disappointed.

“And I am waiting for the results of an investigation by qualified institutions instead of endless finger pointing.”

by Jeremy Kohler

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

On a recent Saturday outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Fairview Heights, Illinois, a woman wearing a reflective orange vest and body camera flagged down a car pulling into the facility.

“Hi, can I talk to you a second?” the woman, Sheri King, said to the driver, reaching for a pamphlet in a pocket of her vest with information about alternatives to abortion and birth control. “I’m Sheri.”

A Planned Parenthood volunteer bolted toward the car, urging the driver to keep moving.

“They’re not with the clinic,” the volunteer yelled.

Instead, King and a partner were with Coalition Life, a nonprofit anti-abortion group that is based in Missouri and raises most of its money there. Almost every minute the abortion clinic in Illinois is open, Coalition Life representatives are out front, aiming to intercept people seeking abortions and persuade them to change their minds.

Since abortion became illegal in Missouri two years ago, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Coalition Life has fine-tuned its strategy. Because there are no abortion clinics in Missouri, Coalition Life operates largely outside clinics in other states where the procedure is still legal. The group’s website says it operates at one location in Kansas and five in Illinois including in Fairview Heights, about 13 miles east of St. Louis.

On its website, Coalition Life has called itself “America’s largest professional sidewalk counseling organization.” The group’s revenue has surged in recent years, thanks in part to a lucrative Missouri tax credit for pregnancy resource centers, of which it is one. Following a massive expansion of the tax credit program by the state legislature in 2019, donors to Coalition Life and similar nonprofits can receive tax credits worth 70% of their donation amount, significantly boosting the groups’ fundraising efforts across Missouri.

The tax credit has led to a growing financial cost to Missouri taxpayers, with over $11.2 million in tax credits authorized in the past year alone. Before the change, the tax credit had been capped at $3.5 million a year. When combined with the $8.6 million the state directly allocates to pregnancy centers, Missouri has become a leader in per capita investment in anti-abortion centers.

While Missouri does not contribute the most overall to anti-abortion groups — Texas, with its much larger population, leads the nation with a $140 million outlay over two years — it stands out for the investment relative to its size. Still, it pales in comparison with this year’s nearly $52 billion budget.

The money raised through tax credits is intended to support services for clients facing unwanted or unplanned pregnancies. Those services include pregnancy testing, counseling, emotional and material support and other related services.

Coalition Life has adapted to the post-Roe landscape by paying people to work outside abortion clinics in other states. The group claims that it refers many of the women it convinces not to have abortions to its pregnancy center in Missouri, just outside St. Louis. There, it provides ultrasounds and counseling and continues to see mothers until their babies are born — sometimes longer.

Because this center is more expensive to operate, and most clients are Missouri residents, the group said most of the money raised in Missouri is spent within the state. There was no independent way to confirm the claim.

Fighting abortion in Missouri’s border states is not how some lawmakers said they envisioned the subsidies for pregnancy centers would be used. Vic Allred, a Republican former House member from the Kansas City area who voted for the tax credit expansion, said he never anticipated Missouri tax dollars going to fight abortion in other states.

Allred said the state should exercise some oversight over how the money is spent. The tax credit, he said, was intended to be “a pat on the back for not getting an abortion, that you’ll have this support, you’ll have these people helping you, you’ll have these supplies, you’ll ease that burden on the new mother.” He said it was not meant to help fund “a political organization.”

Under the program, for every $1,000 in donations to one of dozens of state-approved anti-abortion nonprofits, a state taxpayer’s bill drops by $700. Donors can reduce their out-of-pocket costs even more by deducting the remaining $300 from their income when they file state and federal taxes.

At a fundraiser at the St. Louis airport two years ago, Brian Westbrook, Coalition Life’s founder and executive director, explained how donors could use the tax credit to make much larger gifts to support the group’s work in states where abortion is legal, according to a recording of the event obtained by ProPublica.

“A gift of $1,000 tonight could cost you only $141,” he said. Then he aimed higher, asking that donors consider a donation of more than $71,000 so they can take the maximum tax credit of $50,000.

Missouri does not disclose the recipients of its pregnancy resource tax credits or the amounts donated to individual nonprofits. Westbrook said in an interview that the tax credits have been important to his group’s fundraising efforts. Coalition Life had $800,000 in revenue in 2019, when the legislature voted to expand the tax credit; by 2022, that amount had more than doubled, to $1.7 million.

At the fundraiser, Westbrook told donors that Coalition Life expected its annual budget to grow in three years to more than $8 million.

Over the past two years, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska and North Dakota have introduced tax credits for donations to pregnancy centers. Legislators in a handful of other states have considered similar programs.

Groups that raise money using Missouri’s tax credit must certify they help people struggling with unplanned or unwanted pregnancies; the state law does not specify that the work must be done within Missouri. A state spokesperson did not respond when asked if approaching people outside abortion clinics in other states qualified for participation in the program.

The law also does not appear to prohibit groups that participate in the tax credit program from using donations as part of a broader campaign against abortion. Coalition Life placed radio ads urging residents to “think twice” before signing a petition for a statewide vote to amend the Missouri Constitution to restore some abortion rights, claiming it would permit late-term and partial-birth abortions.

The effort nonetheless qualified for the ballot and goes before voters in November.

Melissa Barreca, a spokesperson for Coalition Life, said the ads were “an effort to educate the public and encourage them to learn, read and investigate these issues for themselves” and were consistent with the group’s mission.

After Missouri’s abortion ban took effect, Planned Parenthood began to refer patients to its Fairview Heights location, which opened in 2019. Westbrook said at the fundraiser that God called his group to shift its focus to Illinois. “That abortion facility is run by the exactly the same people who run the St. Louis — or, former St. Louis — abortion facility,” Westbrook told donors. Coalition Life then opened an office next door.

The organization also deploys paid workers outside clinics in the Chicago area, southern Illinois and Kansas. Westbrook has said he wants the group to expand into other states where abortion is legal; he and his wife and their seven children recently completed a 20-day tour of the East Coast.

On its website, Coalition Life explains how it will use donations made under Missouri’s pregnancy resource tax credit. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Ingrid Burnett, a Democratic state legislator from Kansas City, voted against the tax credit expansion in 2019. She said the program was presented as providing support to mothers forced to carry babies to term who may need counseling as well as material aid to help them bring a child into the world.

“Seems to me that we’re crossing a line here, when we’re using this to send people across state lines to interfere with women who have made this decision who may or may not be from Missouri,” she said.

Abortion supporters said, too, that it was troubling that Missouri subsidizes anti-abortion groups while the state’s maternal mortality rate has been rising and the safety net, particularly in rural areas, is stretched thin.

“I can think of a million ways that they could spend funds to support Missourians, particularly women and families, and not one dollar would be going to this tax credit,” said Emily Wales, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which serves Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and western Missouri.

Barreca bristled at how Wales characterized Coalition Life’s presence outside abortion clinics.

“They are actually out there offering services to women,” she said in an email. “They are doing a job. They are not protesters. They are not picketers. Would the abortion providers prefer that women have no other options?”

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by Doug Bock Clark

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.

Update, Aug. 20, 2024: On Monday, the day after ProPublica published this article, the Georgia State Election Board passed the rule 3-2. Roughly 850 people attended the virtual meeting at which the vote was held. Nationally prominent conservative activists spoke in support of it, including the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, who served on Donald Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, and Harry MacDougald, a lawyer defending Jeffrey Clark, a former top Justice Department official indicted for trying to help Trump overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. The leader of a liberal Washington-based watchdog organization spoke in opposition. During discussion of the rule, meeting administrators frequently had to mute the mics of angry participants who spoke out of turn against it.

The three board members whom Trump had praised by name passed the rule over the objections of the lone Democratic appointee and the chairman, who had been appointed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.

Georgia’s GOP-controlled State Election Board is poised to adopt a rule on Monday that would give county election board members an additional avenue to delay certification of election results, potentially allowing them to throw the state’s vote count into chaos this fall.

A former Fulton County election official who submitted an initial draft of the rule told ProPublica that she had done so at the behest of a regional leader of a right-wing organization involved in challenging the legitimacy of American election systems. That organization, the Election Integrity Network, is led by Cleta Mitchell, who helped orchestrate attempts to overturn the 2020 election and spoke on the call in which former President Donald Trump demanded that Georgia’s secretary of state “find” him 11,780 votes to undo Joe Biden’s victory.

The Election Integrity Network’s role in bringing forward the proposed rule has not been previously reported.

The State Election Board’s Monday meeting comes on the heels of a vote less than two weeks before that empowered county election board members to conduct “reasonable inquiry” into allegations of voting irregularities. That rule did not set deadlines for how long such inquiries might last or describe what they might entail, and critics worried that this omission could cause Georgia to miss the Dec. 11 deadline for sending its certified presidential election results to the federal government.

The new rule is even more concerning, election experts said, because it requires county boards to investigate discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of people who voted in a precinct, no matter how minor. It bars counties from certifying the election tallies until officials can review an investigation of every precinct with inconsistent totals. Such inconsistencies are commonplace, not evidence of malfeasance, and only in extremely rare circumstances affect the outcome of elections. The requirement to explain every one of them and litigation around investigations into them could take far longer than the time allowed by law to certify.

Get in Touch

Do you have any information that we should know about Georgia’s State Election Board or attempts to affect the outcome of the presidential election? Contact reporter Doug Bock Clark by email at doug.clark@propublica.org and by phone or Signal at 678-243-0784. If you’re concerned about confidentiality, check out our advice on the most secure ways to share tips.

“If this rule is adopted, any claims of fraud, any claims of discrepancies, could be the basis for a county board member — acting in bad faith — to say, ‘I’m not confident in the results,’ and hold up certification under the flimsiest of pretexts,” said Ben Berwick, who leads the election law and litigation team of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works to protect the integrity of American elections.

“The bottom line here,” Berwick said, is that “election deniers are intentionally creating a failure point in the process where they can interfere if they don’t like the results of an election.”

Until 2020, the certification of elections was a noncontroversial part of running them. After Trump made “stop the steal” a rallying cry in his attempt to overturn his loss to Biden, an increasing number of conservative election board members, especially at the county level, have attempted to block certification of subsequent elections. ProPublica has previously reported how these disruptions revealed weaknesses in the nation’s electoral system.

Among those who would have the ability to slow down the count in the fall is Julie Adams, who is a Republican member of the Fulton County elections board and a regional coordinator with Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. She was sworn in to the Fulton board in February, and one of her first official acts was to vote against the certification of the March presidential primary election, saying she needed more information to investigate discrepancies. She was overruled by her colleagues. She then sued the board and the county’s election director, asking for the court to find that her duties, such as certification, “are, in fact, discretionary, not ministerial.” The suit is ongoing.

The State Election Board received the proposed rule in April from Vernetta Nuriddin, a former member of the Fulton County elections board. In an interview on Friday, Nuriddin acknowledged that Adams “brought that particular concern” to her and was “instrumental” in bringing that rule and several others to the board.

In Nuriddin’s packet of paperwork asking for consideration of the rule, a cover letter said that the “Election Research Institute respectfully submits this petition for adoption.”

The Election Research Institute is led by Heather Honey, a conservative activist who also played a role in attempts to discredit the 2020 election results and has worked to advance election system overhauls supported by Mitchell, the head of the Election Integrity Network. Another organization Honey co-founded, Verity Vote, is listed as working on “joint projects and events” with the Election Integrity Network in its handbook. Mitchell has praised Honey as a “wonderful person” on her podcast.

Honey told ProPublica that her institute did not submit the proposed rule. “The Election Research Institute, like many, you know, nonprofits out there, have folks that have expertise in elections,” Honey said in a brief interview. “And so it is not uncommon for folks to seek our advice.” When asked about the language identifying the institute as submitting it, she said she would only answer further questions over email and then hung up. Honey did not respond to an emailed list of detailed questions.

Mitchell did not respond to requests for comment or a detailed list of questions.

Neither did Adams. In comments supporting the rule during a public meeting, Adams did not disclose her role originating it but explained that “it’s very hard to certify when you’re not following the law in knowing who voted, where they voted and how many ballots were cast.” She said that the purpose of the rule was to catch “problems beforehand” and that its goal was not “about throwing out precincts.”

Nuriddin eventually withdrew her submission. She would not say why.

An almost identical submission was provided to the board at about the same time by Bridget Thorne, a Fulton County commissioner and election denier. The primary difference was that Thorne’s version did not mention the Election Research Institute and said she was submitting it herself.

Thorne’s proposal was considered by the election board in its May meeting. “My hope is to reel in the blatant Fulton County not running their elections correctly,” Thorne told the board. She acknowledged that she had worked with Nuriddin on the rule, and that Nuriddin had withdrawn her name because “she wanted some tweaking of the language, last minute.”

In an interview, Thorne said she was encouraged to submit the rule by Honey, Adams and others.

She said that she did not know where all of the language in it came from because she had consulted with many lawyers and election experts while putting it together, but that some of it had come from herself and Honey. She said that Adams was not a writer but an organizer of the rule.

Thorne denied the rule was meant to be able to affect the outcome of the election. “The whole rule is to safeguard everybody’s vote,” she said, and to make sure that “nobody’s vote gets watered down by inadvertently double-scanning ballots.”

In a 45-minute discussion of the rule, a Republican member of the State Election Board warned that it ran “counter to both the federal and the state law” because it suggested counties could ignore the existing legal deadlines. The Republican chair of the board said that “this rule needs a little bit more work on it to make sure that it fully follows the statute” and that it was “not yet ready for prime time.” The board’s only Democratic member emphasized that it “is a criminal act to refuse to certify valid votes.”

Speaking alongside other conservative elections officials supportive of Thorne, Adams said that if an investigation was able to “find out why the numbers were wrong, a county might be late in certifying but they’d be a whole lot closer in returning accurate results.”

The five-person board, which has four Republicans on it, voted the proposal down unanimously, while offering to have two members work with supporters to refine the rule for future consideration.

That wasn’t the end of the proposal. In a matter of days, the Republican House speaker made a new appointment to the State Election Board, replacing a Republican lawyer who practices election law and who had said the rule was illegal and voted against it. In his place, the speaker appointed Janelle King. King is a conservative podcaster and panelist on a Georgia politics TV show, co-chairs a conservative political action committee, has no experience administering elections and has questioned the results of the 2020 election.

In June, a conservative activist resubmitted the rule with only minor updates, retaining a misspelling in its most important sentence.

In early August, during a rally in Atlanta, Trump praised by name the three members of the board’s new majority who are aligned with him, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory” and saying they were “doing a great job.”

Days later, the State Election Board adopted a rule by a 3-2 vote that allowed for county board members to delay certification of election results to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into them. The Republican chair sided with the lone Democratic appointee in opposition. Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger harshly criticized that rule in a statement that called it “new activist rulemaking.”

“Quick reporting of results and certification is paramount to voter confidence,” Raffensperger said. “Misguided attempts by the State Election Board will delay election results and undermine chain of custody safeguards. Georgia voters reject this 11th hour chaos, and so should the unelected members of the State Election Board.”

ProPublica interviewed six election experts about the potential impact of the rule that is scheduled to be considered by the election board on Monday. Five said it seemed more likely to affect urban Democratic counties than rural Republican ones because the former are more populated and have more ballots and voters.

“The statistical probability of a discrepancy is more likely to occur in counties with many voters,” said Paul Gronke, a professor at Reed College and the director of the Elections and Voting Information Center. “What’s unusual” about the proposed rule “is saying that any discrepancy is enough to refuse to certify a whole precinct’s worth of votes,” without considering the magnitude of the discrepancy or the votes it might disenfranchise.

The six experts listed off numerous scenarios in which small discrepancies that do not impact the outcome of the election regularly occur, including: ballots getting stuck in scanners and overlooked, citizens checking in to vote and then discontinuing the process before finalizing their vote, memory sticks failing to upload, election systems being slow to update that a provisional ballot has been corrected and so on.

According to the experts, election laws across America do not allow minor discrepancies to halt the certification process because legally mandated deadlines are tight. There are later opportunities to resolve the discrepancies, such as mandatory audits, investigations and litigation.

“There’s a process for investigating problems” with vote tallies in the courts, “and so if a candidate feels there’s something wrongly done, they can go to the courts,” said Gowri Ramachandran the director of elections and security in the Brennan Center’s Elections & Government program.

If the proposed rule were used to delay certification, the battle would shift to the courts, according to the experts. Georgia law is explicit that certification is mandatory and that attempts by county board members not to certify votes would prompt interested parties to seek a writ of mandamus, a type of court order forcing government officials to properly fulfill their official duties. This prescribed remedy goes all the way back to an 1899 decision by the state Supreme Court, arising from a situation in which a county board was overruled when it tried to refuse to certify a precinct to give victory to their preferred candidates.

What would happen after that is less clear. Numerous outside groups would likely attempt to join the litigation, including the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee. On appeal, cases could end up at Georgia’s Supreme Court. Or they could get moved to federal court. The closest precedent is the recount of the 2000 election in Florida, which only ended after the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the count and awarded the presidency to Republican George W. Bush by a 5-4 vote.

“The 100% definitive answer is that no one knows how such a crisis would play out,” said Marisa Pyle, the senior democracy defense manager for Georgia with All Voting is Local Action, a voting rights advocacy organization. “No one wants to find out.”

by Joshua Kaplan

This story discusses threats of violence and contains a racial slur.

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Last February, some 20 men and their wives gathered for dinner at an upscale restaurant in Spokane, Washington, for their annual Valentine’s Day celebration. The men weren’t just friends; they did community service work together. They had been featured on local television, in khakis and baseball caps, delivering 1,200 pounds of food to an area veterans’ center; they were gearing up for their next food drive, which they called Operation Hunger Smash. A few days after the holiday, the men went camping in the snow-speckled mountains outside Spokane, where they grilled rib-eyes and bacon-wrapped asparagus over a bonfire.

They also engaged in more menacing activities. They assembled regularly — sometimes wearing night-vision goggles in the dark — to practice storming buildings together with semiautomatic rifles. Their drills included using sniper rifles to shoot targets from distances of half a mile. And they belonged to a shadowy organization whose members were debating, with ever more intensity, whether they should engage in mass-scale political violence.

They were among the thousands of members of American Patriots Three Percent, a militia that has long been one of the largest in the United States and has mostly managed to avoid scrutiny. Its ranks included cops and convicted criminals, active-duty U.S. soldiers and small-business owners, truck drivers and health care professionals. Like other militias, AP3 has a vague but militant right-wing ideology, a pronounced sense of grievance and a commitment to armed action. It has already sought to shape American life through vigilante operations: AP3 members have “rounded up” immigrants at the Texas border, assaulted Black Lives Matter protesters and attempted to crack down on people casting absentee ballots.

Now with the presidential election less than 100 days away, AP3 members see the fate of their country turning on a turbulent, charged campaign. They’re certain that Democrats will try to steal — not for the first time, in their view — the White House from Donald Trump. “The next election won’t be decided at a Ballot Box,” an AP3 leader wrote several months ago in a private Telegram chat. “It’ll be decided at the ammo box.” He has said he is ready to force his way into voting centers if need be, or “whatever it takes.”

The public’s impression of American militias is dominated by Jan. 6, 2021. Groups such as the Proud Boys had plotted to prevent the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden. They formed the vanguard of the mob that stormed the Capitol that day, according to the Department of Justice. Media coverage since has centered on the prosecutions of participants, with hundreds of rioters sent to prison.

But despite the riot and its fallout, militias are far from extinct. AP3 has expanded at a dramatic pace since Jan. 6, while keeping much of its activity out of view. This rise is documented in more than 100,000 internal messages obtained by ProPublica, spanning the run-up to Jan. 6 through early 2024. Along with extensive interviews with 22 current and former members of AP3, the records provide a uniquely detailed inside view of the militia movement at a crucial moment.

The messages reveal how AP3 leaders have forged alliances with law enforcement around the country and show the ways in which, despite an initial crackdown by social media, they have attracted a new wave of recruits. A change in the political climate has also helped: In a matter of months after Jan. 6, rioters went from pariahs to heroes in the rhetoric of prominent Republican politicians. By the summer of 2021, people were enlisting in AP3, saying that Jan. 6 inspired them to join.

A portrait emerges of a group alternating between focused action and self-destructive chaos and facing a schism over whether political engagement can still address our nation’s problems — or whether violence is the only option. It can be hard to discern the line between bluster and imminent threat in the messages, a perennial struggle for FBI agents who monitor paramilitary groups. But some senior AP3 members grew so alarmed that they quit, scared by the number of people, even high-level leaders, advocating acts of terror.

The materials also shed light on what former national security officials say is the most urgent question regarding militias: Will Jan. 6 prove the high water mark of the movement’s violence or merely a prelude to something more catastrophic? AP3 leaders have sometimes characterized the storming of the Capitol as a botched job, a failure of ill-formed plans that didn’t go far enough. “The Jan 6 event made the movement look weak and uncommitted,” one wrote a year and a half after the riot in a secret channel. “Had the house been taken for real and held we would all be in a different world.”

This is the story of a militia fighting for its survival, determined not to make the same mistake twice.

AP3 members train in Washington state. (Obtained by ProPublica) “Life Is Too Fucking Short”

On a Thursday afternoon in February 2021, Scot Seddon, national commander of AP3, sent an audio message to his deputies in a channel open only to the group’s leadership. A former Army reservist, Seddon had founded AP3 when he was in his 30s and shaped it into a national force. Now he was 50, with a receding hairline, his beard overtaken by gray. In videos from this time, typically recorded in his kitchen, Seddon favored baseball caps and tight shirts that revealed his bulky shoulders and trapezius muscles. He looked like an aging bro who had just returned from the gym. “I hate this movement more every day,” Seddon said that February day, “and I really don’t even want to be a part of it anymore.”

It had been a few weeks since the Capitol riot. The FBI was already arresting leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, two of AP3’s prominent counterparts. Another militia was about to dissolve. One of Seddon’s lieutenants had issued a dark forecast: The reaction to Jan. 6 could destroy our movement. Everyday Americans will recoil.

Seddon on the Capitol Riot AP3 national commander Scot Seddon, in a video posted on Jan. 6, 2021, claimed that left-wing antifa protesters infiltrated the crowd at the Capitol that day, an assertion dismissed by experts. (Obtained by ProPublica)

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At least Seddon didn’t have to fear going to prison. AP3 had spent weeks preparing to go to Washington, D.C., for Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, with one of his top deputies promising to “mad max this shit.” Whether through luck, foresight or miscalculation, Seddon had decided to save his forces for that event rather than deploy them at the Jan. 6 rally. Plenty of his members went anyway; some fought with police officers on the Capitol steps. But they were under orders not to wear AP3 insignia, according to two former lieutenants to Seddon, and the organization was never publicly linked to the rioters.

That did not save AP3 from the fallout. Membership plummeted. AP3ers lost friends and business. Active-duty police officers quit out of fear of losing their jobs.

What’s more, AP3’s best recruiting tool was essentially gone: Facebook had cracked down on paramilitary organizing. “Facebook has been our greatest weapon. It’s gotten us where we are today,” Seddon told his troops. He later described those months as a period of personal “misery” and self-doubt. “I had a drinking problem,” he would confide to the group. “The bottle was consuming me.”

By the middle of 2021, some AP3 leaders were ready to give up. In July, the head of its Arizona chapter announced he was stepping down. “My life is too fucking short to beg people to do what’s right,” he said. He had hardly any members left in his state, and rebuilding was proving impossible. Still, he added, “It has been a great honor to me to have been here (and stayed here) through some of the most trying times this movement has seen since April 19, 1995.”

Seddon displays the hand signal of the Three Percenters, a loose confederation of right-wing groups that AP3 is affiliated with, in a photo posted in 2023. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Nobody needs to explain the significance of ​​that date to a militia member. It was the day a Gulf War veteran with militia ties named Timothy McVeigh blew up a government building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more. The modern militia movement — loosely speaking, a wide variety of groups whose shared traits are military-style training, an affinity for guns and a belief that they are the last line of defense against the excesses of the government and the left — started in the early 1990s and had been growing rapidly. But after the bombing, the movement crumbled. It didn’t recover until 2008, when a financial crisis and Barack Obama’s presidential election kindled a new generation of leaders like Seddon.

But the political climate after Jan. 6 would be very different from the period after McVeigh’s attack. Soon, Seddon’s group would have momentum back on its side.

Lions and Men

Seddon seems like an unlikely commander of a paramilitary organization. Raised in the suburbs of Long Island, he bounced between jobs through his early 40s, including stints as the manager for a small-time rapper and as a model. Seddon appeared on book jackets, including a vampire romance novel titled “Love’s Last Bite.” And there he was, in an awkward shirtless pose with a woman in lingerie, on the cover of “How to Handle a Younger Man: A Collection of Five Erotic Stories.”

It was in internet forums for models, during the latter years of the George W. Bush administration, where Seddon’s right-wing politics started to emerge publicly. He would engage in lengthy sparring with his peers, heckling them with insults: “we dominate you libs” and “you SOUND LIKE A FRENCHMEN need I say more?”

Seddon during his days as a model (Screenshot taken by ProPublica via Bookmate.com)

Seddon grew increasingly alienated — he would later say that he felt “very alone” after Obama was elected — and engaged. He became active on a Facebook page to support Iraq War veterans. And then, during Obama’s first term, he used that as a launchpad to create AP3. At the time, Seddon did not yet own a firearm, according to one of his first recruits.

Like many militias, AP3 was suffused with a military ethos. It adopted the hierarchy and nomenclature, with ranks such as “command sergeant major.” One credential most conferred authority: military service.

Seddon described himself as a veteran and, in a public resume, stated that he had served in Operation Desert Storm. He would tell Army stories to AP3 members and show them a photo of himself as a young soldier. Even his closest confidants in the group were left with the impression that he had substantial military experience.

But Seddon did not, in fact, serve in a combat zone. He joined the Army Reserve, without any prior stint in the military, more than a year after Desert Storm was over, according to his discharge papers and military personnel records. His active-duty tenure lasted for five months, the documents say, and ended when he finished his initial training.

Seddon’s Army discharge papers, along with military personnel records, show he was on active duty for five months. (Obtained by ProPublica. Redacted by ProPublica.)

Seddon declined to be interviewed for this article. Presented with an extensive list of written questions, he responded, “Lions do not concern themselves with the opinions of men.”

“J6 Made Me Want to Join”

Seddon’s vision for AP3 was novel for the time: a national organization, with chapters across the country operating under his command. After Obama announced a plan for tougher gun control in his second term, membership exploded, former leaders said. One told ProPublica that their local chapter grew from four or five people to over 200 in less than a year.

By 2016, AP3 had an active presence in 48 states, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center — larger than any other organization the anti-extremism watchdog was tracking. AP3 was part of the loose confederation known as the Three Percenters, a set of right-wing groups that take their name from the claim that only 3% of colonists fought in the American Revolution. At its peak, by Seddon’s likely exaggerated count, AP3 had 40,000 to 50,000 members. After the Jan. 6 riot, insiders and experts estimate the total was, at most, in the low thousands.

Seddon set about rebuilding the group in 2021. It was difficult initially and made even harder by his own struggles. When the pandemic started, he had a job as a doctor’s technician in New York City, but he refused to get vaccinated and left the medical field. He tried to get licensed as a realtor, then as a personal trainer, and found gig economy work near Scranton, Pennsylvania. He often recorded video directives to his troops from his car while driving between deliveries for Uber Eats.

He began reinvigorating the remnants of his command. His communications offered a mix of elements that his followers found compelling. There was lots of posturing: “Fuck the federal government,” he offered as an opener in one video. “These rats, these devils,” he said in another, “the only way they’re going to start listening is fear.” But Seddon also hailed his members as patriots, heroes, and praised their deeds with an “awesome job bro.” Seddon traveled the country. He would drop by at AP3’s training exercises, where veterans might teach close-quarters gun combat at an abandoned car dealership or lead sniper rifle practice at a suburban ranch.

“You Should Be a Monster” An excerpt from an AP3 recruiting video (Obtained by ProPublica)

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Recruiting new members and unifying the old ones — a disparate roster that brought together men with white nationalist ties and Black military vets — demanded constant effort. Seddon avoided getting pinned down on one controversial question: what precisely his group’s purpose was. “Resisting all efforts to undermine our constitution and the American way of life,” AP3’s mission statement read, at once lofty and vague. “Together we will return our country to the glory it once was.” Many members were furious about COVID-19 restrictions and the “LGBTQ agenda.” Gun control, they thought, was an injustice that might be worth dying over. But Seddon imposed no litmus test. “We have some [members] that are fixated on Muslims,” as one leader put it. “Most are fixated on Antifa and BLM.”

Under Seddon, AP3 was both an armed right-wing resistance group and something akin to a Rotary Club; camaraderie was as important a draw as ideology. AP3 members patrolled city streets with AR-15-style rifles and baseball bats during Black Lives Matters protests. They practiced attacking dummies with knives. But they also taught each other how to save money on groceries through gardening and organized seminars where they wrote reports on each Constitutional amendment. One member said the group dispatched trucks filled with clothes and furniture to his family after a wildfire destroyed their house. AP3 had its own monthly magazine, with militia news in the front pages and word games for kids in the back.

AP3 is both an armed right-wing resistance group and something akin to a Rotary Club; camaraderie is as important a draw as ideology. In chats, members shared images of everything from their weapons to their gardening successes. (Obtained by ProPublica. The photo of a person with an American flag on his chest was cropped.)

By August 2021, Seddon’s lieutenants noticed that the backlash to the Capitol riot was starting to dissipate. A new type of member was signing up. “J6 made me want to join,” a recruit wrote that month in a Telegram channel. He hadn’t been part of a militia before, he explained, but seeing how “true Patriots” were being treated, “it was time to actually do something.”

Seddon sought ways to capitalize on the improving political climate. In Alabama, members fanned out to shops around the state, where they dropped off stacks of business cards encouraging patriots to “do your part.” “The APIII Alabama Recruitment line has rang non stop today,” a leader reported back afterward. “I honestly wasn’t expecting it to get this big.”

In Washington state, AP3 members in the military reserves touted the militia to fellow reservists during their units’ regular monthly drills. One chapter looked into purchasing billboard ads. In internal chats, many members agreed the “best place to recruit” is Veterans Affairs facilities.

By the fall, they had arrived at a more efficient method. Facebook’s public posture hadn’t wavered. AP3 was still on its list of banned “dangerous organizations.” Again and again in press releases, the company said its efforts to combat militias were stronger than ever.

Inside AP3, though, leaders were seeing something different: The social media giant was gradually loosening its controls.

A Meta spokesperson said Facebook was still actively working to keep AP3 off its platform. “This is an adversarial space,” she said, “and we often see instances of groups or individuals taking on new tactics to avoid detection and evade our policies and enforcement.”

Seddon would soon tell leaders there were “huge opportunities to recruit using Facebook” again. AP3 experienced such an influx of aspiring members that leaders struggled to keep up. “GUYS WE REALLY NEED SOME HELP,” one of Seddon’s deputies wrote in a typical appeal in an internal chat. “GOT 175 PEOPLE WAITING TO GET IN.”

It was a sorely needed shot of adrenaline.

“Our Force Multiplier”

The cover of the February 2022 issue of AP3’s magazine (Obtained by ProPublica)

In the view of many AP3 leaders, their chances of success hinged on building alliances with another heavily armed sector of society: police and sheriffs’ departments. If they couldn’t get the agencies to fight alongside them, they at least needed the cops to leave them alone. Many organizations like AP3 share this approach; a leaked FBI counterterrorism guide from 2015 noted that investigations of “militia extremists” often find “active links to law enforcement officers.” The details of those efforts rarely come into public view.

One test of that strategy occurred in Kenosha, Wisconsin, as the prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse was winding to a close in 2021. When Black Lives Matter protests and civil unrest overtook Kenosha the year before, Rittenhouse had ventured into the scrum with a semiautomatic rifle and killed two people. Prosecutors called it murder; Rittenhouse called it self-defense. Within AP3, he’d become a folk hero. “Kyle represents every one of us,” one leader said.

In September 2021, with Rittenhouse’s trial two months away, AP3 leaders were preparing for what would happen after the verdict. If he were acquitted, there might be riots in Kenosha. And if there were riots, the militia might deploy a team that could be in the same position as Rittenhouse had been in, walking armed into a volatile situation. They wanted local law enforcement on their side.

The head of AP3’s Wisconsin chapter, a truck driver, had already contacted the Kenosha County sheriff. He’d invited a couple of local officers over for beers, too. The sheriff wasn’t interested in help from a militia, the chapter head reported in an internal chat. (The sheriff did not respond to attempts to seek comment.) Seddon told him he wasn’t trying hard enough: “I hate these kind of excuses.”

A man wears an AP3 patch at a rally with the Proud Boys in Portland, Oregon, in 2020. (Maranie R. Staab/AFP/Getty Images)

On Sept. 20, Seddon recorded a speech with more full-throated instructions for courting law enforcement. He already had officers as members: One AP3 leader in Alabama would send video messages while driving in his police uniform. Seddon wanted to move up the chain of command. “We need to pick the good apples and we need to have them infiltrate the minds of those on the inside that stand on the fence,” he said. “It’s like building an army.”

He knew that was harder to achieve when you’re seen as anti-government extremists. So Seddon had created a playbook for presenting AP3 as a misunderstood club for good Samaritans. Leaders encouraged members to get local police departments involved in AP3’s food drives for homeless people. Seddon emphasized that these community service projects, a source of pride for many members, were invaluable public relations coups.

His members distributed brochures — “WE ARE NOT A MILITIA!!!!!” they declared — at rallies and to police officers. This was a branding decision to make people like cops feel comfortable supporting or joining AP3, Seddon said in internal messages, even though “we all know better.”

Seddon pushed members to contact sheriffs in their regions and had his deputies send Excel spreadsheets to the militia’s rank and file. The documents listed every sheriff in each member’s state, with columns to mark whether they were Republicans and “friendly.”

Sometimes it came easily. During the 2022 election, the county where Burley Ross, head of AP3’s North Carolina chapter, lived had an open seat for sheriff. In an interview with ProPublica, Ross said he approached both candidates and asked: If the federal government wanted you to take someone’s guns, what would you do?

“I’m 100% not taking someone’s guns,” Scott Hammonds, the Republican candidate, responded, according to Ross. When his Democratic opponent said he’d enforce the law, Ross suggested that if he tried that, someone would leave the encounter in a body bag.

Hammonds won. Then as sheriff, he became an “off the books” member of AP3, according to messages Ross sent in internal chats. Some of Hammonds’ deputies started training with the group, Ross wrote. “For us to train with the deputies, that’s a plus for us,” he told ProPublica, “because we understand how they work.” ProPublica could not independently confirm Hammonds’ relationship with the group. Hammonds did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Burley Ross was head of AP3’s North Carolina chapter. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Police officers weren’t the only ones quietly allying with AP3. Some lawmakers did, too. Among them was a North Carolina state legislator who was an off-the-books member, Ross wrote in an internal chat. It was Keith Kidwell, leader of the state House Freedom Caucus. (Ross asked ProPublica to make clear he did not name Kidwell or Hammonds in interviews and that ProPublica identified them using the AP3 messages it obtained. Kidwell did not respond to requests for comment.)

AP3’s “commanding officer” in Oklahoma, Ed Eubanks, took an especially calculated approach to cultivating ties with police. A competitive shooter who said he’d been a sniper in the Special Forces, Eubanks was older than most in the militia, in his 60s and retired. He was an “outcast” in his liberal family, he wrote to a group of about 100 militia members, echoing a common theme in the group. He had a lot of time to dedicate to AP3.

Eubanks announced in a 2021 internal chat that he was setting up “a PR team to start making inroads” with law enforcement across Oklahoma. He let officers use shooting ranges on his property. He built a barbecue smoker with “APIII” on the side to use for meet-and-greets with police departments. It was just the sort of creativity Seddon was hoping for.

The barbecue smoker (as it was being constructed) that Ed Eubanks built to use for meet-and-greets with police departments (Obtained by ProPublica)

Eubanks would claim success with multiple law enforcement agencies, particularly the Oklahoma City police force. Messages from 2020 show the courtship in its beginnings. Eubanks described his plans to stage a counterprotest at an upcoming “defund the police” rally in Oklahoma City in order to “build a better relationship with the OKCPD.” After the rally, Eubanks reported that he had made connections with city police officers who would be giving him intel (and barbecue — they’d invited AP3 members to a cookout at police union headquarters after the event).

In the years that followed, the invitations to functions at the union lodge continued, according to messages from Eubanks and another AP3 member. Eubanks said police notified him when rallies were happening and that the militia got “minute by minute updates” from officers at some events.

A spokesperson for the Oklahoma City police department said it was “going to pass” on a request for an interview and did not respond to detailed written questions. Mark Nelson, president of the local Fraternal Order of Police, said that AP3 was never invited to an official union event, but that officers can host private events at the union lodge and he would “have no idea” who was invited. In response to detailed questions, Eubanks declined to comment.

One of Eubanks’ members said he pretended to be a Black Lives Matter supporter at one protest in the city because police had asked AP3 to embed a member inside BLM and report back. “The demonic presence there when the leaders showed up,” the member wrote, “was downright oppressive.”

ProPublica could not determine the full extent of AP3’s ties to the Oklahoma City police, but Eubanks contended in a message that his efforts were “worth every second.” As he put it in another message, “This will be our force multiplier when the time arises.”

AP3 members, left, foreground, at a county GOP dinner in Washington state in late 2021 (Obtained by ProPublica) AP3 on Patrol

By mid-2022, Seddon was growing ebullient. He’d toned down his drinking, he told his comrades. In videos, he looked clean cut and slimmed down. Recruiting was booming, with as many as 50 people applying each day. His members were providing security details for county GOP events again. And the militia’s first major operation since the Capitol riot was well underway.

Seddon had sounded a call to arms in late 2021. Illegal border crossings were surging, and the Texas governor had declared that his state was “abandoned” by the federal government. “Our country is being invaded at the Southern border,” Seddon said. “Haitians, Middle Easterners, South American invaders that are coming in.” He had about 20 members preparing to deploy to Quemado, Texas, he said, and was seeking more volunteers.

Anyone interested would need to bring an AR-15-style carbine and a semiautomatic pistol. They would conduct vigilante patrols, a regular feature at the border since the 1970s. Another leader explained the rules. “It is a felony to detain these folks under Texas law,” he said. “We can only report to the authorities, but we are allowed to carry live rounds.”

Many members said they didn’t want to go if they couldn’t kill migrants. “​​The most heard comment I get” is “there is only one way to stop them,” one leader told Seddon. AP3 joined forces with another militia and soon had members in Quemado, sleeping at a Christian charity 1,000 feet from the Rio Grande.

The charity’s leaders, terrified of the Mexican cartels that helped transport some migrants, were initially grateful for the support. They put the militiamen up in twin bunk beds in little rooms that resembled a hospital ward. AP3 would keep a presence at the border for at least the next year and a half. Their members caught migrants and turned them over to the authorities. In time, messages claim, they were patrolling over 10,000 acres of land.

Eubanks helped lead the operation. At night, he’d split members up to cover more ground. Then he would don camouflage fatigues and venture alone into the pitch darkness, a shotgun in his hand.

First image: A room where AP3 members stayed in Quemado, Texas. Second image: Ed Eubanks near the border. Third image: A small vehicle used by AP3 members for their patrols. (Obtained by ProPublica)

In internal chats, Eubanks bragged about the allies they’d cultivated, including Brad Coe, a cowboy-hat-wearing local sheriff who had publicly praised border militias and regularly discussed immigration on Fox News. Coe shared intel with him and discussed the idea of Eubanks “running a bush team to track the cartel,” Eubanks told Seddon and others. Eubanks complained in the chats that the Texas Department of Public Safety was “refusing to work with us” but said AP3 was collaborating with the Border Patrol and the National Guard, who installed “observation pads for us to use along the river.”

The partnerships didn’t always go smoothly. Once, an AP3 member got into an argument with a National Guardsman that turned physical. “He kicked the shit out of the national guardsman,” Ross, who helped coordinate the operation, told ProPublica. “I called him and said, ‘You cannot beat up the national guardsmen any more.’” (Local law enforcement arrived but decided not to make any arrests, according to Ross.)

Coe did not respond to requests for comment. A Border Patrol spokesperson did not address ProPublica’s questions about its agents but said that civilians “involving themselves in border security related activities” is “unlawful” and “dangerous.” In response to detailed questions, the Texas Military Department, which oversees the Texas National Guard, issued a one-sentence statement: “The Texas Military Department does not provide support to or operate with local militias.”

As the operation expanded, Eubanks sent back pictures of hundreds of migrants the militias had “rounded up,” huddled on the ground, often surrounded by Border Patrol or what appear to be National Guard members. The militiamen would return excited after stopping a group at gunpoint, according to Lorraine Mercer, the charity’s ministry director, who got to know the men over many months as their host. They didn’t always wait for government agents to arrive, Mercer said. “Some of them were trying to run them back into Mexico,” she told ProPublica. They’d say, “We’ll handle them, the Border Patrol doesn’t know what they’re doing.”

Seddon wanted the operation to get even more ambitious. And he had a scheme he thought could make that possible. “The bottom line is we need to start making money,” he told state leaders in July 2022. His answer was to create a nonprofit called American Community Outreach Network.

ACON’s website gave no indication of its ties to AP3. It was advertised as a charity that provided services in disaster zones and to disadvantaged youth.

But in internal chats, Seddon was explicit that ACON was a way to fund the militia. “I want every single one of us to fucking get rich,” he said in one video. “I want to be sitting on a yacht in two years with every one of you,” he said in another. Members would receive a 20% cut of any donations they brought in, he promised.

This was more than a get-rich-quick ploy, in Seddon’s telling. It could help AP3 thrive in the post-Jan. 6 era. “I feel reborn,” he said as the plan moved ahead. Imagine if people didn’t need to juggle militia duties with their day jobs, “if every single one of us had the ability to do this full-time,” he said. It’d be so much easier to mobilize troops to the border or anywhere else.

“It’s Going to Be a Blood Bath”

“This election is do or die for us,” Seddon told his lieutenants in August 2022. The midterm elections were months away, and Democrats controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. If we can’t retake Congress now, Seddon said in a video, “we’re in real, real deep shit.” He had a plan to get involved.

Seddon wanted AP3 to fan out across the country, stake out ballot boxes and deter fraudulent voting, which he claimed was rampant during the 2020 election. “We’re trying to persuade these people maybe that’s not such a good idea,” Seddon said about supposed liberal ballot stuffers. “There’s a large group of what look like some pretty badass patriots outside.” The operation was shortly underway in Arizona, Colorado and Michigan, though it’s unclear how many members heeded Seddon’s call.

Absentee ballots had barely made it into voters’ mailboxes before it all went awry. Eubanks posted a handheld video of a television screen in an internal chat: “NBC Nightly News” was showing surveillance footage of a man in Maricopa County, Arizona. The man hadn’t been identified, but inside AP3, they knew who he was: a Marine veteran named Elias Humiston. Several years before, he had pleaded guilty to an illegal firearm discharge. Now he was at the center of a national news cycle.

Humiston was captured on camera outside a drop box for absentee ballots. His face was masked, and he had a handgun and wore a tactical vest. He had gotten into a confrontation with a woman who tried to record his license plate, prompting the sheriff’s department to arrive.

“Now the DOJ is involved,” Eubanks wrote four days after the incident. Government attorneys said such activities could constitute illegal voter intimidation. But the authorities didn’t appear to know that the anonymous vigilante was a part of AP3.

Humiston had held a leadership role in AP3 and had recently won an award from the militia for his work at the border. He promptly resigned “to protect” AP3, records show. He was never charged with a crime or publicly linked to the militia. (Humiston did not respond to requests for comment.)

Some leaders said that Humiston’s efforts “should be applauded.” Another camp saw the mission as a foolhardy mistake by Seddon. “Poorly planned and horribly executed,” one leader called it.

Seddon told everyone to stop acting like cowards. “If it’s not this, it’s the fact that we’re white, that we’re Christian,” he said. The DOJ is “going to come at us no matter what we do,” Seddon continued. “Communism — that’s where this country is leading if we don’t take a stand.”

Seddon had always had a short fuse. But he was becoming increasingly militant and inflammatory, according to several longtime members. In messages, he raged against “pedophilia” in schools and the “panels of blacks” “disrespecting white Americans” on MSNBC. When Congress increased the IRS’ budget, he declared that revenue agents were coming to “kill our kids.” Once, in a voice note he recorded while driving, he paused. “I almost ran over this nigger,” Seddon said. “I am not racist — just these dirty fucks walking these streets.”

Seven former leaders told ProPublica they became alarmed by how the rhetoric was shifting in AP3. In the days after Jan. 6, Seddon had suppressed calls for violence, telling members who wanted to assassinate politicians to stand down. But he had stopped acting as a voice of restraint, even as such talk increased.

One morning in August 2022, an ex-cop with at least 100 AP3 members under his command announced a mysterious initiative. He had previously said it was time to take a violent stand against Black Lives Matter: “We will have to suffer some and some will die,” he said, but he was “tired of waiting.” Now he said he planned to assemble a “Tac Team” of “those who will do what others won’t.”

A different afternoon, a different leader put forward his own proposal. “We havnt made any head way in the last 5 plus years,” he wrote. Let’s pick a date and descend on government buildings across the country, he suggested, and then kill the officials who’ve committed treason. “Time to stack body’s up.” (Two others told him to arrange a secret meeting offline.)

After the 2022 midterms, Ross made a plea in an internal chat. “APIII AND EVERY OTHER PATRIOT group seems to want a fight,” he wrote. “A war will leave no winners.” Ross, too, believed that civil war was inevitable, but he pushed for the group to focus on grassroots politics in the meantime. “There’s going to be a time to be violent,” he told ProPublica. “I’m the type of person who’s like, ‘Now is not the time.’” In AP3, that made him a moderate.

A growing faction had lost hope in the democratic process. Elections and activism are pointless, they maintained; even the midterms were rife with fraud. They felt out of alternatives. Their talk was now a steady drumbeat:

“Get it over with I’ll die with honor.”

“It’s going to be a blood bath.”

“When does AP3 as a whole say, that’s enough and stand up?”

First two images: AP3 members training in the light and in the dark. Third image: AP3 members with fellow militiamen from the Oath Keepers. (Obtained by ProPublica) “I Know Where You Live”

Seddon’s downfall started around the turn of this year. An AP3 member, increasingly suspicious, had obtained a copy of his military discharge papers. That was enough to cause an explosion. After years of touting his Army experience, Seddon’s secret was exposed.

He tried to suppress the uprising that ensued. He threatened a former leader who confronted him about the records in private. “I know where you live,” Seddon wrote on Facebook Messenger. “Tread careful.” Ross accused Seddon of stolen valor and was kicked out.

Seddon’s command quickly began to unravel. A rumor started to spread: Law enforcement was investigating the ACON scheme. The charity had never taken off. One of Seddon’s ex-deputies told ProPublica it raised less than $5,000. But its website falsely advertised it as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit authorized to accept tax-deductible donations, which the IRS said is not true.

Leaders who had spent months encouraging the initiative now condemned ACON as a scam to put money in Seddon’s pocket. “Not volunteering for a Rico trial,” one member wrote in a side chat, referring to the racketeering statute that prosecutors use to take down the mafia. In the spring, state chapters began to defect from AP3 in droves.

Soon Seddon had lost a significant majority of his organization. Former leaders estimate that about 10 state chapters stayed on, leaving him to try to rebuild the militia’s presence everywhere else.

Seddon appears undaunted. He’s lost a large chunk of his membership before and managed to recover. (Meanwhile, the instability in his career continues. Recently, he started a business that offers “fast cash” to cancer patients who sign over their life insurance policies.)

Seddon, left, at a 2024 training (via Gab)

His recent setbacks seem to have only made him more volatile. Toward the end of Trump’s criminal trial in May, Seddon wrote on Facebook that Judge Juan Merchan was treating the former president unfairly. “This guy needs to meet his maker,” Seddon said. He followed up by posting the judge’s home address.

Facebook shut down his account, which he’d long been using to promote the militia. The platform conducted a large enforcement action against AP3 in June, according to the Meta spokesperson, removing 40 pages, 15 groups and 600 accounts that “were mostly focusing on recruitment.” The spokesperson said Facebook strengthened its policies at the beginning of the year “to take an even stricter approach to enforcement against this group and other banned militia organizations.”

Seddon was back on social media, this time on TikTok, after the assassination attempt on Trump in July. “This was a direct attack on us,” he said. “We need to become fucking lions.”

AP3’s travails have not been unique. Since the Capitol riot, the militia movement has grown more fractured and decentralized. This may make it harder for one leader to spur mass action. It could also make it harder for one leader to prevent mass action and for law enforcement to track the groups and to intervene.

The presidential election could propel the militia movement in a darker direction. Experts worry that a Trump loss could spark violence from those who feel it’s their only option, especially if he once again refuses to accept the results. If Trump wins and then fulfills his promise to pardon Jan. 6 defendants, they fear the most radical wing of his party could take it as a license for more extreme action.

AP3 may have splintered, but its former members have mostly just moved to other militias. John Valle, Seddon’s former third in command, sees the movement’s future as consisting of state and local groups, operating independently but coordinating on secure messaging apps.

He said that the 286 members of his Washington chapter are now operating as their own independent group. They didn’t want to get caught up in AP3’s potential legal problems, but their mission remains the same. As Valle put it, “We’re just rebranding.”

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

by Nick Judin, Mississippi Free Press

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

Beneath the city of Jackson, Mississippi, is a Rube Goldberg-esque network of pipes that brings water to residents. The system, by one estimate, is twice as long as it should be for a city of this size. Much of it has been in disrepair for years; some parts are more than 100 years old.

Underground, broken pipes have spewed water into the surrounding earth or sent it bubbling up from cracked streets. For every gallon of water that reaches a customer’s tap, at least another gallon doesn’t, according to a June estimate from the manager of the water system.

Aboveground, the symptoms of those problems have been faucets that sputtered and toilet bowls that didn’t refill. Teenagers in the county’s juvenile-detention center were sent to other facilities to shower, one official said. Hospitals that regularly lost water built their own wells. Roughly every few days, people in one part of town or another have received notices telling them their water was unsafe to drink unless they boiled it first. At times, like for two weeks in the winter of 2021, many residents had no running water at all.

But for years, state employees inspecting Jackson’s primary water system noted few problems with the distribution system — the pipes that delivered water to its customers. In the 16 years before the system collapsed in 2022, leaving roughly 160,000 residents in and around Jackson dependent on bottled water for weeks, inspectors admonished the city just a couple times about the pipes underground. They identified issues with low water pressure just once and noted high water loss a few times. But they issued no formal reprimands or fines.

From 2006 through 2021, Jackson’s inspection score from the Mississippi State Department of Health, which oversees water systems in the state, averaged nearly 4 out of 5. The few times MSDH identified major problems in Jackson, all but one were tied to its water plants, not the distribution system.

This week, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General said the state’s failure to flag ongoing problems in Jackson’s water system, including those in the pipes, contributed to the Jackson water crisis in August 2022. Over several years, the state’s inspections “did not reflect the conditions of Jackson’s system,” the inspector general’s staff wrote. As a result, they wrote, problems “were left unresolved until the eventual catastrophic failure of the system,” when the city’s main water plant finally buckled. It took weeks until the city could reliably pump clean water to residents.

A Jackson, Mississippi, firefighter loads cases of bottled water into a resident’s car in August 2022. The collapse of the city’s water system that summer left roughly 160,000 people dependent on bottled water for weeks. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP) Portable toilets were parked on the grounds of the Mississippi Capitol during the 2022 failure of Jackson’s water system. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP)

The Office of Inspector General said the EPA, as the agency ultimately responsible for compliance with federal drinking water standards, shares some responsibility for the state’s failures because it didn’t make sure the state was properly enforcing its regulations. The agency said in a response included in the report that it agrees with the inspector general’s findings.

MSDH hasn’t responded to requests for comment on the report; its response to the Office of Inspector General wasn’t immediately available. But the findings aren’t exactly new to state regulators. The report, which covers inspections from 2015 through 2021, corroborates reporting by the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica that looked at state inspections dating back to 2006.

The news outlets told MSDH this year that their reporting showed that the states’ inspections had failed to identify problems in the distribution system and to require the city to act. MSDH officials disputed the claim as “patently false,” saying its inspections were based on information provided by the city. The agency said the city of Jackson failed to take on the responsibility “to respond to any potential pressure or water loss issues.”

In an interview late last year, State Health Officer Dan Edney defended MSDH’s oversight. Still, he said he expected the EPA to tighten its rules on how states oversee water systems. “The EPA probably, after studying this event, is going to change some things in terms of how they want inspections to be, and I welcome that,” he told the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica. Such changes, he said, would allow Mississippi “to intervene in a little bit more meaningful way, sooner.”

Such changes are indeed underway. In response to the inspector general’s report, the EPA plans to review how MSDH conducts federally required inspections. Beyond Mississippi, the EPA is checking other states’ oversight in the Southeast. And federal officials will update EPA guidance on how to perform federally required inspections to include a process for handling ongoing problems such as those that plagued Jackson’s distribution system.

Water Pressure Was Bad, but Still Passed the Test

MSDH’s inspections do include questions about the pipes underground. But time and again, the agency’s inspection records did not reflect what was going on beneath the surface in Jackson.

Every year when inspectors came, they checked water quality, reviewed records and policies and looked over equipment. They filled out a two-page questionnaire, awarded points based on the answers and wrote up pages of recommendations. On every inspection report from 2006 to 2020, inspectors answered no to a question about whether there was “any indication” of pressure problems. Only in 2021 did they answer yes, noting that a fire at a water plant had caused pressure to drop.

A completed questionnaire after a state inspection of the Jackson water system in 2018. As on every other inspection report from 2006 to 2020, state employees answered no to a question asking if there was “any indication” of pressure problems. (Obtained by Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Edney, who became the state’s chief health officer in 2022, admitted to the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica that this was “surprising.” As a practicing physician, he had experienced water pressure problems at Merit Health Central, a hospital located in a part of town that was often the first to lose water during an outage.

There was other evidence as well: the city’s own boil-water notices, which alerted people to problems in the system. Low pressure resulting from a line break can allow bacteria to seep into the pipes, which is why Jackson residents regularly received such notices. From August 2014 through July 2022, Jackson issued more than 1,500 boil-water notices, according to city records in the possession of MSDH, including at least nine notices that affected everyone in the city. Such notices aren’t normally reported to the EPA. But, inspector general staff wrote, “if state surveyors find an exorbitant number of boil water notices” during a federally required inspection, “the state could report the issue to the EPA.”

The Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica asked Edney how inspectors could have noted pressure problems just once even as Jackson regularly shared boil-water notices with MSDH. Edney said the state doesn’t consider water pressure to be a problem unless it’s “consistently” below 20 pounds per square inch, and Jackson often posted pressures of 21 to 30 psi. “If they’re consistently running 22 psi, then they pass,” Edney said. “That’s an acceptable low pressure.”

Though that figure might be acceptable to Mississippi, it is much lower than the standard pressure specified in a set of guidelines that the EPA recommends water systems follow. Those guidelines, produced by a consortium of state water regulators, say that a water system’s “normal working pressure” must be at least 35 psi and generally should be between 60 and 80 psi.

Both MSDH and the EPA pointed out that these are just guidelines. There are no federal requirements for how high water pressure must be; the EPA says most states set the minimum at 20 psi to ensure that firefighters have the water they need.

Ken Kopocis, who led the EPA’s Office of Water during the Obama administration, said a water system operating on a thin margin like Jackson’s did is just “one small hiccup” away from an interruption in water service or a widespread outage. “This is going to happen,” he said. “It’s only a matter of happenstance that it got delayed as long as it did.”

Massive Water Loss Wasn’t a Problem for Inspectors

When pressure in a water system drops unexpectedly, there are two likely causes: a decline in water production at plants or water loss due to broken pipes.

Estimates suggest that for years, Jackson has lost half or even more of its treated water. It was a well-known problem among the people who ran the utility. In 2012, an engineering firm warned that the rate of water loss was increasing. In 2016, a public works official estimated that Jackson was losing 40% of its water, according to a news story at the time.

Data from the city’s water plants indicates the situation may have been even worse. Between 2013 and 2022, Jackson’s water plants produced an average of about 45 million gallons of treated water a day. On a normal day, the city should require 18 to 20 million gallons, according to Ted Henifin, the head of JXN Water, the federally appointed management firm now running the city’s water system.

Because of widespread leaks underground, Jackson’s two water plants, including the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant, had to produce much more water than the city should have needed. (Steve Helber/AP)

It wasn’t until after Henifin’s team took over the water system in 2022 that Terence Byrd, who managed one of the utility’s two water treatment plants for about five years, realized how those leaks contributed to the constant cycle of breakdowns and repairs at the plants. “Our plants were running into the ground,” said Byrd, who is now working for JXN Water, “because they were trying to pump against so many leaks in the system.”

Bill Miley, who was responsible for fixing those leaks when he served as utilities manager for the city of Jackson, said that work kept his ever-shrinking crews and hired contractors running nonstop. “I had enough to keep three crews busy near seven days a week,” he said.

The city experienced more than 7,300 breaks over a five-year period, according to the EPA inspector general, far above the industry benchmark. A former city official told federal employees that a single line break leaked 4 million to 5 million gallons a day — a total of 10 billion to 13 billion gallons from 2016 to 2022, according to the inspector general’s report. State inspectors, however, never flagged the frequent line breaks as a serious problem that warranted official corrective action.

Nor did they evaluate Jackson based on how much water it was losing. Their questionnaire asked only whether the city was tracking water loss at all and whether “acceptable” records were available for review. For all but two of 16 years, inspectors said Jackson’s records were fine.

The exception was in 2008 and 2009. The first year, inspectors noted that Jackson hadn’t provided acceptable records, which was considered a “significant deficiency,” and they told the city to respond with a plan to fix it. In 2009, state inspectors again noted the lack of records on their report. From 2010 on, MSDH’s inspection records show, the agency considered Jackson’s records acceptable.

Three current and former officials with Jackson’s water system told the news organizations that the inspection reports were wrong in calling the city’s water records acceptable. They explained that tracking water loss requires functional meters to measure how much water customers use. But in Jackson, the city’s water meters have been in a state of constant failure for at least the last decade. The city had no way to accurately calculate how much water it was losing, and officials knew it at the time.

In a written statement sent before the inspector general report was published, MSDH said that, under state law, there was nothing further the agency could have done to mandate that the records reflected reality. “There is no established and enforceable consequence of providing inaccurate water loss information,” the agency said. And there’s little chance that state lawmakers would grant the agency the authority to set a limit. The Legislature “is unlikely to support changing the regulatory environment for every public water system in the state as a result of Jackson and its specific lack of system maintenance,” MSDH officials said.

Inspectors eventually made note of Jackson’s water loss in their 2019 report, saying that city records showed that water loss was “around 50%.” The following two years, inspectors put it at more than 40%. Even then, Edney said MSDH had no authority to intervene because the state doesn’t have a limit on how much water a local utility can lose. “Maybe there needs to be,” he said.

The state’s limited approach to enforcement comes up repeatedly in the inspector general’s report. State employees overlooked some problems, and they didn’t consistently document others or escalate those that continued from year to year, inspector general staff wrote. When state employees did identify serious problems, they didn’t always notify the city and sometimes didn’t record them in an EPA database. As a result, the EPA didn’t know just how bad things were in Jackson.

A City That Couldn’t Count on the Water

The water system portrayed in the state’s inspection reports contrasted sharply with the experience of residents of Windsor Forest, a majority-Black neighborhood located far from the water plants and pumping stations.

For most of the six years that Paidra Evans has lived in the South Jackson neighborhood, she’s had trouble getting enough water to wash dishes or hose down her car. When the 2022 crisis hit, she was caring for her husband, a truck driver, as his health slowly declined. “A lot of times, when I had to bathe him on the bed, the water would be brown,” she said. “He couldn’t brush his teeth or anything. He said: ‘Baby, what is going on? Just let the water run, run, run, and then maybe it’ll get clear.’”

Paidra Evans lives in Windsor Forest, a neighborhood across the city from the water plants. That part of town experienced persistently low water pressure up until last year. (Nick Judin/Mississippi Free Press)

Her neighborhood “had been a focal point even before the crisis started,” JXN Water’s Byrd said. (As of October, JXN Water said it had transitioned the neighborhood to the city’s well system, alleviating these long-standing issues; Evans said her water pressure has improved.)

Miley, the city’s former utilities manager, was well aware of those problems. He said he knew something was wrong whenever he got a call from Merit Health Central. When the pressure dipped in the system, Merit would lose water above the fifth floor — a warning that others in the city weren’t getting water either.

Merit, which by 2015 was the only hospital in the city without its own water supply, eventually decided to pay $11,000 a month to park water trucks outside in case of an outage. The bill goes up to $10,000 per day when the hospital needs the water.

At the Henley-Young-Patton Juvenile Justice Center in South Jackson, every two months or so the water pressure would decline so severely that staff needed bottled water to cook and flush toilets, said Eddie Burnside, the facility’s operations manager. That started in 2018 and continued until at least 2023, he said.

In 2020, Hinds County installed a pump at the facility to draw water from the city’s pipes, Burnside said. But problems continued; Burnside said detainees drank bottled water when pressure dropped too low to trust what came out of the pipes.

Jordan Rae Hillman, JXN Water’s chief operating officer, confirmed in a written statement that pressure at Henley-Young dropped whenever there were significant line breaks anywhere in the city. She said it was a consequence of the facility’s relatively high elevation and the water system’s challenges in keeping the system pressurized.

Now, with the intervention of the federal government, pressure across the city has begun to increase. Melanie McMillan, Merit Health’s spokesperson, said the hospital has seen “tremendous improvement.”

That’s due to a drastic reduction in water loss, said Henifin, head of JXN Water. The city’s two plants now produce just 38 million gallons a day to meet demand, down from 55 million gallons a day last summer. “Great progress,” Henifin said; still, half of that water doesn’t make it to customers.

JXN Water has periodically monitored pressure outside Henley-Young, part of a new network of sensors across the city. The most recent measurement in February showed street-level pressure of 38 psi, just above what the guidelines recommended by the EPA say is the lower limit for normal pressure. Soon, a new jail nearby will provide well water, permanently freeing the juvenile facility from the city’s water service.

Though Mississippi regulators defended their oversight of the city’s water system, Edney acknowledged in two interviews that MSDH could do more to make sure communities have reliable, safe drinking water. When systems are out of compliance, the state will use the threat of fines to force water systems to make repairs, he said.

Kopocis, who headed the EPA’s Office of Water during the Obama years, echoed water regulators in a few other states in saying that the gaps exposed by the Jackson water crisis extend beyond Mississippi. Most states do not have water quality laws that are stricter than the federal government’s. And regulators in several states said inspectors there focus on water plants, not pipes.

That means problems like Jackson’s may go undetected before a major failure. Robert Brownwood, who works for California’s water regulator, said Jackson is like Flint, Michigan — another struggling, majority-Black city that made headlines for a water crisis beginning in 2014. “As Flint was for lead,” he said, “Jackson is the poster child for distribution infrastructure and repair.”

by Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica, and Garrett Yalch and Clifton Adcock, The Frontier

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article was produced in partnership with The Frontier. Additional funding for this story was provided by The Pulitzer Center.

Lin’s most vivid memory of the marijuana farm is the moment he found himself staring into the barrel of an AK-47.

He was one of several dozen Chinese immigrants who had spent months working without pay at the farm in Oklahoma. None of them had spoken up because they were intimidated by the bosses and their armed guards. But Lin and his wife, who also worked on the farm, were desperate for money to send to their kids back in China.

Seething with anger and frustration, he gathered his courage, confronted the manager and demanded his unpaid wages. As Lin’s wife looked on, aghast, the manager reached for an assault rifle and raised it to Lin’s face, he said.

“The gun was against my forehead,” Lin recalled in an interview. “I believe he was capable of pulling the trigger.”

The terrifying incident caused the couple to flee to New York. Three years later, Lin still lives in fear. He has received menacing calls from the farm’s owner and anonymous men, he said. His former bosses blame him for inciting labor conflicts at the farm and for a drug raid that shut it down in 2022, he said.

Lin’s story is a rare firsthand account of the harsh conditions and violent atmosphere endured by Chinese workers on many marijuana farms in Oklahoma and other states. ProPublica and The Frontier have reported that Chinese criminal groups, some with suspected ties to the Chinese state, have become a dominant force in the illicit U.S. marijuana trade and subjected thousands of Chinese immigrant laborers to abuse and exploitation.

Until now, though, much of that information about illegal activity in the cannabis industry has come from law enforcement officials, court and police records, community leaders and advocates. Lin gave a frightening front-line look inside the underworld.

Lin, a youthful 44-year-old, asked to be identified by his surname for his safety. He said he decided to recount his experience to seek justice. Interviewed through an interpreter, he spoke in a soft, strained voice as he described threats, stolen wages and employees confined to the farm against their will.

Reporters corroborated many aspects of Lin’s story with law enforcement and labor officials, court files, other government documents, interviews with another former worker, Chinese-language media reports, communications records and other sources.

Lin’s skills as a plumber and electrician made him a kind of leader among the employees at the farm, he said. (Alan Chin, special to ProPublica)

The owner of the now-defunct farm, Lamkam Ho, pleaded guilty last year to a charge of marijuana trafficking. She and her companion, Zhixuan Hai, who was the manager, are awaiting trial for allegedly robbing a business associate in Oklahoma City last year. Ho, 58, and Hai, 48, have not yet entered a plea in that case.

In addition, Ho has had contact with a suspected Chinese organized crime group involved in illicit activity in several states, according to a U.S. law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of ongoing investigations.

A lawyer representing the couple, Tyler Box, said he and his clients had no comment about the allegations against them. Ho and Hai did not respond to requests for comment.

Like many laborers and entrepreneurs in the U.S. marijuana industry, Lin is from the tough coastal province of Fujian. He says he left in 2016 because the government persecuted him for his Christian faith. He paid $50,000 to smugglers who bribed Chinese officials to issue him a passport and then sent him by plane to Tijuana, Mexico, where he climbed over the border fence into the United States and applied for political asylum.

He settled in New York. But when the pandemic disrupted the economy in 2020, he became one of many Chinese immigrants who found marijuana jobs in the West. He went to New Mexico and then Oklahoma.

In September 2020, Lin and his wife got hired at a former cattle farm in Maramec, about 45 miles west of Tulsa. His skills as a plumber and electrician made him a kind of leader among the employees, he said. At first, he won the trust of Ho, the owner, and Hai, the manager, who had both recently relocated from the Los Angeles area to set up a new operation, Lin said.

“I didn’t dislike the boss, because I’m technical personnel,” he said. “The boss wouldn’t mess with [me]. He knew that I just did my work.”

Lin laid pipes and did electrical work at the Maramec farm and at others nearby owned by the couple’s associates, he said. He did errands between the couple’s farm and their house in an upscale suburb of Oklahoma City. As one of the few employees at the remote compound who owned a vehicle, Lin took road trips to New Mexico to bring back heavy equipment, sleeping in his car rather than hotels to save money.

Hai even sent him on a mission to New York to pick up a kitchen stove — and $50,000 in cash hidden in appliance boxes, Lin said. In text messages about that October trip, Hai wrote “Thank you, brother” and told Lin “safety first,” according to a screenshot of the conversation.

But the mood at the farm darkened when planting began in dozens of greenhouses and sheds spread across 30 acres. The management hired three guards who patrolled the locked and fenced compound around the clock, Lin said. At least one of the guards has an arrest record, public records and media reports show. The armed men in civilian clothes intimidated the employees and kept them confined to the grounds unless they had permission to go out, Lin said.

The farm in Maramec, Oklahoma (Apple Maps)

“Their mere presence posed a threat,” he said. “They made the farmworkers feel threatened and afraid of the bosses. … There was no shortage of verbal violence.”

Lin and his wife, who worked in the greenhouses and as a cook, lived with other employees who were crowded into bunkhouses and trailers, he said.

“We slept with 20 or 30 people in one room,” he said. “There was only one bathroom and no air conditioner.”

As co-workers confided in him, he became alarmed at what he heard.

Two men and a woman from Guangxi province told him that smugglers, known by Chinese immigrants as “snakeheads,” had brought them across the Mexican border directly to the farm. The owner had paid their smuggling fees of about $20,000 each, Lin said the workers told him.

“The snakeheads sold them to the farm boss,” he said. “The farm boss paid the fee.”

The immigrants would have to remain at the site and work two years to pay off the debts, Lin said.

“They were not allowed to leave the farm,” he said. “We were given specific instructions not to take any of these people out on our once-a-week trips to buy daily necessities.”

A month into the job, Lin said, Hai told him the management could not pay his $4,000 monthly salary until after the harvest. The manager suggested Lin could make money instead by subcontracting a greenhouse from him to grow his own crop — a frequent tactic used against vulnerable marijuana workers to delay or avoid paying wages. Fellow employees who had moved with the bosses from a New Mexico farm to Oklahoma told Lin they were still owed many months of wages, he said.

“They only want you to work for them for free,” Lin said.

Lin said he and his wife discussed the workers’ plight with one of the few outsiders at the farm, a local contractor who drove a bulldozer and befriended them because he was a fellow Christian.

Despite Hai’s claims of financial difficulty, he drove a Mercedes and the couple owned homes in gated communities in Oklahoma and Southern California, records show. Ho incorporated a second marijuana-related business in Oklahoma with a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur who is a leader of diaspora organizations affiliated with the United Front, the Chinese Communist Party’s influence arm, according to business records and media reports. (The entrepreneur did not respond to requests for comment.)

By December, Lin had had enough. One day, he and his wife went to a room in the main house that Hai used as an office and sleeping quarters, he said. Lin declared that he wanted his pay. The Lins watched in disbelief as the manager pulled an AK-47 from beneath his bed and aimed it at Lin’s forehead, backing him against the wall, he said.

“I was scared when he took out the gun,” Lin said. He said Hai was furious because “the rest of the people wouldn’t ask for payment. I’m the only one who dared to ask.”

He said the manager told him: “After the harvest, I can give you the salary. If you continue like this, I will not be this courteous to you.”

Lin still lives in fear years after what happened on the farm. (Alan Chin, special to ProPublica)

Later that day, as word of the incident spread, Hai told other workers to urge Lin to stop complaining, Lin recalled. Lin said he didn’t report the incident to the police out of fears about his immigration status.

ProPublica and The Frontier were not able to corroborate the allegation about the gun. But another former worker, who asked to be identified only by his English first name, Chris, described a similar dispute in which Hai threatened him and his friend with a gun after they demanded their first month of wages while filming him with cellphones.

“He really liked to pull out the gun and threaten people — I experienced that firsthand,” Chris, a 35-year-old from Jiangsu province, told ProPublica and The Frontier. “We quickly snuck away and called the police.”

The Pawnee County sheriff, Darrin Varnell, confirmed in an interview that one of his deputies went to the farm in the summer of 2021 in response to that dispute and kept the peace as the terrified workers gathered their belongings and left. Sheriff’s deputies also received periodic calls from passing drivers about men patrolling the farm carrying AK-47s, but they were not able to confirm the reports, Varnell said.

After the confrontation at gunpoint, Lin said, the manager ordered him to stay in the compound.

“The boss wouldn’t let me leave the farm,” he said. “The attitude toward me changed.”

Along with two co-workers from the same village in Fujian, the Lins decided to escape. But they worried about retaliation if they got caught, he said. They spent tense and furtive days making plans and tracking the activities of the guards, he said.

“We kind of learned the patterns of when they would be there,” he said. “I stayed up at night watching to see if they would leave.”

One night shortly before New Year’s Eve, there were no guards in sight. Using a bolt cutter from the tool supplies, Lin broke through the lock on the front gate and the four of them sped off in his car, he said. They drove all the way back to New York.

On Jan. 3, 2021, Lin sent a complaint about unpaid wages by email to the Oklahoma Department of Labor. Emails show that a state official referred him to a Chinese-speaking employee of the U.S. Department of Labor, but Lin said he did not hear from that agency. An official at the federal agency declined to comment.

The Lins also called their friend the bulldozer contractor and told him what had happened, Lin said.

About a week after the escape, the owner of the farm called Lin’s wife, complaining angrily because the contractor had urged her to pay her workers, Lin said.

“She was telling us to keep our mouths shut,” he said. “My wife got really scared.”

Former co-workers told Lin by phone that the employers were looking for him and had even called a farm at which he’d worked in New Mexico asking about his whereabouts, he said. The workers also told him that others had followed his lead and complained about their unpaid wages to the owners and a reporter for Chinese-language media, he said.

The reporter relayed their accounts to federal labor officials, who advised the Oklahoma Department of Labor, according to Daniel Mares, the state agency’s assistant general counsel. State labor officials interviewed employees about the wage problems and alleged threats by the owners and alerted the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics because “concerns of potential human trafficking arose,” according to department emails provided by Mares.

The state narcotics bureau opened an investigation and, in September 2022, agents raided the Maramec farm backed by National Guard troops and sheriff’s deputies. Their search turned up 700 pounds of processed marijuana, 2,074 plants, two pistols and a small-caliber rifle, court documents say. Agents arrested four Mexican laborers and turned them over to immigration authorities.

National Guard troops raided the farm two years ago. (Oklahoma National Guard)

Ho had hired an Oklahoma resident, a known “straw owner” used by criminals to elude laws requiring local ownership, to pose as her majority partner, court documents say. Prosecutors charged Ho with illegal cultivation and trafficking and she was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport before she could board a flight to Hong Kong. In June of last year, Ho pleaded guilty to trafficking and received a deferred sentence to be imposed after a three-year probation period, court documents say.

A few weeks before that court appearance, she and Hai were arrested in Oklahoma City and charged with attacking and beating a Chinese American real estate agent in a parking lot and stealing $3,000 and two iPhones from him. The couple accused the victim, who has also been a target of drug investigations, of owing them $700,000, according to court documents. They were released on bond and neither has entered a plea in the case.

Lin, who has become a legal U.S. resident and embarked on a new life, says he has received several anonymous phone calls from Mandarin-speaking men warning him not to cause trouble and threatening to hurt his family. He believes his former bosses are behind the threats, though he cannot prove it. Friends have warned him to stay away from New York’s Chinatowns and other places with large Chinese populations.

“These people are still searching for me,” he said. “We are afraid.”

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

by Lisa Song

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Is there anything more pathetic than a used plastic bag?

They rip and tear. They float away in the slightest breeze. Left in the wild, their mangled remains entangle birds and choke sea turtles that mistake them for edible jellyfish. It takes 1,000 years for the bags to disintegrate, shedding hormone-disrupting chemicals as they do. And that outcome is all but inevitable, because no system exists to routinely recycle them. It’s no wonder some states have banned them and stores give discounts to customers with reusable bags.

But the plastics industry is working to make the public feel OK about using them again.

Companies whose futures depend on plastic production, including oil and gas giant ExxonMobil, are trying to persuade the federal government to allow them to put the label “recyclable” on bags and other plastic items virtually guaranteed to end up in landfills and incinerators.

They argue that “recyclable” should apply to anything that’s capable of being recycled. And they point to newer technologies that have been able to remake plastic bags into new products.

I spent months investigating one of those technologies, a form of chemical recycling called pyrolysis, only to find that it is largely a mirage. It’s inefficient, dirty and so limited in capacity that no one expects it to process meaningful amounts of plastic waste any time soon.

That shouldn’t matter, say proponents of the industry’s argument. If it’s physically capable of being recycled — even in extremely limited scenarios — it should be labeled “recyclable.”

They are laying out their case in comments to the Federal Trade Commission as it revises its Green Guides, documents that define how companies can use marketing labels like “recyclable” or “compostable.” The guides are meant to curb greenwashing — deceptive advertising that exaggerates the sustainability of products. They were last updated in 2012, before the explosion of social media advertising and green influencers; the agency declined to answer questions about the revision or give an idea of when it will be done.

The push for a looser definition of “recyclable” highlights a conundrum faced not just by companies represented by the Plastics Industry Association, but by members of the Consumer Brands Association, whose plastic-packaged products fill grocery shelves across the world. (Neither trade group, nor ExxonMobil, wanted to elaborate on their positions advocating for a more liberal use of the word “recyclable.”)

Under increasing pressure to reckon with the global plastics crisis, companies want to rely on recycling as the answer. But turning old plastic into new plastic is really, really hard.

Products made with dyes, flame retardants and other toxic chemicals create a health hazard when they’re heated for recycling. That severely limits the types of products you can make from recycled plastic. And most items are too small for companies in the recycling business to bother sorting and processing, or they are assembled in a way that would make it far more costly to strip them down to their useful elements than to just make new plastic. Plastic forks? Straws? Toys given out in fast food meals and party favor bags? Never actually recycled. In fact, only 5% of Americans’ plastic finds new life.

Environmental experts worry that if the FTC sides with the industry, companies could slap the “recyclable” label on virtually anything.

Though the agency only pursues a few greenwashing cases a year, its guides — which are guidelines instead of laws — are the only national benchmark for evaluating recycling claims.

They’re used by companies that want to market their products in an honest way. They also serve as a reference for state officials who are drafting laws to try to reduce plastic waste.

By 2032, for example, most single-use packaging sold in California will need to be recyclable or compostable.

What good will such laws be, environmental experts worry, if those words mean nothing?

For at least three decades, the industry has misled the public about what really is recyclable.

Take a close look at any plastic product and you’ll likely see a little number stamped on it called a resin identification code; it distinguishes what kind of plastic it’s made of. Plastic bags, for example, are labeled No. 4. Only some No. 1 and No. 2 plastics are widely recyclable. In each case, the number is surrounded by the iconic “chasing arrows” symbol, which has come to denote recyclability, regardless of whether that product can actually be recycled.

The design was created in the 1980s by a group of chemical companies working with Exxon and BP; Grist recently published a fascinating story about the effort.

Around that time, the plastic industry was contending with the nation’s growing awareness that its products were the root of an intractable pollution problem. States were weighing legislation to deal with it. And the American Plastics Council was convening meetings to head off threats. The council discussed the arrows, which they described as “consumer tested,” according to meeting notes obtained by the Center for Climate Integrity, an advocacy group that works to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable.

The industry persuaded 39 states to require the use of the symbols. Their purpose, the notes said: “to prevent bans.” They pursued the strategy despite warnings from state regulators who predicted the arrows would lead consumers to overestimate the recyclability of plastic packaging.

By 1995, state attorneys general were telling the FTC that’s exactly what was happening.

The agency ruled in 1998 that brands could continue using the codes with the recycling symbol, but could only display them prominently — by printing them next to the brand name, for example — if the product was recyclable for a “substantial majority” of consumers. If not, the symbols could be stamped in a less obvious place, like the bottom of containers.

These mandates did little to ease consumers’ confusion. “You mean we’re not supposed to throw plastic bags in recycling bins?” a colleague recently asked me.

During a tour of the New York facility that sorts the city’s recyclables, I saw the result of a million well-intentioned mistakes — countless bags sloshing over conveyor belts like the unwanted dregs at the bottom of a cereal bowl.

A conveyor belt at the Brooklyn facility that sorts most of the material collected via curbside recycling in New York City (Sharon Lerner/ProPublica)

They’re notorious for clogging equipment. Sometimes, they start fires. And when they get stuck between layers of paper, the bags end up contaminating bales of paper that are actually recyclable, condemning much of it to the landfill.

If companies started printing the word “recyclable” on them, I wondered, how much worse could this get?

When you see something labeled as “recyclable,” it’s reasonable to expect it will be made into something new after you toss it in the nearest recycling bin.

You would be wrong.

The current Green Guides allow companies to make blanket “recyclable” claims if 60% of consumers or communities have access to recycling facilities that will take the product. The guides don’t specify whether facilities can just accept the item, or if there needs to be a reasonable assurance that the item will be made into a new product.

When the agency invited the public to comment in late 2022 on how the guides should be revised, FTC Chair Lina M. Khan predicted that one of the main issues would be “whether claims that a product is recyclable should reflect where a product ultimately ends up, not just whether it gets picked up from the curb.”

Strangely, that statement ignored the agency’s own guidance. An FTC supplement to the 2012 Green Guides stated that “recyclable” items must go to facilities “that will actually recycle” them, “not accept and ultimately discard” them.

The industry disagrees with the position.

“Recent case law confirms that the term ‘recyclable’ means ‘capable of being recycled,’ and that it is an attribute, not a guarantee,” said a comment from the Plastics Industry Association. Forcing the material to be “actually recovered” is “unnecessarily burdensome.”

Citing a consumer survey, ExxonMobil told the FTC that the majority of respondents “agreed that it was appropriate to label an item as recyclable if a product can be recycled, even if access to recycling facilities across the country varies.” The company’s comments argued against “arbitrary minimum” thresholds like the 60% rule.

The FTC also received comments urging the agency to tighten the rules. A letter from the attorneys general of 15 states and the District of Columbia suggested increasing the 60% minimum to 90%. And the Environmental Protection Agency told the FTC that “recyclable” is only valid if the facilities that collect those products can reliably make more money by selling them for recycling than by throwing them away in a landfill.

The industry argues that recycling is never guaranteed. Market changes like the pandemic could force facilities to discard material that is technically recyclable, wrote the Consumer Brands Association. There is “simply no consumer deception in a claim that clearly identifies that a product is capable of being recycled,” the group wrote, despite the fact that “an external factor several times removed from the manufacturer results in it ultimately not being recycled.”

And what if consumers stopped seeing as many products marketed as recyclable? That could “dramatically” lower recycling rates, the group wrote, because consumers would get confused, seeming to imply people wouldn’t know if they could recycle anything at all.

“Wow, that’s some weird acrobatics,” Lynn Hoffman, strategic adviser at the Alliance for Mission-Based Recycling, said of the industry’s uncertainty argument. The group is a network of nonprofit recyclers that supports a zero-waste future.

Hoffman acknowledged the inefficiencies in the system. The solution, she said, is to improve the true recyclability of products that can be reliably processed, like soda bottles, by tracking them as they pass through the supply chain, being transparent about where they end up and removing toxic chemicals from products.

Calling everything “recyclable” would be a huge mistake, she said. “We have to be realistic about the role that recycling plays,” she added.

No matter how well done, it doesn’t fix the bigger crisis. Not the microplastics infiltrating our bodies or “plastic smog” in the oceans or poisoned families living in the shadow of the chemical plants that produce it.

In fact, research has shown people can produce more waste when they think it will be recycled. When North Carolina began rolling out curbside recycling in different towns, researchers analyzed data on household waste before and after the change. They found that overall waste — the total amount of trash plus stuff in the recycling bin — rose by up to 10% after recycling became available, possibly because consumers felt less guilty.

“They get their blue bins, and they worry less about the amount of trash they generate,” said one of the researchers, Roland Geyer, a professor of industrial ecology at the University of California-Santa Barbara. “I’m probably guilty of that too.”

Do You Have Experience in or With the Plastics Industry? Tell Us About It.

by Abe Streep for ProPublica

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On July 18, federal wildfire managers placed the nation under a designation known as Preparedness Level 5 — bureaucratic code for all hands on deck or, as one veteran wildland firefighter called it, “fire DEFCON.” In layman’s terms, Preparedness Level 5 means that the country’s wildland firefighting resources are spread thin, more blazes are imminent, and supervisors of local crews are reluctant to allow them to travel far from home to help elsewhere. This marks only the fourth time in the past two decades that the country has reached such a state so early in the calendar year. So far, more than 5 million acres have burned nationwide, tripling last year’s total, and there are still months to go in fire season.

Nine days after the country entered Preparedness Level 5, the U.S. Forest Service — the largest of the five federal agencies responsible for fighting wildfires, with more than 11,000 firefighters — said that it had reached 101% of its hiring goal for 2024. However, firefighters on the ground say that the agency is understating how badly depleted their ranks are.

Overall numbers are hard to obtain, but according to data provided by a dispatcher who works for the Bureau of Land Management, 2,417 nationwide requests for crucial fire resources — everything from radio operators to task force leaders — had gone unfilled through July 26. Those requests were delivered to all five federal agencies as well as to state and private organizations. What was especially alarming, the dispatcher said, was the lack of experienced firefighters: “It tells us we have critical shortages in certain particular middle- and upper-level operational qualifications.”

Eric Franta, who works at a Forest Service helicopter air base in Oregon, told me his unit was staffed at only 75%. (In a profession where fears of workplace retaliation are widespread, the only wildland firefighters willing to share their names are those that have roles with the National Federation of Federal Employees, the union representing wildland firefighters. Franta is a union steward.) Another Forest Service wildland firefighter in Oregon said, “We’re not able to fill any crews.” Firefighters in California are reporting similar issues. According to interagency data obtained by ProPublica, 90 of the approximately 270 Forest Service fire engines in the state were unavailable for service on Aug. 12. Engines may be unavailable for a variety of reasons, such as mechanical maintenance or crews on mandatory leave, but firefighters say this number is unusually high. On the same day, according to the data, at least a third of the statewide Hotshot crews — elite teams that fight large wilderness fires — were not staffed sufficiently to operate as intended.

Why the U.S. Is Losing Wildland Firefighters

In March, ProPublica reported that the nation’s wildland firefighting force was experiencing an exodus, especially among its most highly qualified firefighters. In the past three years, the Forest Service lost 45% of its permanent employees, forcing it to fill its ranks with inexperienced firefighters. Those inside and outside the service cite numerous reasons for the departures. Wildland firefighters are compensated poorly; base pay is $15 an hour, roughly what a fast-food server makes. (In 2021, Congress passed a measure that added a temporary retention bonus for firefighters, which is still in effect but has not been made permanent.) The federal civil service structure makes it difficult for wildland firefighters to maintain a career. And the Forest Service especially has been slow to address the health risks involved with suppressing wildland fires. Although the Department of Labor now considers cancer a work-related illness for wildland firefighters, the multiagency preparedness guide for incoming recruits still doesn’t mention the word.

When asked about the disparity between its 101% staffing figure and the dire assessments of firefighters on the ground, a Forest Service spokesperson wrote, “We have some gaps in critical leadership roles due to departure of experienced leaders and managers with years of knowledge and expertise.” The spokesperson added, “If those roles are not able to be filled by qualified and experienced individuals, it can result in operational inefficiencies.”

During one day last week, the federal government reported 123 newly started fires. A number of them were in and around Idaho’s Boise National Forest, where Morgan Thomsen, a union steward and a Forest Service firefighter on a Wyoming helicopter crew, was working. There were not enough firefighters to fill the crews to catch them all, he told me. “The new fires are all big now too, but hardly anyone is on them,” he texted. “The system is being stressed and can’t deal with it. Now, it depends on the weather and site conditions whether these fires will be put out before they burn down houses and so on. We’ve effectively lost our asses and are triaging.”

by Zach Despart, The Texas Tribune, and Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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

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

Officials in Uvalde, Texas, revealed on Wednesday that they failed to release some officer body camera and dashboard footage related to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting as required by a settlement agreement with news organizations that sued for access.

After the city released hundreds of records on Saturday to news organizations, including ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, an officer informed the Uvalde Police Department that some of his body camera footage from the May 24, 2022, shooting was missing, according to a news release from the city.

In response, police Chief Homer Delgado ordered an audit of the department’s servers, which turned up “several additional videos.” The city did not say which officers or cruisers the missing footage belonged to.

According to information that Uvalde police initially provided to Texas Department of Public Safety investigators, seven of the 25 responding officers had their body cameras turned on the day of the shooting. Records released on Saturday only included footage from five of the officers’ body cameras. Whether the city’s discovery of additional materials is limited to the two remaining body cameras or includes additional footage from more officers is unknown.

The department shared the newly discovered footage with District Attorney Christina Mitchell for review. Delgado also ordered an internal affairs investigation into how the error occurred. That probe will determine which department employees are responsible and what disciplinary actions may be warranted, according to the news release.

“I have ordered an immediate review of all footage collection and storage protocols within UPD and will institute a new process to ensure our department lives up to the highest standards,” Delgado, who joined the department last year, said in a statement. “The Uvalde community and the public deserve nothing less.”

It’s unclear whether Mitchell, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, had access to the footage as she evaluated whether officers should be criminally charged for the flawed response to the shooting in which 19 children and two teachers died.

A grand jury in June indicted former Uvalde school district police Chief Pete Arredondo and officer Adrian Gonzales on felony child endangerment charges. Both men pleaded not guilty. No Uvalde Police Department officers have been charged.

News organizations, including the Tribune and ProPublica, sued several local and state governmental bodies more than two years ago for access to records related to the shooting. The city settled with the new organizations, agreeing to provide records that had been requested under the state’s Public Information Act, including body camera footage from all responding officers. Three other government agencies — the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District and the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office — continue fighting not to release any records.

City officials did not respond to requests for comment but said in a statement that they would evaluate the judge’s order governing the release of documents to ensure that they comply with the settlement terms reached with the news organizations.

Reid Pillifant, an associate attorney with Haynes Boone, a law firm that represents the news organizations, said he appreciated the Police Department’s “quick response in conducting an audit to ensure all relevant materials are shared with the public as soon as possible.”

The Tribune, ProPublica and FRONTLINE independently obtained a trove of investigative materials through a confidential source. That trove includes the body camera footage of two Uvalde police officers — Jesus Mendoza and Joe Zamora — that was not released on Saturday. The newsrooms analyzed Mendoza’s 25-minute-long body camera footage and his interview with state investigators as part of an investigation into law enforcement’s botched response that included a documentary and revealed that while the children knew what to do when confronted with a mass shooter, many officers did not.

Zamora’s body camera footage, which is only about eight minutes long, appears to show him at the house belonging to the gunman’s grandmother, whom the teen shot in the face before going to the school.

In the footage, a crying woman can be heard saying, “I knew it was my nephew.” She adds, “he didn’t want to live anymore.”

by Nick Grube, Honolulu Civil Beat

People on Maui have heard the stories: neighbors forced from their homes not by last year’s wildfires, but by property owners seeking to take advantage of the housing shortage. In some cases, tenants have said property owners have rented to government aid programs that offered top dollar to shelter wildfire survivors. In others, landlords have rented to others who will pay more.

Civil Beat has teamed up with ProPublica to more deeply examine what many say is a secondary housing crisis stemming from the loss of thousands of homes in the wildfires. We want to know how widespread these issues are, who’s responsible, who’s been harmed and what can be done about it.

To do this right, we need to hear from anyone who has been touched by this issue. You can help us ensure our stories are comprehensive and nuanced and that they reflect what is happening in your life. If you’re a property owner or landlord, we want to hear your thoughts on the governor’s emergency order barring most evictions and rent increases. If you are a property manager, real estate agent or someone else with expertise in Maui’s housing market, we’d like to hear from you. If you work for a government agency, contractor or nonprofit aid group, we’d like to hear from you, too. And, of course, we want to hear from renters: people who had to leave their homes so wildfire survivors could move in, those who faced rent increases, those who have been told their leases will not be renewed and those who have left Maui.

by Nick Grube, Honolulu Civil Beat

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

A year ago, after a deadly wildfire displaced thousands of residents of Lahaina, Hawaii’s governor and lieutenant governor invoked a state law blocking most evictions and prohibiting price gouging. The emergency order soon became a tool to prevent widespread displacement of all Maui residents, including people struggling to pay rent because they had lost work due to the fire.

Despite that order, some Maui property owners have capitalized on the crisis by pushing out tenants and housing wildfire survivors for more money. Among those displaced: a couple and their two young children who, according to court records, were evicted so their landlord’s son could move in while renting his own home to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s housing program for $8,000 a month.

Some property owners have brought in more than twice the going rate for a long-term rental by signing up with FEMA or another aid program. They have received lucrative property tax breaks for housing wildfire survivors, in some cases worth more than $10,000 a year.

Other landlords have forced out tenants and sought people who will pay more. Over the course of several months, one landlord tried to evict his tenants for different reasons, even claiming that Maui’s mayor needed to use the house as a “command center to rebuild Lahaina.” (A spokesperson for the mayor said that claim was false.) After the tenants moved out, two of them saw their ocean-view apartment listed online for $6,800 a month rather than the $4,200 they had paid. Asked about the higher price, the landlord told Civil Beat and ProPublica that the apartment has been cleaned up and is now furnished.

Complaints about evictions and rent increases have circulated for months. Housing advocates say Gov. Josh Green’s administration hasn’t moved aggressively enough to tighten the rules and that the Hawaii attorney general has overlooked abuses.

Even before the fires swept across Maui, rental housing on the island was among the most expensive in the country. The loss of so many homes was bound to increase prices. But tenants, housing advocates, government officials and even landlords say high prices offered by FEMA, the state and private aid organizations have encouraged property owners to chase the money. State Sen. Angus McKelvey, who lost his own home in Lahaina, called it “FEMA fever.”

Jo Wessel, a Colorado landlord, said she tried to sign up with FEMA after her tenants fell behind on their rent and electricity bills. She said a property management company working for FEMA offered her $6,500 a month, which according to court records was more than twice what she charged for the two-bedroom condominium in Kahului. Although the governor’s order bars evictions for nonpayment of rent or utilities, Wessel told Lea and David Vitello and their two children on Jan. 6 that they had five days to pay up or leave, according to documents reviewed by Civil Beat and ProPublica. Two weeks later, FEMA inspectors knocked on the Vitellos’ door to see if their home was suitable for wildfire survivors. “We didn’t see it coming,” Lea Vitello said.

The Vitellos refused to leave when their lease expired at the end of January, and Wessel eventually took them to court. It took until April for the Vitellos to find a new place and move out. Wessel said the delay caused her to miss out on the FEMA contract, but she was able to sign up with a nonprofit housing program willing to pay about $400 more per month than what she was charging the Vitellos. Wessel said she thought the Vitellos had taken advantage of the governor’s order and that they still owe her money. Although the Vitellos left a few months ago, Wessel’s court case against them continued until this week, when a judge dismissed it.

Those who have been forced out are contending with a housing market where the median rent has jumped 44% since before the fires, according to an Argonne National Laboratory study released last week. Some people who’ve been pushed out since the fires told Civil Beat and ProPublica that they haven’t yet found a permanent home.

Peter Sunday, whose family was evicted so their landlord’s son could move in, said he paid just $1,900 a month for their three-bedroom cottage and that the cheapest place he has found since is twice as much. He, his wife and their two young children have moved from place to place while they search for something stable.

Adrienne Sunday and her husband, Peter Sunday, move a container in the storage unit that holds most of their belongings in Kula, Hawaii, in July. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat)

Malcolm Vincent, the landlord’s son, said in a court filing that he lived in a garage on family property after he rented his home to FEMA and while he was waiting for the Sundays to leave. When called by Civil Beat and ProPublica, Vincent said he was busy and hung up. In response to a text message, he wrote, “Stop.” Ann Siciak, the Sundays’ former landlord, did not respond to interview requests.

State and federal officials said they didn’t intend for their housing programs to encourage landlords to kick people out to make room for wildfire survivors, but they had to offer lucrative rates in order to secure housing quickly. “We’re not incentivizing,” FEMA Region 9 Administrator Bob Fenton said in an interview. “What we’re doing is being competitive.”

The Green administration acknowledged that “some bad actors have not complied” with the governor’s order. Officials urged tenants to report unscrupulous landlords to the state attorney general.

Green said in an interview that he, too, has heard about landlords who have kicked out tenants to make more money, but he said they “represent the extreme minority.” Much more common, he said, are stories of people who did the right thing and provided shelter to thousands of people.

“I was very clear that we didn’t want to displace anybody, but there are a million different forces at play here,” Green said. “Every moment, every week, you just had to try to prevent predatory behavior. There’s a lot of that. That’s one of the lessons I learned from this crisis.”

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, left, and Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen speak during a tour of wildfire damage in Lahaina a few days after the fire. (Rick Bowmer/AP)

State officials pointed to a sharp drop in eviction cases filed in court since the fire as evidence that the governor’s order is “doing what it was designed to do: stop unlawful evictions and keep families and survivors housed.”

But tenants’ rights groups and lawyers said court cases, the only public paper trail of evictions, don’t show the complete picture. It’s time-consuming and risky for a tenant to fight an eviction in court; if they lose, they’ll have a record that could make it harder to rent another place. Many tenants simply move out after getting a notice to vacate the property, even when they think their landlord is breaking the law.

“We know this is happening,” said Jade Moreno, a researcher and policy analyst for the Maui Housing Hui, a tenants’ rights organization. “We hear the stories all the time.”

“The Greed Is Sickening”

Although most people refer to FEMA when they complain that emergency housing programs have skewed the market, the state of Hawaii pays similar rates for its own program. And in November, in an effort to entice property owners, the governor revealed just how much money could be made housing people who were homeless after the fire.

Thousands of wildfire survivors were living in hotel rooms at the time, costing the state at least $1 million a day; meanwhile, vacation rental homes that would have been cheaper sat vacant. So Green announced that the state would pay a premium to anyone who housed survivors.

For landlords who typically rented to locals, the numbers offered by the state were stunning: $5,000 a month for a studio or one-bedroom home; $7,000 for a two-bedroom; $9,000 for a three-bedroom; and $11,000 for a four-bedroom.

Early on, FEMA also concluded that it would have to pay vacation rental rates. FEMA won’t publicize what it pays, saying it varies by property. But contracts reviewed by Civil Beat and ProPublica show the agency has paid $5,000 to $9,050 for a one- or two-bedroom unit. For three- and four-bedroom homes, it has paid $9,000 to $11,400, according to two landlords who spoke to Civil Beat and ProPublica.

Contracts for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s housing program obtained by Civil Beat and ProPublica show that landlords have brought in prices well above the market rate for long-term rentals on Maui. State and federal officials have said they had to offer high prices in order to convince property owners to shelter wildfire survivors. (Obtained by Civil Beat and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Once people knew what they could get, Maui-based property manager Claudia Garcia started getting calls. Property owners, many of whom lived on the mainland, asked if Garcia could help them lease to FEMA or raise their rents to keep pace. She said she refused because she didn't want to help them take advantage of the crisis. “The greed is sickening,” said Garcia, whose firm manages more than 100 rentals on the island. “It’s just not right what they’re doing.”

The Legal Aid Society of Hawaii got calls, too, but from tenants. In the first seven months after the fire, the number of Maui residents who sought help with evictions grew by 50% compared with the seven months before the fire, according to the organization.

The high prices offered by the state and FEMA forced at least one nonprofit that was sheltering victims of the fire to bump up its offers to property owners. “Short-term rental owners did shop us,” said Skye Kolealani Razon-Olds, who oversees the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement’s emergency housing and recovery programs. “They provided us with FEMA rental rates and asked if we could match it.”

Razon-Olds said the nonprofit has received 19 complaints from tenants who said they were being forced out of their homes so their landlords could rent to FEMA. She said her organization convinced FEMA to stop dealing with those owners.

In February, six months after the fire, FEMA announced that it would reject properties if it learned tenants had been illegally forced out “so landlords could gain higher rents from the FEMA program.” Officials told Civil Beat and ProPublica that FEMA has found fewer than 10 cases in which a landlord wrongfully ended a lease in order to participate in the housing program. In all those cases, FEMA removed the properties from the program.

State and federal officials characterized their rates as a compromise between vacation rental and long-term rates. The rates publicized by the state are maximums, state officials said; in practice, Hawaii is paying significantly less — about $228 per night rather than $267. That works out to about $6,800 per month rather than $8,000.

After state and local officials raised concerns, FEMA asked the Argonne National Laboratory to study whether housing programs had caused property owners to increase rents or displace residents.

Researchers concluded that the loss of housing in the fires was the biggest factor in the rapid increase in rental prices and that there wasn’t enough data to know how much housing programs had contributed. However, they noted that the Hawaii Office of Consumer Protection received about 700 housing-related complaints from August 2023 to April, most related to lease terminations or rent increases. Those complaints and subsequent investigations, researchers wrote, indicate that the “behavior of some landlords may have changed leading to secondary displacement or increased costs for some renter households outside of the burn area.”

One landlord, however, said it wasn’t until she was approached by a property management company working for FEMA that she decided to house wildfire survivors. The company offered Mara Lockwood $7,000 a month — about $2,300 more than what she had collected for her two-bedroom condo overlooking Maalaea Bay.

Lockwood took the deal, not just for the extra income, but because she would be exempt from property taxes for at least a year, which she said will save her about $12,000 annually. But she was conflicted. As the owner of a Maui real estate company, she saw the asking prices for rentals rise, and she kept hearing stories of people getting pushed out of their homes so that their landlords could earn more money.

“Kicking somebody out to rent to FEMA to make more money is a horrible thing to do to people,” Lockwood said. “But when you’re given an opportunity and money is involved — and you have to follow the money — then some people are going to do that.”

“That’s What The Law Allowed”

For every case in which it’s clear a tenant is being kicked out so their landlord can make more money, there are many more that aren’t as obvious, said Nick Severson, the lead housing attorney for the Legal Aid Society of Hawaii. “Sometimes we’ll have emails or texts or statements from the landlord that say, ‘I need you out of here so I can rent this for $8,000 a month to FEMA,’” he said. “But usually it’s not that lucky. It’s a little bit more covert, which makes it hard to push back on.”

Screenshots of text messages show that four days after Christmas, a landlord informed her tenant that he had to give up his rental unit so her family could rent it to FEMA. The landlord, who gave the tenant more time to move after he objected, told Civil Beat and ProPublica that she didn’t end up renting to the agency. (Obtained by Civil Beat and ProPublica)

That’s partly because the state law prohibiting price gouging during an emergency provides landlords with some wiggle room. Renters can be evicted if a landlord or family member is moving in or if the renter has violated the terms of their lease, as long as it’s not related to nonpayment of rent, utilities or similar charges. And landlords can push people out at the end of a fixed-term lease without providing any reason. In several cases reviewed by Civil Beat and ProPublica, landlords have cited those exceptions in evicting tenants and have gone on to rent their properties to wildfire survivors for more money.

Property owners acknowledge that they’re bringing in more money through housing programs than they did before the fire. According to the Hawaii attorney general, the governor’s emergency proclamation prevents landlords from raising their rent unless it was agreed to before Aug. 9 or the landlord can show their costs have increased.

And yet the attorney general has held property owners accountable in relatively few cases. The office has concluded that landlords violated the governor’s order in just 28 of the 200 complaints of illegal evictions and rent increases it had received as of June 3. (Another 30 were still under investigation.) Fenton, the FEMA regional administrator, said the attorney general’s office concluded that just one of the cases FEMA referred had violated the proclamation. The attorney general’s office can levy civil penalties of up to $10,000 a day, but it hasn’t.

“We have the emergency proclamation, but it doesn’t prevent anyone from evicting tenants and raising rent,” said Anne Barber, a Maui real estate broker who works with Garcia in her property management firm. “There is no accountability.”

In February, a tenant complained to the Hawaii attorney general that he was being forced out of his home by a landlord whom he said was planning to rent his home to FEMA. An official with the attorney general’s office told the tenant that the landlord wasn’t obligated to renew the lease and that merely participating in FEMA’s housing program wasn’t a problem. (Obtained by Honolulu Civil Beat and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

The attorney general’s office said in a written statement that it “provides people with opportunities to do the right thing and correct their actions. If individuals continue to choose not to comply, then the Attorney General can and will seek legal remedies.”

The Green administration said it has revised the emergency proclamation to address the needs of the community; at one point, the governor added language barring unsolicited offers to buy property in areas affected by the fires. But, administration officials said, the governor’s power is limited. For example, they said he has no authority to force landlords to extend leases. Green’s staff said lawmakers must look at the price-gouging law and make needed changes.

In one case, Maui landlord Gregory Lussier filed an eviction case against six people living in a four-bedroom home in Kahului. He told Civil Beat and ProPublica that he wanted the tenants out because some of them had left and the remaining ones had stopped paying the full rent, which was about $4,000, but he knew the governor’s order prohibited him from evicting them for not paying. In his Jan. 5 notice to the tenants and the eviction case he filed in court against them a week and a half later, he cited several violations of the lease, including prohibitions on pets, smoking, illegal activity, expired vehicle registrations, and obscene or loud language. Before the case went to trial, the tenants moved out.

Although Lussier rented the property to FEMA’s housing program for $11,000 a month, he said that’s not why he filed eviction proceedings. “There was no premeditated scheme to force the tenant to leave so we could get a FEMA rental agency lease,” he said in an email. However, court records call into question his version of events. Lussier said the lease with FEMA’s outside property manager started Feb. 1 and he believes he signed the rental agreement the day before. He said he didn’t explore renting to the housing program until after the property was vacant and that the process of signing up took “several weeks.” But video of a hearing shows that Lussier and three of his tenants appeared in court on Jan. 29, where the tenants denied his allegations that they had violated the lease. Lussier declined to explain the discrepancy to Civil Beat and ProPublica.

Maui attorney Jack Naiditch said he’s gotten several phone calls from property owners who want to exploit loopholes in the emergency proclamation so they can take advantage of FEMA’s prices. He said he’s turned them away: “I’m not going to put my name on the line for somebody who’s fibbing.”

But he has represented a number of property owners in court, including Sunday’s landlord; some of them have later rented their homes to house wildfire survivors. He declined to discuss specifics of their cases.

When Sunday appeared in court in April, he pleaded with the judge to let his family stay in their home. “Frankly, this is cold, your honor,” Sunday said. “A single man wants to evict a family of four to move into a home which he has admitted is for his own financial benefit and gain.”

“There’s nothing I can do about that,” the judge said. “That is what the law allows. So that needs to be taken on with the governor, our mayor or Legislature, because there are people who very likely take advantage of that.”

Four days after the Sundays received their eviction order, Green responded to residents’ complaints and made it harder to claim the exception that Sunday’s landlord had cited. Now, a landlord or family member who claims they need to move into a property must provide a sworn statement saying they’re not accepting money from an aid program to house survivors.

That same day, Sunday said, his family packed the last of their belongings as a process server threatened to call the sheriff if they lingered too long. They put most of their belongings in a storage unit and gave away all of their pets and backyard farm animals — 18 chickens, nine ducks, two dogs and a pair of cats. They have to relocate again this week.

Sunday doesn’t know what to tell his kids about the constant shuffling and when they’ll see their pets again. “I can’t give them any kind of peace,” he said, “without lying to them.”

Opal Sunday carries a box of crafts from the Sunday family’s storage unit in Kula, Hawaii, in July. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat)

Struggling to Keep or Find Housing After Maui’s Wildfires? Tell Us Your Story.

Clarification, Aug. 16, 2024: This story has been updated to clarify, in a subsequent reference, that Bob Fenton is a regional administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

by Vernal Coleman

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.

Republicans in Indiana’s legislature passed a bill this year intended as the final blow to a long-running lawsuit filed by the city of Gary against gun manufacturers seeking to hold them accountable for local illegal gun sales.

The lawmakers even included language making the bill retroactive to ensure that it would apply to the Gary suit, which was filed nearly a quarter century ago.

On Monday, that effort failed.

Indiana Superior Court Judge John Sedia ruled that while the law barring cities from pursuing lawsuits against the gun industry is constitutional, applying it retroactively would “violate years of vested rights and constitutional guarantees.” It was a rare courtroom setback for makers of firearms in the U.S.

On Tuesday, Gary Mayor Eddie Melton applauded the judge. “This ruling reinforces the importance of the independence of each branch of government,” he said in a written statement. The ruling, he added, ensures that the city’s rights are “protected and upheld.”

State Rep. Ragen Hatcher, whose father served as Gary’s first Black mayor, was similarly pleased. “This is a major win that our community deserves,” the Democratic legislator said in a statement.

Gary’s case is the last of a generation of civil suits that made similar claims against the gun industry. Attorneys for gun manufacturers and retailers filed for the case to be dismissed based on the new Indiana law, which placed the power to sue solely with the state’s attorney general.

The bill’s backers made no secret that the Gary case was the bill’s target. It included language to make it retroactive to Aug. 27, 1999 — three days before the city filed its lawsuit. But that decision appears to have doomed the industry’s challenge.

The defendants, which include Glock, Smith & Wesson and several other of the nation’s largest gunmakers, argued in a hearing before Sedia last week that the city no longer has the authority to pursue its claims that gunmakers have failed to address an epidemic of illegal gun sales associated with violence in and around Gary.

Philip Bangle, arguing for Gary, countered that, in practical terms, the bill was “special” — specifically aiming at Gary’s suit — and not allowed under the state constitution.

Bangle, an attorney from the Brady center, a nonprofit centered on gun violence prevention, told the judge that similar suits from other towns were not an issue. “There’s none being contemplated; there’s none being threatened; and frankly, looking at what Gary has had to endure these last 25 years, I doubt that any of these bodies would want to,” he added.

In siding with Gary, Sedia cited a 2003 Indiana Supreme Court decision that says a state law cannot be applied retroactively if it violates constitutionally protected rights.

Judge John Sedia begins proceedings for the Gary hearing on Thursday. (Taylor Glascock for ProPublica)

The General Assembly can bar cities from bringing lawsuits against gun manufacturers, but it cannot end this lawsuit, Sedia wrote. “To avoid manifest injustice, the substance of this lawsuit must be taken to its conclusion.”

A representative for the gunmakers said an appeal is coming. “Respectfully, the Superior Court got it wrong,” said Lawrence Keane, senior vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association representing several of the defendant gunmakers. “The defendants will immediately appeal to the appellate court to correct this error.”

State Rep. Chris Jeter, author of the bill aimed at disrupting the lawsuit, disagreed with Sedia’s assertion that applying the law retroactively would violate the state constitution. “Municipalities are a creature of state law,” he said. “They aren’t people; they have no rights.”

But Jody Madeira, a law professor at Indiana University and critic of legislators’ efforts to kill the lawsuit, was thrilled by the judge’s ruling. The main takeaway is clear, she said: State lawmakers “cannot use legislative hoodwinking” to disrupt the lawsuit and Gary will get its day in court.

For now, the ruling thwarts the latest attempt by the gun industry and its allies to disrupt the case. Filed in 1999, the suit was one of several that decade from major cities against the nation’s most successful gunmakers.

Recognizing the threat the flood of lawsuits posed, the gun industry gathered its political influence to lobby federal lawmakers. They supported federal legislation strong enough to effectively immunize the industry from civil suits. Once passed, the suits fell one by one. All except Gary’s.

The case had notably approached a significant milestone that similar lawsuits had not. As the year began, it was nearing the end of the discovery phase, where the two sides would continue an exchange of thousands of records, providing plaintiffs a chance to glimpse inside the internal decisions and policies of gun manufacturers. It is unclear when or if that process will resume.

by Rob Davis, Agnel Philip and Alex Mierjeski, ProPublica, and Matthew Kish, The Oregonian/OregonLive

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On dozens of occasions since 2020, a private Gulfstream jet belonging to Nike has touched down at Moffett Field, a federally owned airfield on the banks of San Francisco Bay.

The Silicon Valley site’s most notable feature is a hulking building known as Hangar One, which in the 1930s housed a U.S. Navy airship and today is a conspicuous landmark along U.S. 101.

It also happens to sit about a 30-minute drive from one of Nike CEO John Donahoe’s homes. He became the Oregon-based company’s top executive in January 2020, bought a condo in Portland and registered as an Oregon voter. But he also maintained a home in the Bay Area community of Portola Valley. His previous job was leading a tech company in Santa Clara, and his wife worked at Stanford University until September.

Nike’s jets landed at Moffett more than 100 times in the first three and a half years of Donahoe’s tenure, flight-tracking records show. Landings at Moffett stopped in July 2023 but became more frequent at a nearby airport with a similar drive time to Portola Valley.

Donahoe and Nike executive chairperson Mark Parker have made clear that climate change is a crisis demanding urgent action. “It’s about leading with actions, not words,” Parker said in Nike’s 2019 corporate responsibility report. “We are more committed than ever to help save the planet,” Donahoe said in a 2022 company video.

Yet Nike has failed to shrink one aspect of its carbon footprint that the two men directly influence: travel on the private jets, which emit far more carbon per passenger than commercial airliners.

One of Nike’s private jets takes off from the airport where the company has a hangar in Hillsboro, Oregon, in July. (Dave Killen/The Oregonian)

Nike’s jet travel is up. Company disclosures show that its private planes last year emitted almost 20% more carbon dioxide than they did in 2015, which the company uses as a baseline for its climate goals. The flights are one small reason Nike and its supply chain produced roughly as much carbon dioxide in 2023 as in 2015, despite the company’s commitment to sharply reduce emissions.

The company owns two Gulfstream G650ERs. Flight-tracking records show that their destinations include New York City, where the company has a corporate office, and Paris during the Olympics and in April, when Nike unveiled its Olympic uniforms.

In July, a Nike jet flew down to San Jose, California, and back to its base in Hillsboro, Oregon; it then took off two days later for Idaho, where Donahoe and his wife were photographed at the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, an annual gathering dubbed “summer camp for billionaires.”

Vacation spots Nike jets have traveled to include Cape Cod, where Parker owns a home. Since 2020, the planes have landed there at least 15 times. They’ve touched down in the Cayman Islands at least six times since 2021.

But the Bay Area has been a magnet. It was an out-of-the-way pit stop for an Oregon-bound flight after Donahoe delivered the spring commencement keynote at West Virginia’s Marshall University in 2023. It has been a weekend destination with Friday landings and Sunday returns to Oregon. (The jets averaged about 10 flights a year to Moffett Field in the two years before Donahoe’s hiring, when he was a Nike board member and lived in California, versus an average of about 30 a year from 2020 through mid-2023, while he was Nike’s CEO.)

More than 30 times, one of the company’s private jets flew down to Moffett and back to Oregon in the same day, sometimes spending as little as 25 minutes on the ground.

If those flights ferried a single person in one direction, turning what would be one commercial flight into two by private jet, it would release 160 times as much carbon per passenger as if the person flew commercial, said Phillip Ansell, director of the Center for Sustainable Aviation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He called this arrangement “completely inexcusable.”

“In the current climate where aviation does not yet have a viable route to fully decarbonize, we need to see these types of flights come to a halt,” Ansell said.

Nike did not make Donahoe and Parker available for interviews and declined to say why the jets frequented Moffett Field and, more recently, San Jose Mineta International Airport.

The company said in a statement that its jet passengers comprise a variety of people who are essential to its business objectives, including executives, employees, athletes, entertainers and others. The jets improve productivity and address security concerns for executives, Nike said, calling private flights a standard practice among large global companies.

As for curbing carbon pollution, the company said that “we focus on Nike’s areas of greatest impact,” noting that the bulk of its emissions come from the production of materials for its sneakers and apparel.

Nike CEO John Donahoe in front of a Nike jet. In an Instagram post by the University of North Carolina’s head women’s basketball coach, Courtney Banghart, she thanks him for a “lift.” (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Celebrities including Taylor Swift, Drake and Kylie Jenner have drawn scrutiny for their profligate jet-setting in the face of the planet’s record-breaking temperatures. And in the business world, CEOs are increasingly being allowed to use corporate jets for personal use, according to Equilar, a data firm that studies executive compensation. In 2018, 36% of S&P 500 companies included the perk in CEO pay packages. By last year, that had grown to 45%.

But Nike, the world’s largest athletic apparel company, stands apart: It has staked a claim as a corporate leader on the environment, joining thousands of companies pledging to voluntarily slash carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Nike also stands out for disclosing more about its private jet travel than its peers. A review by ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive of the disclosures of 30 companies, including 18 of Nike’s self-identified peers, found no others that publicly report emissions from corporate jets. Roughly half report emissions from business travel, which can include jet use.

Get in Touch

ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive plan to continue reporting on Nike and its sustainability work, including its overseas operations. Do you have information that we should know? Rob Davis can be reached by email at rob.davis@propublica.org and by phone, Signal or WhatsApp at 503-770-0665. Matthew Kish can be reached by email at mkish@oregonian.com, by phone at 503-221-4386, and on Signal at 971-319-3830.

In addition to reporting rising emissions from its jets, Nike’s disclosures show that it is behind on its ambitions for reducing its overall contribution to climate change. The company said in 2016 that it would halve its total emissions; instead they have grown slightly since 2015.

Meanwhile, since December, Nike has laid off 20% of its dedicated sustainability staff, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica have reported, and lost another 10% through internal transfers or voluntary departures.

Nike’s growing private jet use sets the wrong tone from the top, said Charles Elson, founding director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.

“It’s, ‘Do what I say, not as I do,’” Elson said. “Flying private aircraft all over the place certainly isn’t a bold action in support of climate responsibility. That’s the problem. Your actions and your words seem to diverge in unflattering ways. It is not a good look.”

Private jet use represents less than a tenth of a percent of all Nike’s emissions. The overwhelming majority come from production and shipping by the company’s overseas suppliers. But the jets generate 6% of the carbon coming from assets that Nike owns, a share that has grown as Nike has powered its buildings around the world with renewable energy.

Donahoe, whose $29.2 million compensation last year made him one of America’s highest-paid executives, has an arrangement with Nike that allows him to use the jets for more than business. He can fly in them for personal travel at his own expense. He has reimbursed Nike more than $700,000 for such trips in the last two years, securities filings show.

In addition, the company has given the chief executive $293,000 in free personal travel since 2020 as part of his compensation. Parker, the executive chairperson, has received $494,000 in free personal use of the jets in that time.

The jets’ flight paths can be found on the website of ADS-B Exchange, which crowdsources location readings from airplane transponders. The flight records don’t show who is on board, but in some cases flights coincided with news coverage and social media posts indicating their purpose.

Nike’s jets have landed at golf destinations around the country. They visited Augusta, Georgia, ahead of the Masters Tournament in 2022 and again in 2023. A Nike jet has joined the roughly 1,500 other private jets that crowd the small airport during the tournament, making it so busy that Golf Digest has described it as a “bonafide Heathrow.”

In 2022, Donahoe golfed in a morning pro-am event before the Memorial Tournament at Muirfield Village Golf Club, outside Columbus, Ohio. Social media photos show Donahoe playing with Rory McIlroy, a golf star Nike sponsors.

One of Nike’s corporate jets landed in Columbus the day before the golf event; it returned to Oregon after the pro-am ended, flight records show.

Photographs posted to Instagram from a Nike fan account show Donahoe golfing at an event outside Columbus, Ohio. At right in the second image is Rory McIlroy, a Nike-sponsored golf star. Flight records show one of Nike’s corporate jets landed in Columbus the day before the event and returned to Oregon after it ended. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Traveling by private jet is far more polluting than flying commercial.

Ansell, the sustainable aviation expert, said a fully loaded Gulfstream G650ER flight releases about 4.5 times as much carbon dioxide per passenger as a Boeing 737, the workhorse commercial airplane. If the Gulfstream is carrying only a single passenger, it’s about 80 times as polluting, he said, because the private aircraft’s weight and fuel consumption stay roughly the same.

Nike’s Gulfstream models can be configured to carry as many as 19 passengers. It’s unknown how many people typically travel on them.

“It is patently irresponsible to be using luxury G650s for flights that carry only a few passengers,” Ansell said.

The pollution from Nike’s jets adds up. Last year, they generated roughly the same amount of carbon dioxide as a passenger car driving 10.9 million miles, company disclosures and an Environmental Protection Agency emissions calculator show. (Imagine driving a car around the equator 438 times.) It was roughly equal to the amount of carbon pollution that would be released by burning 4.7 million pounds of coal.

While Nike’s corporate jets have been generating more carbon, the company last year recorded a 65% decline compared to 2015 in emissions from another source: commercial air travel by rank-and-file employees.

Four former employees said the company has restricted worker travel in recent years. They said their managers didn’t cite the need to reduce emissions but instead the need to save money. Nike, in a statement, said its employees also had embraced remote meeting tools since the pandemic, allowing them to “operate effectively without extensive travel.”

By contrast, the company’s jets are used for transportation to “specific high-level meetings and events that require executive presence,” Nike said, “and cannot be conducted remotely.”

Ryanne Mena and Jeff Frankl of ProPublica contributed research.

by Megan O’Matz and Joel Jacobs

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.

In bankruptcy filings and consumer complaints, thousands of people across the country make pleas for relief from high-interest loans with punishing annual rates that often exceed 600%.

Although they borrowed small sums online from a slew of businesses with catchy names — such as Loan at Last or Sky Trail Cash — their loans stemmed from the same massive operation owned by a small Native American tribe in a remote part of Wisconsin.

Over the past decade, the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians has grown to become a prominent player in the tribal lending industry, generating far-reaching impact and leaving a legacy of economic despair. A ProPublica analysis found companies owned by the LDF tribe showed up as a creditor in roughly 1 out of every 100 bankruptcy cases sampled nationwide.

That’s the highest frequency associated with any of the tribes doing business in this sector of the payday loan industry. And it translates to an estimated 4,800 bankruptcy cases, on average, per year.

ProPublica also found that LDF’s various companies have racked up more than 2,200 consumer complaints that were routed to the Federal Trade Commission since 2019 — more than any other tribe in recent years.

“THIS IS THE TEXTBOOK DEFINITION ON LOANSHARKING,” one Californian with an LDF loan complained in all caps in June 2023 to federal regulators. The person, whose name is redacted, argued that “no one should be expected to pay over $11,000 for a $1,200 loan,” calling the 790% rate “beyond predatory.”

In a separate complaint, a Massachusetts customer wrote, “I thought this kind of predatory lending was against the law.”

Such confusion is understandable. Loans like these are illegal under most state statutes. But tribal-related businesses, including LDF, claim that their sovereign rights exempt them from state usury laws and licensing requirements aimed at protecting consumers. And so these businesses operate widely, facing little pushback from regulators and relying on the small print in their loan agreements.

As LDF climbed in the industry, it kept a low profile, garnering little publicity. For years it operated from a call center above a smoke shop in the community’s small downtown, before moving to a sprawling vocational training building, built in part with federal money, off a less visible, two-lane road.

But staying under the radar just got harder. Court filings show that LDF tribal leaders and some of their nontribal business partners have come to an agreement with consumers in a 2020 federal class-action lawsuit filed in Virginia. Nearly 1 million borrowers could finally get relief.

The deal calls for the cancellation of $1.4 billion in outstanding loans. Tribal officials and their associates would also pay $37.4 million to consumers and the lawyers who brought the suit. Although they settled, LDF leaders have denied wrongdoing in the case, and its president told ProPublica it adheres to high industry standards in its lending operations.

A final resolution of the case will take months. If approved, the total settlement would be the largest ever secured against participants in the tribal lending industry, lawyers told the court.

“This is a big one,” said Irv Ackelsberg, a Philadelphia attorney who has faced off in court against other tribal lenders and followed this suit closely. “Is it going to stop tribal lending? Probably not because it’s just a fraction of what’s out there.”

The LDF tribe is central to the suit but is not named. Nor is LDF Holdings, the corporate umbrella over the various lending subsidiaries.

A sign along the road at the entrance to the Lac du Flambeau reservation (Tim Gruber for ProPublica)

Knowing that both those entities likely would have been entitled to sovereign immunity, lawyers for the borrowers chose a different approach. Instead, they brought the case against members of the tribe’s governing council; high-level employees of LDF’s lending operations; and a nontribal business partner, Skytrail Servicing Group, and its owner, William Cheney Pruett.

Pruett also denied wrongdoing in the case. He did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica.

The proposed settlement notes that the tribal leaders and their partners understood that continuing to defend the case “would require them to expend significant time and money.” LDF, under the settlement, can continue its loan operations.

In emails to ProPublica, LDF President John Johnson Sr. defended the tribe’s lending business as legal and beneficial to both borrowers and the tribal members. He said the loans help people “without access to traditional financial services,” such as those with bad credit histories and people facing financial crises. Many borrowers, he said, have had positive experiences.

He also emphasized the economic benefits to the tribe, including jobs and revenue for vital services. “Please make no mistake: the programs and infrastructure developed through LDF Holdings’ revenue contributions have saved lives in our community and are helping preserve our culture and way of life,” he wrote in an email.

Johnson, who is a named defendant in the suit, and other tribal leaders declined requests to be interviewed.

John Johnson Sr., tribal president of Lac du Flambeau, helps set up a tribal flag during a youth spearfishing event earlier this year. (AP Photo/John Locher) Partnerships Fuel Lending

Historically, some financial services firms formed alliances with tribes, gaining an advantage from the tribes’ sovereign immunity. For years, consumer lawyers and even federal prosecutors have raised questions about whether some tribal lending operations were just fronts for outsiders that received most of the profits and conducted all the key operations — from running call centers to underwriting and collecting.

The LDF tribe is one of only a few dozen of the nation’s 574 federally recognized tribes that have turned to the lending business as an economic lifeline. Typically those tribes are in isolated areas far from large population centers needed to support major industries or hugely profitable casinos. Online lending, or e-commerce, opened opportunities.

“If you look at the tribes who do it, they tend to be rural and they tend to be poor,” said Lance Morgan, CEO of a tribal economic development corporation owned by the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. “Because they don’t really have any other options to pursue from an economic development standpoint. They just don’t. That’s why this appeals to some tribes.”

He said his tribe considered getting into the lending industry but decided against it.

Tribes in the U.S. still suffer from the legacy of racism and betrayal that saw the U.S. government steal land from Native Americans and destroy cultures. Now, with limited economic resources and taxing options, tribal governments draw upon federal grants and subsidies to help fund essential community services — support promised in long-ago treaties, laws and policies in exchange for land. But these programs have proven to be “chronically underfunded and sometimes inefficiently structured,” according to a 2018 report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

On the LDF reservation, which is home to about 3,600 people, the median household income is under $52,000, and 20% of the population lives below the federal poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. On lands that are chock-full of lakes, streams and wetlands, the LDF people operate a fish hatchery, hunt deer and cultivate wild rice. The tribe also has a casino, hotel and convention center.

LDF says its lending revenue helps fund essential tribal services, including preserving the natural environment. (Tim Gruber for ProPublica)

LDF entered the loan business in 2012 and has set up at least two dozen lending companies and websites on its way to massive expansion, a ProPublica examination found. LDF owns the companies and works with outside firms to operate its businesses, which offer short-term installment loans.

Unlike traditional payday loans, these are not due by the next pay period but have longer terms. Borrowers show proof of income and typically authorize the company to make automatic withdrawals from their bank accounts.

Get in Touch

To do the best, most comprehensive reporting on this opaque industry, we want to hear from more of the people who know it best. Do you work for a tribal lending operation, either on a reservation or for an outside business partner? Do you belong to a tribe that participates in this lending, or one that has rejected the industry? Are you a regulator or lawyer dealing with these issues? Have you borrowed from a tribal lender? All perspectives matter to us. Please get in touch with Megan O’Matz at megan.omatz@propublica.org or 954-873-7576, or Joel Jacobs at joel.jacobs@propublica.org or 917-512-0297. Visit propublica.org/tips for information on secure communication channels.

Details of the tribe’s business operations are not public. A July 2014 tribal newsletter reported that LDF had three lending companies employing four tribal members. By 2022, an LDF attorney told the Virginia judge that LDF Holdings, the lending parent company, employed about 50 people on the reservation. Johnson told ProPublica it currently employs 170 people “who live on or near the reservation,” of which 70% are tribally enrolled.

Each year, on reservation land, LDF now hosts the Tribal Lending Summit, a gathering of staff, vendors and prospective partners. Attendee lists posted online show dozens of representatives of software companies, call centers, marketing firms, customer acquisition businesses and debt collection agencies.

After this year’s event, in June, the LDF business hosts posted a congratulation message on social media: ”Here’s to another year of growth, learning, and collaboration! We look forward to continuing this journey together and seeing you all at next year’s summit."

Business Practices Under Fire

Like many operators in this corner of the lending industry, LDF has been forced to defend its business practices in court. It has been subject to at least 40 civil suits filed by consumers since 2019, ProPublica found.

The suits typically allege violations of state usury laws and federal racketeering or fair credit reporting statutes. Johnson, in his statements to ProPublica, said LDF follows tribal and federal regulations, and he cited LDF’s sovereign status as the primary reason state laws on lending don’t apply to its business practices.

“Expecting a Tribe to opine on and/or submit to State regulatory oversight is akin to expecting Canada to submit to or speak on the laws of France,” he wrote.

Most suits against LDF’s lending companies settle quickly with the terms kept confidential. Consumers can be at a disadvantage because of the arbitration agreements in the fine print of their loan contracts, which attempt to restrict their ability to sue.

Karen Brostek, a registered nurse in Florida, borrowed $550 in 2017 from LDF’s Loan at Last at an annual percentage rate of 682%. The contract required her to pay back $2,783 over nine months.

Karen Brostek Received a Loan from LDF with a 682% Annual Percentage Rate

The agreement with LDF required her to pay $2,233 in finance charges on a $550 loan.

Source: Karen Brostek’s loan agreement (Lucas Waldron, ProPublica)

It wasn’t her first foray into short-term borrowing. She said her salary did not cover her expenses and she had “to borrow from Peter to pay Paul.”

Karen Brostek outside her home in Brooksville, Florida (Bob Croslin for ProPublica)

Loan at Last tried numerous times to collect the debt, even threatening in one phone call to have her jailed, she said. Finally, in August 2019, she satisfied the obligation.

Brostek sued LDF Holdings in small claims court in Pasco County in 2021. The suit cited Florida laws that make it a third-degree felony to issue loans with APRs over 45%.

The parties settled within weeks. Brostek recalls receiving about $750. LDF’s Johnson did not comment on Brostek’s case in his response to ProPublica.

She said she does not begrudge the tribe making money but said, “We need to find another way to help them so they don’t feel they’re backed into a corner and this is their only alternative.”

A Groundbreaking Settlement

The Virginia class-action suit claimed that LDF’s governing council delegated the daily operations of the lending businesses “to non-tribal members.” Mirroring allegations in other civil actions, the suit claims that LDF’s partnerships were exploiting sovereign immunity to make loans that otherwise would be illegal.

According to the plaintiffs, LDF Holdings entered into agreements that allow nontribal outsiders to handle and control most aspects of the lending businesses. That includes “marketing, underwriting, risk assessment, compliance, accounting, lead generation, collections, and website management for the businesses,” the suit said. For years, the president of LDF Holdings was a woman who lived in Tampa, Florida. She is a named defendant in the suit, which says she is not a member of the tribe.

Johnson told ProPublica that early on the tribe lacked expertise in the industry and that its partnerships were simply an example of outsourcing, “a standard practice in many American business sectors.”

His statement added, “Recruiting outside talent and capital to Indian country is a mission-critical skill in Tribal economic development.”

The amount of revenue that comes to the tribe is undisclosed, but the class-action suit says the contract with one of its partners, Skytrail Servicing, resulted in only “a nominal flat fee” for LDF.

The 2014 servicing agreement between Skytrail Servicing and LDF is sealed in the court record, and details about the arrangement are largely redacted. In one filing, Skytrail Servicing denies an allegation from the plaintiffs that the tribe received only $3.50 per originated loan.

In a separate filing in the suit, Johnson, the tribal president, said LDF’s lending profits are distributed to the tribe’s general fund, which helps pay for the tribal government, including essential services such as police, education and health care.

The legal strategy crafted by the Virginia consumer protection firm Kelly Guzzo PLC relied heavily on a 2021 federal appeals court decision that concluded that tribal lending was off-reservation conduct to which state law applied. The court found that while a tribe itself cannot be sued for its commercial activities, its members and officers can be.

The class-action suit alleges that tribal officials and their associates conspired to violate state lending laws, collecting millions of dollars in unlawful debts. “In sum, we allege that they are the upper level management of a purely unlawful business that makes illegal loans in Virginia, Georgia, and elsewhere throughout the country,” lawyer Andrew Guzzo said in a September 2022 hearing, referring to LDF officials.

“What I’m trying to say, in other words, is this isn’t a case that involves a lawful business, such as a real estate brokerage firm, that happens to have a secret side scheme involving a few rogue employees,” he said. “The people that are overseeing this are overseeing a business that makes unlawful loans and nothing else.”

The most consequential aspect of the settlement plan is the debt relief it would offer an estimated 980,000 people who were LDF customers over seven years — from July 24, 2016, through Oct. 1, 2023. Those who had obtained loans during that period and still owed money would not be subject to any further collection efforts, canceling an estimated $1.4 billion in outstanding debt.

Eligibility for cash awards is dependent on the state where borrowers live and how much they paid in interest. Nevada and Utah have no interest rate restrictions, so borrowers there aren’t entitled to any money back.

The tribal officials who are listed as defendants have agreed to pay $2 million of the $37.4 million cash settlement. The remaining amount would come from nontribal partners involved in five of the tribe’s lending subsidiaries.

That includes $6.5 million from Skytrail Servicing Group and Pruett, a Texas businessman who has been involved in the payday loan industry for more than two decades.

The largest portion of the settlement — $20 million — would come from unnamed “non-tribal individuals and entities” involved with LDF’s Loan at Last, the company that gave Brostek her loan.

The consumer attorneys are not done. They noted in a memorandum in the case that other LDF affiliates who did not settle in this instance “will be sued in a new case.”

How We Estimated the Size and Impact of the Tribal Lending Industry

Because tribal lenders are not licensed by states, there is very little public information about the size of the industry.

Bankruptcies give a rare window into the prevalence of the industry because when people file for bankruptcy, they must list all the creditors they owe money to. Bankruptcies are filed in federal court and are tracked in PACER, the federal courts’ electronic records system. But PACER charges a fee for every document viewed and cannot be comprehensively searched by creditor list, making it impractical to identify every bankruptcy case with a tribal lender.

Instead, we selected a random sample of 10,000 bankruptcy cases using the Federal Judicial Center’s bankruptcy database, which lists every case filed nationwide (but does not include creditor information). We looked at Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 cases — the types used by individuals — filed from October 2020 to September 2023. We then scraped the creditor list for each of these cases from PACER and identified which cases involved tribal lenders.

We ultimately identified 119 cases with LDF companies as creditors — 1.19% of our total sample, the most of any tribe. Extrapolating these figures across all 1.2 million Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy cases during these three years gave an estimated 15,000 cases involving LDF loans during this period (with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 2,600). That comes out to an estimated 4,800 cases per year, on average. Many factors can contribute to bankruptcy, and LDF loans were not the only debts these bankruptcy filers faced. Still, these figures showed that LDF stood out among other tribal lenders and had a substantial presence across bankruptcies nationwide.

We also looked at consumer complaint data that we acquired through public records requests to the Federal Trade Commission, which collects complaints made to various sources including the Better Business Bureau, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the FTC itself. We focused our requests on several categories we found to be related to lending products, such as payday loans and finance company lending. Our tallies are likely an undercount: Complaints against tribal lenders may have fallen under other categories, such as debt collection, though our explorations found this to be less common. We found more than 2,200 complaints about LDF companies since 2019, the most of any tribal lending operation.

We compiled hundreds of tribal lending company and website names that we used to search through the creditor and complaint data. However, due to the ever-shifting industry landscape in which websites often go offline while new ones pop up, it is possible that we did not identify every complaint and bankruptcy involving tribal lenders.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by B. “Toastie” Oaster, High Country News

This article was produced in partnership with High Country News, which was a member of the Local Reporting Network in 2023-24. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

A company developing an industrial-scale solar panel array on Badger Mountain in Eastern Washington has paused permitting activities on the project amid concerns about impacts to Indigenous cultural sites.

The decision comes on the heels of an investigation by High Country News and ProPublica this year, which found that a land survey funded by the developer, Avangrid Renewables, had omitted more than a dozen sites of archaeological or cultural significance on the public parcel included in the project area. This survey is required by the state before it can permit the project so construction can begin.

In a June 27 letter to the state agency responsible for approving the project, Avangrid wrote that it will be pausing project planning for two to three months “while we re-evaluate public comments, including from our project landowners and affected tribal nations.”

The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation have objected to the Badger Mountain solar project for years, according to tribal business councilmember Karen Condon. They officially registered their opposition in May 2023, citing the foods, medicines, archaeological heritage sites and other cultural resources found on the mountain. They were joined shortly after by the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. Both tribal nations have the right to access and use public lands in their ancestral territory, which includes the state-owned parcel on Badger Mountain.

Due to concerns from tribal nations and state agencies, the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, whose members are appointed by the governor, had previously ordered a redo of the cultural resources survey.

“While we are pausing permitting activities, Avangrid is continuing to evaluate other elements of the Badger Mountain project,” a company spokesperson said in an email to HCN and ProPublica.

The future of the Badger Mountain solar project is unclear. Avangrid’s spokesperson wrote, “We have a strong relationship with [Washington’s Department of Natural Resources] on our operating projects and value their participation in advancing clean energy in the state and will continue to work with them to advance new clean energy projects.”

The DNR, which acts as the landlord for the parcel and evaluates the environmental and cultural impacts of projects on it, said the pause is a chance to have more discussions with tribes and potential stakeholders. “Each time people [go] out to the area, more and more archaeological sites and plant resources are seen and more concerns arise,” Louis Fortin, scientific consultation manager at the department, wrote in an email to HCN and ProPublica.

Fortin noted that some leases with private landowners expired in December 2023, and that some of the landowners are not renewing those leases. The majority of the project is on private lands, suggesting that a major portion of the project may no longer be viable for reasons unrelated to cultural resources. Avangrid declined to answer inquiries about private landowners’ concerns.

In March, a group of Wenatchi-P’squosa people and their supporters gathered on Badger Mountain to demonstrate against the proposed solar development, which would impact critical foodways and sites of archaeological heritage.

After hearing of Avangrid’s pause in operations, one of the Wenatchi-P’squosa organizers, Darnell Sam, told HCN and ProPublica he isn’t confident tribal concerns will meaningfully alter the course of development. “I still don’t trust the process,” he said, noting that the developer has already invested millions of dollars in the project. Sam is the traditional territories coordinator for the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, where the Wenatchi-P’squosa people are enrolled, but said this view is his own and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of his office.

His mistrust, he explained, is due in part to what he’s seen his neighbors at the Yakama Nation go through. For years, the nearby Yakama Nation has opposed a pumped hydro storage project, which has also been the subject of an HCN and ProPublica investigation into how a federal agency dodged its consultation obligations, about 200 miles south of Badger Mountain. Despite tribal objections, that development has continued to advance.

“We’re not against green energy,” Sam said. “But where’s the responsible place for it to be?”

by Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio, photography by Stacy Kranitz, special to ProPublica

This story describes an attempted murder in a domestic violence case.

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

Before rural Scott County remade itself into a model for managing domestic violence, Jade Peters didn’t know where to turn for help. Her ex-boyfriend was stalking her and threatened to kill other men who talked to her.

She knew he had a gun, but so did many people in Scott County, and she didn’t think the justice system would take her seriously.

If you or someone you know needs help, here’s a guide on how to navigate Tennessee’s justice system for domestic violence victims.

One night in 2009, Peters was walking up her steps when she saw someone approaching. As he got closer, she realized it was her ex-boyfriend. She fumbled with her keys, trying to set off her car alarm.

He pulled his hand out of his pocket. A sudden bright light pierced the darkness — the flash of a gun firing.

The bullet tore through Peters’ mouth and throat, with fragments lodging in her spine. When she was able to drag herself into her house to call for help, she remembers avoiding her reflection in the mirror, not wanting to see what damage the bullet had done.

Jade Peters at her home in Scott County, where she was shot by an ex-boyfriend. After her recovery, Peters became a lawyer and has represented domestic violence victims.

A few years ago, Scott County decided that the system that Peters and other domestic violence victims across the state contended with wasn’t good enough. Tennessee consistently has one of the highest rates of women killed by men, and most of those homicides are committed with a gun. Yet, over the years, the state has loosened its gun laws, making it easier for people to buy and carry firearms. While the state bars domestic abusers and people with felony convictions from having guns, WPLN and ProPublica found that those laws are rarely enforced.

Tucked into the Appalachian foothills along the Kentucky border, Scott County recognized that victims in rural areas face unique barriers. There are few resources, like domestic violence shelters. Law enforcement and the courts typically lack staff and training. And cultural attitudes about domestic violence and guns can make officers and judges less likely to believe women or more reluctant to take firearms away from abusers.

The county completely overhauled the way it handles domestic violence cases. It brought most of the agencies that deal with domestic violence into one building called the Family Justice Center. It then started one of the state’s only court programs solely dedicated to handling domestic violence cases.

And vitally, the county took steps to better ensure that people subject to domestic violence charges or protection orders don’t have guns.

Peters said that if the reforms had existed when she needed them, she would have known where to get help. “It would have made a difference,” she said.

Separating dangerous people from their guns is an issue that much of the country grapples with. But in Tennessee, “it’s even more inconsistent in these rural communities,” said Heather Herrmann, who oversees a statewide group that studies domestic violence homicides. She said in rural areas, judges are more likely to consider things like whether accused abusers hunt or have jobs that require guns.

First image: Oneida, Tennessee, is one of the small towns in Scott County. Second image: The Scott County Family Justice Center brings together the district attorney’s office, emergency housing, a domestic violence officer and other resources so victims only have to make one stop to get help.

In rural Lewis County in Middle Tennessee, for example, Judge Mike Hinson said protecting gun rights weighs heavily in his decisions. It can be hard to justify signing an order of protection — which can bar someone from coming near the victim, contacting them or having firearms — if a gun wasn’t involved in the domestic violence incident, he said.

“It’s those close cases where I try to balance a person’s rights — because they do have a Second Amendment right, and they do have a right to protect themselves, and they do have a right to get a job,” Hinson said. “That’s the tougher balance.”

It’s a balance he acknowledged he doesn’t always get right.

Even if a judge orders someone to give up their guns, there’s a glaring gap in Tennessee’s system. It’s one of about a dozen states that allow someone to give their gun to a third party like a friend or relative instead of a law enforcement agency or a licensed firearms dealer. And it doesn’t require that the person be identified to the court. In such cases, someone could say they gave up their guns but still have access to them, advocates for domestic violence victims say.

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Scott County saw that gap and decided to change its firearms form, requiring abusers to name the person who is holding their guns and list their address. That person has to sign to verify they have the guns. Scott is the only one of Tennessee’s 95 counties that has done this, victim advocates say. They have asked the Tennessee Administrative Office of the Courts to change the form statewide, but the office says the legislature would have to do that.

It’s difficult to measure Scott County’s success because the numbers are so small. But data from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation shows that while domestic violence incidents have fallen slightly across the state, in Scott County, they’ve dropped by more than half, from nearly 250 in 2009 to an average of less than 100 in recent years. Victims are seeking protection orders from the courts more than they did before the reforms — a sign that there’s more trust in the system, victim advocates say. And far more requests are being approved.

Domestic violence pamphlets at the Scott County Family Justice Center “Some People, It Was Just a Bad Day”

No other rural county in Tennessee has yet followed Scott’s lead. And throughout the state, old attitudes prevail. On the other side of Nashville from Scott County is a region of rolling hills and cropland where guns and hunting are also a big part of life.

This area of Middle Tennessee is represented in Congress by Rep. Andy Ogles, a Republican who in 2021 sent out a Christmas card of his family holding guns. (Ogles didn’t respond to calls or emails from WPLN and ProPublica but has told reporters he didn’t regret the card.) Jason Aldean’s controversial music video, “Try That in a Small Town,” was filmed at a courthouse in the area and served as an anthem of old-school, small-town values that critics said was a racist rallying cry for vigilante justice and gun violence. (Aldean has defended the song and video.)

That culture permeates all the way up the justice system to judges, Herrmann said.

“When you have a really insular community, a really gun-focused community, and often a community that maybe has some misconceptions or stereotyping of what domestic violence is and what it means, then you have judges, not always, but often, who carry those same beliefs,” she said.

Judges in Tennessee have an incredible amount of power in how they run their courtrooms, which can greatly affect domestic violence cases. If a case lacks obvious physical signs of abuse, judges may fall back on their own notions about domestic violence, which research shows favors defendants.

Hinson said he sees himself as a representative for the culture of Lewis County. The county proudly boasts one of the largest collections of mounted trophy heads in North America. The old courthouse has a bullet hole from when a man going through a divorce brought a gun to confront his wife. The new courthouse is across the street from a store advertising that “we sell ammo.” With only about 12,500 residents, the county is the type of place where most people know each other, which can make domestic violence cases difficult.

The Lewis County Museum of Natural History in downtown Hohenwald boasts one of the largest collections of mounted trophy heads in North America. Downtown Hohenwald, where the Lewis County Justice Center is located

Since 2014, many of those cases have gone before Hinson, a Lewis County native with icy blue eyes and gray hair.

Some folks around Lewis County call him “the people’s judge”: He often wears a quarter-zip sweater or a button-down shirt in court instead of a judicial robe. And he speaks plainly, like he’s talking to a friend he ran into at the store instead of someone in a jailhouse jumpsuit.

Hinson’s casual attitude and off-the-cuff remarks caused him to be suspended by the Administrative Office of the Courts’ Board of Judicial Conduct in 2021. In one case, in which he denied a woman an order of protection, the board said he made a “demeaning” comment, telling the couple that another judge would “wade through the bullshit” in their divorce. He later apologized for the remark.

Sometimes, Hinson said, he finds the law constricting and prefers to take his own approach. Once, that resulted in him dismissing hundreds of traffic tickets because he thought the community was being overly targeted. It made him popular among some residents — and less so with the Tennessee Highway Patrol.

“I don’t believe the law was made for us to worship,” Hinson said. “I believe the law is a tool.”

Judge Mike Hinson grew up in rural Lewis County, Tennessee. He says the area has shaped who he is and how he runs his courtroom.

That applies to the domestic violence cases he sees in his courtroom, which, he said, often result from addiction. It’s a struggle Hinson himself relates to. He said he had a drinking problem and anger issues that ended his last marriage — something he shares with the men who appear before him in court.

“Some people just might need a little anger management,” Hinson said. “Some people, it was just a bad day and the only time it’s ever happened.”

Hinson also said he thinks some women overuse protection orders to gain the upper hand in a divorce case or custody battle.

“This is stuff that we hear from every corner of the state,” Herrmann said. “In these small towns in particular, people talk. They know what the judge has said to other people. They know how other people’s cases have gone.”

“I’m Gonna Take His Side”

Some victims who went through Lewis County court said Hinson’s sympathy for the men made them feel dismissed or like they were the ones being reprimanded. Multiple victims asked not to be named because it’s a small community and they worried it could affect their cases. WPLN and ProPublica also sat in on Hinson’s court.

In February, Hinson admonished a woman who sought a protection order against her ex-boyfriend after he fired a gun into the ceiling during an argument. Instead of granting the order of protection, Hinson put the man under a no-contact order, which didn’t require him to give up his firearms.

He told the man he couldn’t reach out to the woman, but he also told the woman her ex-boyfriend wouldn’t be held responsible if she contacted him first and he replied. If that happens, Hinson said, “I’m gonna take his side.” And he urged her not to do what some women do, reaching out to their partners after leaving court to work out their problems. “We’re not going to be doing that,” he told her.

A month later, another woman in Hinson’s court seemed surprised by the way the judge spoke to her estranged husband after he assaulted her. Instead of chastising him about his behavior, Hinson appeared to try to motivate her husband by telling him his wife thought he was “a great guy.”

The woman, sitting in the courtroom that day, leaned over to a victim’s advocate and said, “I never said that.”

Scott County’s New System

About 200 miles away, as the early morning fog cleared over the Scott County Justice Center in May, men slowly trickled into the courtroom under a sign in Greek that translates roughly to “a man’s character is his fate.” Their work boots thudded on the floor as they found seats on the wooden benches.

“All rise,” the bailiff said. “Domestic violence court is now in session.”

First image: A domestic violence hearing in Scott County. Second image: A woman tells Judge Scarlett Ellis about her reasons for seeking a protection order during a domestic violence court case.

The men had already been convicted of domestic violence or were subject to protection orders. They were there so that Judge Scarlett Ellis could monitor whether they were keeping up with their probation appointments and other conditions like mental health and addiction treatment.

She looked up over her glasses with a kind smile at the group of men in front of her, the way a teacher might greet her class. Then one by one they stood in front of her. Ellis peppered them with questions: How has therapy been going? Have you avoided contact with your victim? What have you learned in batterers intervention class?

Ellis’ approach is encouraging but not lenient. When it’s clear that the men before her have made strides toward changing their behaviors, she doesn’t hesitate to tell them. One man stood at the podium, his hands clasped behind his back as he responded to her questions with, “Yes, ma’am,” and, “No, ma’am.” He had an interview later that day for a better-paying job, he told her.

“You’ve changed your life,” she told him. “I can see it. I really can.”

Ellis can use her discretion to have those who are doing well come to court less often. But if they’re not complying, she can also extend their probation or send them to jail.

Later in the day, when victims came to the domestic violence court for new cases to be heard, they were ushered by a court advocate into a back room to keep them separate from the men they say abused them. It’s one of many victim-centered changes the court has made. When their protection order hearing comes up, the victim stands at one podium, the offender at another, with the court advocate and a sheriff’s deputy between them.

Domestic violence court is held on a separate day from other cases to protect victims’ privacy.

“I was already embarrassed with what all had happened and being assaulted and then to have to be in a room with people who had done drugs and stole from others was just more embarrassing and belittling,” one person wrote in a community needs assessment that was conducted before the court was created.

Ultimately, a judge’s orders are only as strong as their enforcement, which Scott County has also tried to address. Like many rural counties, the Scott County Sheriff’s Department is small and understaffed. But it has a dedicated domestic violence officer to help victims.

“I’m their voice,” Deputy Danielle Gayheart said in a raspy twang. “They’ve done their side of it” by getting the order of protection, she said.

First image: Ellis presides over the domestic violence court in Scott County. Second image: Deputy Danielle Gayheart is a domestic violence officer with the Scott County Sheriff’s Department.

Gayheart has listened to jailhouse phone calls to see if an abuser was contacting a victim. She also checks social media. Once, a man posted a picture of himself hunting deer with a gun. When she sees those things, she’ll charge people with violating protection orders.

“When it comes to anything like that, I’m your girl,” she said.

“We Repeat What We Don’t Repair”

One of the keys to holding defendants accountable in Scott County is its batterers intervention program. In other rural counties, attending one can mean a long drive: In Lewis County, for example, the closest one is over an hour away. Judges in those places often won’t list it as a court condition because it’s too hard to get to. But Scott County’s class is 10 minutes from the courthouse.

During one class, six men crowded around folding tables pushed together in a square. “We repeat what we don’t repair” was scrawled on a white board on the wall.

Kathi Hall, a facilitator with Scott County’s batterers intervention program, said many of the men grew up in abusive households and have to unlearn behaviors they saw as kids.

The facilitator led them through an exercise on how to recognize the signs of anger in their bodies and stop it before they take it out on someone else. Feeling hot-headed? Try sticking your head in the freezer. Feeling restless? Take a walk. Clenching your teeth? Chew a piece of gum. Many of the men are still in the relationships that put them in court, so creating these plans is urgent.

While the 26-week class is court-ordered, the men weren’t shy about participating.

“I’m not real good at showing my feelings,” one man said. “I never have been. You know, I was raised —”

“You don’t wear your feelings on your sleeve,” another chimed in from across the table.

“That’s right,” the first man said. “Growing up, you know, I was raised that you’re a man. You’re not supposed to show that because nobody gives a shit. You’re supposed to be stronger than that.”

Attendees gather around tables at the batterers intervention program in Scott County. The men were mandated by the court to attend the class.

Programs like this one have led to change, according to Peters. After the shooting, her ex-boyfriend pleaded guilty to attempted murder and was sentenced to prison. Peters recovered from her wounds and went back to school to become a lawyer, representing clients in Ellis’ domestic violence court.

She said men in Scott County know that when they’re brought to court on a domestic violence charge, there will be serious consequences.

“Men are somewhat afraid of that,” Peters said. “They’re very aware that you can be dispossessed of firearms for a year, that you can lose a lot of your rights, that you can be sentenced to programs and court appearances.”

She said that empowerment for victims and accountability for offenders has had an impact beyond just the court program — the system change has led to broader cultural change in Scott County.

“There’s still women who are in bad situations,” Peters said. “It’s just that now there’s more help for them.”

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Lomi Kriel and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Zach Despart, Terri Langford and Kayla Guo, The Texas Tribune

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

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

Police video, audio, texts and emails released Saturday by Uvalde, Texas, city officials offer new details about the Robb Elementary school shooting while also largely reaffirming reporting about law enforcement’s failure to engage a gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers.

In one report, a Uvalde municipal police officer said that law enforcement had to rely on a parent to use bolt cutters to break the locks to the gated fence the shooter had scaled to enter the school. That same officer also indicated in his report that he overheard a female relative of the shooter discuss how he’d expressed suicidal thoughts the night before the May 24, 2022, massacre. And in a 911 call, the shooter’s uncle pleaded with police to speak to the teenager, saying he believed he could talk him down. The call, however, came six minutes after law enforcement killed the gunman.

Text exchanges between Uvalde officers also provide insight into their frustrations after Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw blamed local police in the days following the shooting.

A Texas House of Representatives report released two months later, by contrast, spread blame onto the scores of local, state and federal law enforcement officers — including McCraw’s at least 91 DPS troopers — who also responded to the scene and failed to take charge.

The day after McCraw’s public comments, Uvalde Police Lt. Javier Martinez, who was shot within the first few minutes of the response, said that he had received a call from U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican.

In a text detailing the conversation, Martinez said the senator told him McCraw “should NOT have done that.” Martinez said he told Cornyn that McCraw had “screwed us all” and that the local officers were all receiving death threats.

Cornyn’s spokesperson declined to comment, while McCraw did not immediately respond. An attorney for Martinez and the Uvalde police officers said that he was not aware of the text exchange. Martinez did not respond to a message inquiring about it.

Velma Duran, the sister of Irma Garcia, one of the two teachers killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting, confronts Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw after he finished testifying to the state House in 2023. (Evan L’Roy/The Texas Tribune)

Most other records released by the city, such as body camera footage and audio of 911 calls from children inside the classrooms, were detailed in previous reporting from The Texas Tribune, ProPublica and FRONTLINE after the news organizations independently obtained hundreds of hours of investigative material through a confidential source.

The Saturday release is the first major disclosure of documents by a government agency involved in the flawed response to the deadliest school shooting in Texas history. It was part of a settlement agreement in a lawsuit between the city and the news organizations. Three other government agencies — the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District and the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office — continue fighting not to release any records.

Former Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, who is now a Republican candidate for the Texas House, said in a phone interview Saturday that the other government entities in the lawsuit should follow the city’s example.

“The only way we’re going to know what truly happened is for everybody to release their records, put them out there,” McLaughlin said. “Mistakes were made. There’s no denying that. Take your lumps.”

By now, law enforcement’s failures during the response to the Uvalde shooting are well documented, including the fact that officers wrongly treated the shooter as a barricaded subject, rather than an active threat, and failed to confront him for 77 minutes. No officer took control of the response, which prevented coordination and communication between agencies. According to records released Saturday, for example, a DPS aircraft official struggled to coordinate logistics for two helicopters, SWAT team members and the San Antonio Police Department because they couldn’t reach an incident commander.

The newsrooms published 911 calls that showed the increasing desperation of children and teachers pleading to be saved and revealed how officers’ fear of the shooter’s AR-15 prevented them from acting more quickly. In a collaboration with FRONTLINE that included a documentary, the newsrooms also showed that while the children in Uvalde were prepared, following what they had learned in their active shooter drills, many of the officers who responded were not.

The U.S. Justice Department later published a report that heavily criticized the delayed response and said that some victims would have survived had officers followed their training.

According to the records released Saturday, Uvalde municipal police officer Bobby Ruiz Sr. said in an incident report after the shooting that law enforcement had to rely on a parent to cut a lock on the gates of a fence around the school. Once the gate was open, students and teachers began running toward the opening.

“I ran up along with two other male individuals in which we hurried the students and school staff behind cover,” the officer said.

Ruiz was then sent to the nearby house where the gunman lived with his grandparents. The teenager had shot his grandmother in the face and taken his grandfather’s truck to the school. Ruiz said that while at the house, he overheard a relative say they’d stayed up with the gunman the night before after he expressed a desire to die by suicide.

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

In one 911 call, the shooter’s uncle, Armando Ramos, urged police to let him speak with the shooter, confident he could persuade him to stop.

“Everything I tell him, he does listen to me,” a distraught Ramos said. “Maybe he could stand down … or turn himself in.”

But his nephew was already dead, killed minutes earlier by police after he emerged from a classroom closet and fired at them.

An attorney for the news agencies as well as the uncle of one of the children killed at Robb Elementary said information about the shooting — and law enforcement’s response — helps grieving relatives get closure and will better prepare authorities for future massacres. They pushed other agencies to follow the city’s move and release records.

Jesse Rizo’s 9-year-old niece Jackie Cazares was one of the fourth graders killed. He was elected to the Uvalde school board in May and has pushed the district to release information the news organizations have requested. He said the piecemeal nature the public releases is spurring residents to suspect government officials are involved in a cover-up.

“And then we begin to lose faith and trust,” he said. “And the longer that things get delayed getting made public, then the more of a lack of trust we have.”

Jesse Rizo, the uncle of shooting victim Jackie Cazares, in 2022. Rizo was elected to the Uvalde school board in May. (Evan L’Roy/The Texas Tribune)

Brett Cross, the father of 10-year-old Uziyah Garcia, who was also killed that day, said that he is infuriated that the city released information to media organizations through the settlement without first notifying families. He demanded more documents be released.

“They need to show everything, the world, how this actually is,” Cross said. “This isn’t something that we can just turn off. The world gets to turn off the TV and walk away. We don’t get to. We have to live this daily.”

Two state district judges in Texas have ordered the county, DPS and the school district to release records related to the shooting. All three have appealed the decisions.

Only the city has settled with the news organizations, saying in a statement Saturday that it wished to comply with the court order and end a legal battle.

DPS representatives and a school district spokesperson did not immediately return calls or emails Saturday. Uvalde County Sheriff Ruben Nolasco said in a statement that the potential release of records was “under the purview” of the office’s attorney.

Only a handful of responding officers have been publicly disciplined and no trial date has been set for the two who were indicted by a grand jury in June. Those two men — Pete Arredondo and Adrian Gonzales — pleaded not guilty. An attorney for Gonzales called the charges “unprecedented.”

Uvalde city officials chose to release records against the longstanding wishes of District Attorney Christina Mitchell, who is preparing to prosecute those two school district officers, including the agency’s former chief, for alleged inaction. Mitchell has argued that releasing records will interfere with those cases.

Attorneys representing the news organizations have said there is no proof to support her claims and that agencies cannot withhold the records under state laws.

Laura Prather, a media law chair for Haynes Boone who represented the news agencies in the legal fight for the records, called the city’s release a “step toward transparency,” though she noted the legal battle continues.

“Transparency is necessary to help Uvalde heal and allow us all to understand what happened and learn how to prevent future tragedies,” Prather said.

Crosses and rosaries hang in front of Robb Elementary this year in memory of the victims of the 2022 shooting. (Eric Gay/AP Photo)

by Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented

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Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda for a right-wing presidential administration, has lost its director and faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track.

One centerpiece of that program is dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy. The vast majority of these videos — 23 in all, totaling more than 14 hours of content — were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.

The Project 2025 videos coach future appointees on everything from the nuts and bolts of governing to how to outwit bureaucrats. There are strategies for avoiding embarrassing Freedom of Information Act disclosures and ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges.” Some of the content is routine advice that any incoming political appointee might be told. Other segments of the training offer guidance on radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.

In one video, Bethany Kozma, a conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration, downplays the seriousness of climate change and says the movement to combat it is really part of a ploy to “control people.”

“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma says.

In the same video, Kozma calls the idea of gender fluidity “evil.” Another speaker, Katie Sullivan, who was an acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice under Trump, takes aim at executive actions by the administration of President Joe Biden that created gender adviser positions throughout the federal government. The goal, Biden wrote in one order, was to “advance equal rights and opportunities, regardless of gender or gender identity.”

Sullivan says, “That position has to be eradicated, as well as all the task forces, the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites, and a complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications.”

Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, falsely saying that he knew nothing about it and had “no idea who is behind it.” In fact, he flew on a private jet with Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which leads Project 2025. And in a 2022 speech at a Heritage Foundation event, Trump said, “This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

A review of the training videos shows that 29 of the 36 speakers have worked for Trump in some capacity — on his 2016-17 transition team, in the administration or on his 2024 reelection campaign. The videos appear to have been recorded before the resignation two weeks ago of Paul Dans, the leader of the 2025 project, and they are referenced on the project’s website. The Heritage Foundation said in a statement at the time of Dans’ resignation that it would end Project 2025’s policy-related work, but that its “collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local — will continue.”

The Heritage Foundation and most of the people who appear in the videos cited in this story did not respond to ProPublica’s repeated requests for comment. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign who features in one of the videos, said, “As our campaign leadership and President Trump have repeatedly stated, Agenda 47 is the only official policy agenda from our campaign.”

Project 2025’s 887-page “Mandate for Leadership” document lays out a vast array of policy and governance proposals, including eliminating the Department of Education, slashing Medicaid, reclassifying tens of thousands of career civil servants so they could be more easily fired and replaced, giving the president greater power to control the DOJ and further restricting abortion access.

Democrats and liberal groups have criticized the project’s policy agenda as “extreme” and “authoritarian” while pointing out the many connections between Trump and the hundreds of people who contributed to the project.

“Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025 have always been disingenuous,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The discovery that the vast majority of speakers in Project 2025 training videos are alumni of the Trump administration or have other close ties to Trump’s political operation is unsurprising further evidence of the close connection there.”

Several speakers in the videos acknowledge that the Trump administration was slowed by staffing challenges and the inexperience of its political appointees, and they offer lessons learned from their stumbles. Some of the advice appears at odds with conservative dogma, including a suggestion that the next administration may need to expand key government agencies to achieve the larger goal of slashing federal regulations.

Rick Dearborn, who helped lead Trump’s 2016 transition team and later served in the Trump White House as deputy chief of staff, recalled in one video how “tough” it was to find people to fill all of the key positions in the early days of the administration.

The personnel part of Project 2025 is “so important to the next president,” Dearborn says. “Establishing all of this, providing the expertise, looking at a database of folks that can be part of the administration, talking to you like we are right now about what is a transition about, why do I want to be engaged in it, what would my role be — that’s a luxury that we didn’t have,” referring to a database of potential political appointees.

Dan Huff, a former legal adviser in the White House Presidential Personnel Office under Trump, says in another video that future appointees should be prepared to enact significant changes in American government and be ready to face blowback when they do.

“If you’re not on board with helping implement a dramatic course correction because you’re afraid it’ll damage your future employment prospects, it’ll harm you socially — look, I get it,” Huff says. “That’s a real danger. It’s a real thing. But please: Do us all a favor and sit this one out.”

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented) “Eradicate Climate Change References”

The project’s experts outline regulatory and policy changes that future political appointees should prepare for in a Republican administration.

One video, titled “Hidden Meanings: The Monsters in the Attic,” is a 50-minute discussion of supposed left-wing code words and biased language that future appointees should be aware of and root out. In that video, Kozma says that U.S. intelligence agencies have named climate change as an increasingly dire threat to global stability, which, she says, illustrates how the issue “has infiltrated every part of the federal government.”

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

She then tells viewers that she sees climate change as merely a cover to engage in population control. “I think about the people who don’t want you to have children because of the” — here she makes air-quotes — “impact on the environment.” She adds, “This is part of their ultimate goal to control people.”

Later in the video, Katie Sullivan, the former acting assistant attorney general under Trump, advocates for removing so-called critical race theory from public education without saying how the federal government would accomplish that. (Elementary and secondary education curricula are typically set at the state and local level, not by the federal government.)

“The noxious tenets of critical race theory and gender ideology should be excised from curriculum in every single public school in this country,” Sullivan says. (Reached by phone, Sullivan told ProPublica to contact her press representative and hung up. A representative did not respond.)

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In a different video, David Burton, an economic policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, discusses the importance of an obscure yet influential agency called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The Trump administration used OIRA to help roll back regulations on economic, fiscal and environmental issues. Under Biden, OIRA took a more aggressive stance in helping review and shape new regulations, which included efforts to combat housing discrimination, ban the sale of so-called ghost guns and set new renewable fuel targets.

Burton, in the Project 2025 video, urges future political appointees to work in OIRA and argues that the office should “increase its staffing levels considerably” in service of the conservative goal of reining in the so-called administrative state, namely the federal agencies that craft and issue new regulations.

“Fifty people are not enough to adequately police the regulatory actions of the entire federal government,” Burton says. “OIRA is one of the few government agencies that limits the regulatory ambitions of other agencies.” (Burton confirmed in a brief interview that he appeared in the video and endorsed expanding OIRA’s staffing levels.)

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

Expanding the federal workforce — even an office tasked with scrutinizing regulations — would seem to cut against the conservative movement’s long-standing goal of shrinking government. For anyone confused by Project 2025’s insistence that a conservative president should fill all appointee slots and potentially grow certain functions, Spencer Chretien, a former Trump White House aide who is now Project 2025’s associate director, addresses the tension in one video.

“Some on the right even say that we, because we believe in small government, should just lead by example and not fill certain political positions,” Chretien says. “I suggest that it would be almost impossible to bring any conservative change to America if the president did that.”

A Trump Government-in-Waiting

The speakers in the Project 2025 videos are careful not to explicitly side with Trump or talk about what a future Trump administration might do. They instead refer to a future “conservative president” or “conservative administration.”

But the links between the speakers in the videos and Trump are many. Most of those served Trump during his administration, working at the White House, the National Security Council, NASA, the Office of Management and Budget, USAID and the departments of Justice, Interior, State, Homeland Security, Transportation and Health and Human Services. Another speaker has worked in the Senate office of J.D. Vance, Trump’s 2024 running mate.

Sullivan, the former DOJ acting assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s Office of Justice Programs, which oversees billions in grant funding, appears in three different videos. Leavitt, who is in a training video titled “The Art of Professionalism,” worked in the White House press office during Trump’s first presidency and is now the national press secretary for his reelection campaign.

A consistent theme in the advice and testimonials offered by these Trump alums is that Project 2025 trainees should expect a hostile reception if they go to work in the federal government. Kozma, the former USAID deputy chief of staff, says in one video that “many” of her fellow Trump appointees experienced “persecution” during their time in government.

In a video titled “The Political Appointee’s Survival Guide,” Max Primorac, a former deputy administrator at USAID during the Trump administration, warns viewers that Washington is a place that “does not share your conservative values,” and that new hires will find that “there’s so much hostility to basic traditional values.”

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

In the same video, Kristen Eichamer, a former deputy press secretary at the Trump-era NASA, says that the media pushed false narratives about then-President Trump and people who worked in his administration. “Being defamed on Twitter is almost a badge of honor in the Trump administration,” she says.

Outthinking “the Left”

The videos also offer less overtly political tutorials for future appointees, covering everything from how a regulation gets made to working with the media, the mechanics of a presidential transition process to obtaining a security clearance, and best practices for time management.

One recurring theme in the videos is how the next Republican administration can avoid the mistakes of the first Trump presidency. In one video, Roger Severino, the former director of the Office of Civil Rights in the Trump-era Department of Health and Human Services, explains that failure to meticulously follow federal procedure led to courts delaying or throwing out certain regulatory efforts on technical grounds.

Severino, who is also a longtime leader in the anti-abortion movement, goes on to walk viewers through the ins and outs of procedural law and says that they should prepare for “the left” to use every tool possible to derail the next conservative president. “This is a game of 3D chess,” Severino says. “You have to be always anticipating what the left is going to do to try to throw sand in the gears and trip you up and block your rule.” (In an email, Severino said he would forward ProPublica’s interview request to Heritage’s spokespeople, who did not respond.)

Operating under the assumption that some career employees might seek to thwart a future conservative president’s agenda, some of the advice pertains to how political appointees can avoid being derailed or bogged down by the government bureaucrats who work with them.

Sullivan urges viewers to “empower your political staff,” limit access to appointees’ calendars and leave out career staff from early meetings with more senior agency officials. “You are making it clear to career staff that your political appointees are in charge,” Sullivan says.

Other tips from the videos include scrubbing personal social media accounts of any content that’s “damaging, vulgar or contradict the policies you are there to implement” well before the new administration begins, as Kozma put it.

Alexei Woltornist, a former assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, encourages future appointees to bypass mainstream news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Instead, they should focus on conservative media outlets because those are the only outlets conservative voters trust.

“The American people who vote for a conservative presidential administration, they’re not reading The New York Times, they’re not reading The Washington Post,” Woltornist says. “To the contrary, if those outlets publish something, they’re going to assume it’s false. So the only way to reach them with any voice of credibility is through working with conservative media outlets.”

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

And in a video about oversight and investigations, a group of conservative investigators advise future appointees on how to avoid creating a paper trail of sensitive communications that could be obtained by congressional committees or outside groups under the Freedom of Information Act.

“If you need to resolve something, if you can do it, it’s probably better to walk down the hall, buttonhole a guy and say, ‘Hey, what are we going to do here?’ Talk through the decision,” says Tom Jones, a former Senate investigator who now runs the American Accountability Foundation.

(Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

Jones adds that it’s possible that agency lawyers could cite exemptions in the public-records law to prevent the release of certain documents. But appointees are best served, he argues, if they don’t put important communications in writing in the first place.

“You’re probably better off,” Jones says, “going down to the canteen, getting a cup of coffee, talking it through and making the decision, as opposed to sending him an email and creating a thread that Accountable.US or one of those other groups is going to come back and seek.”

Do you have any information about Project 2025 that we should know? Andy Kroll can be reached by email at andy.kroll@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 202-215-6203.

Videos prepared by Lisa Riordan Seville, Mauricio Rodríguez Pons and Chris Morran. Mariam Elba contributed research.