ProPublica

by Megan O’Matz

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About a month ago, three conservative candidates for school board seats in the west Wisconsin city of Eau Claire stoked controversy about a teacher training program that they claimed could exclude parents from conversations about their children’s gender identity or sexual orientation.

Right-leaning groups across the country seized on the issue, portraying it as another example of schools usurping the role of parents. A few weeks later, the school board president received a death threat.

“I am going to kill you and shoot up your next school-board meeting for promoting the horrific, radical transgender agenda,” an anonymous email read.

Farther south in Holmen, in the scenic Driftless Area of Wisconsin, local police are investigating a social media post showing a postcard left on cars at a shopping center that read: “Keep Holmen Schools White and Christian.”

The postcard urged support for two board candidates. Neither candidate has been connected to the incident, and both decried the postcard on social media, calling it a “disgusting and vile fake political ad.”

“I really don’t want to make more statements on it. It’s been really exhausting,” Josh Neumann, the father of six said of the attention paid to the card. His running mate Chad Updike could not be reached for comment.

Voters in Wisconsin and three other states head to the polls Tuesday in what are some of the nation’s earliest school board elections this year. In a harbinger of what voters across the country will see in coming months, many of the traditionally nonpartisan school board races have become increasingly polarized.

Outsiders who have traditionally stayed out of local races are now trying to influence school board contests across the country, using tactics more typical of elections with higher stakes.

Republicans, and particularly the wing of the party that still supports former President Donald Trump, have come to see local races as a way to energize their base and propel voters to the polls — part of what some leaders have called a “precinct strategy.” Sen. Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican, last year encouraged residents to “take back our school boards, our county boards, our city councils.”

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, speaking on his “War Room” podcast last May, said: “The path to save the nation is very simple. It’s going to go through the school boards.”

“It’s the precinct committees. It’s you. It’s upon your shoulders,” he added, warning that “cultural Marxism” is being introduced in schools and promising a Tea Party-like revolt by parents of schoolchildren.

In Wisconsin, as elsewhere, some school board members and other school officials have quit without finishing their terms, saying that the anger directed their way has made serving untenable. Others have declined to run for reelection.

In Eau Claire, school board President Tim Nordin, who received the death threat, is standing firm and running for reelection. “This is Eau Claire’s election,” he said in a statement. “Others want to control this election by inciting fear in you and driving votes with outside money and news coverage. They, quite literally, are trying to threaten us into submission. I remain unbowed.”

The three conservative candidates did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Michael Ford, an associate professor of public administration at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh who studies school board races, said it’s not surprising that the state, the birthplace of school vouchers and home to one of the most robust open-enrollment public school choice programs in the country, would be a focus for school board elections.

“We always, traditionally, are on the front lines of the changes in education policy, especially those that are highly premised on parental engagement,” he said. “I think it’s logical other states that have looked at Wisconsin as a pioneer on these things would look again.”

Parents, who during the pandemic saw their children struggle with remote learning and other issues, are demanding more control over school management and curriculum decisions. The backlash against mask-wearing by students has played neatly into conservative themes of parental freedom.

Some political observers and academics worry that the politicization of local offices will make it harder to deliver essential school services.

“It makes progress impossible,” Ford said.

Wisconsin school board races at times have had partisan undertones, but the issues at play have largely centered on controlling taxes and paring the benefits educators received.

Things began to change about a decade ago. That’s when Wisconsin school board candidates who had signed petitions to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker over his push to limit collective bargaining for public employees became targets of conservative talk radio. On the other side, the state’s largest teachers union typically vetted and endorsed candidates it believed would support its aims at the bargaining table.

Today, school board elections are more heated and personal — framed in terms of saving schools, saving children and saving America. Also mentioned: COVID-19 protocols, critical race theory, equity, “divisive curriculum,” library book bans and parental rights.

Rebecca Kleefisch, the former lieutenant governor under Walker who is running for the GOP nomination for governor, recently endorsed 115 local candidates she calls conservatives, including 48 school board candidates — a product of two years of work recruiting and training people for local races. Her campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Political experts say it is highly unusual for gubernatorial candidates to endorse school board candidates, except perhaps in their hometown. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has not done so. “The governor generally has not gotten involved in nonpartisan races in Wisconsin,” his communications office said in an email.

Another sign this spring that the school board races are taking on a more partisan tone: Rather than campaigning as individuals, candidates in many of the state’s population centers are running on slates with common platforms and talking points.

“Attention Conservative Voters Don’t Stay Home: Vote For all Four Candidates,” a flyer for the village of Sussex states. Paid for by the Republican Party of Waukesha County, it features the names and photos of two candidates for village trustee and two for the school board.

Campaign materials and literature about critical race theory are on display at a forum on Wednesday for Waukesha County conservative school board candidates. (Taylor Glascock, special to ProPublica)

A particular focus for Wisconsin Republicans has been the traditionally conservative communities ringing Milwaukee known as the WOW counties: Washington, Ozaukee and Waukesha.

The counties have shown some liberal leanings of late. In much of the area, Trump’s support slipped from 2016 to 2020. Biden even won the city of Cedarburg, in Ozaukee County, though by just 19 votes.

Campaign finance records filed to date show the Republican Party of Waukesha County has funneled at least $10,000 into elections in nine school districts in that county alone.

The Patriots of Ozaukee — a newly formed organization dedicated to “promoting conservative values and asserting our Constitutional rights” — is endorsing candidates in school board and municipal races.

The Patriots of Ozaukee did not respond to requests for comment.

National conservative advocacy groups, with members in Wisconsin and elsewhere, also are having an influence on local school district races in the state. They include Moms for Liberty, which has a chapter in Kenosha and on its Facebook page has recommended three of the six candidates running for school board.

“Our mission is preserving America through unifying, educating and empowering parents to preserve their rights at every level of government,” said Amanda Nedweski, the organization’s co-chair in Kenosha and an outspoken critic of the Kenosha Unified School District’s board.

“We attend meetings. We do research. We do a lot of public record requests,” she said. The tax-exempt organization only recently started asking for dues of $25 per year.

Another group urging greater activism is the Phoenix-based Turning Point USA, which has conservative political clubs on high school and college campuses nationwide. It does not endorse or fund candidates, but has a “school board watchlist” that names districts across the country it says push “Leftist, racist and anti-American propaganda.” Its website lists nine Wisconsin districts.

The group uses its watchlist to highlight mask mandates, diversity and other matters, Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet said. “Those types of issues are obviously massively important to parents and other stakeholders in the community, and it’s not always easy to find out who supports what,” he said.

In Ozaukee County’s Mequon-Thiensville School District in the suburbs north of Milwaukee, one of the organizers of an unsuccessful recall election last fall that targeted four school board members is again seeking a board seat. Scarlett Johnson, the former vice president of the Wisconsin chapter of No Left Turn in Education, has said that she wants to bring a fresh perspective to the board.

“I think education has changed,” she said. “I think the way that parents look at education has changed. I think teachers are very frustrated as well. And so that’s why I say the status quo is just not going to work anymore. And I don’t get the feeling that our current board and our administrators really understand that.”

The recall effort was notable because it drew contributions from two out-of-state billionaires: $6,000 from Illinois billionaire Richard Uihlein, a Trump supporter and founder and CEO of Uline, a Wisconsin shipping supplies company, and $1,650 from the Chicago hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin. Johnson said members of the recall effort simply wrote letters to the two men asking for donations.

Representatives for Uihlein and Griffin did not respond to requests for comment.

Altogether, the recall effort brought in more than $58,000 in contributions.

A coalition of parents opposing the recall raised more than $36,000, according to campaign finance reports.

Both sides spent money largely on Facebook ads, direct mail, radio ads and yard signs.

Nicole Angresano, a leader in the coalition that turned back the recall, resents the coordinated attacks on the top-rated district. “I don’t think infuriating is hyperbole,” she said. “It’s infuriating to me.”

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by Ian MacDougall

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A bipartisan group of senators announced a bill this week aimed at curtailing the risk of improper influence when companies do work for both the federal government and businesses or other clients. Under the legislation, federal agencies would require prospective contractors to disclose business relationships with “public, private, domestic, and foreign entities” that might pose a conflict of interest.

Existing federal rules already require the disclosure of actual or potential conflicts, which U.S. government agencies rely on to determine whether the situation can be mitigated or should disqualify a company from working on a given project. But most attention has focused on conflicts arising from work on different federal government projects. The question of how the existing rules apply to a contractor’s corporate clients is an issue that has received scant attention until recently, experts in contracting law say, and the new legislation seeks to remove any ambiguity around whether companies have to disclose possible conflicts arising from private-sector work.

In a press release, the bill’s sponsors cited a ProPublica report on the consulting giant McKinsey & Company and its work for the Food and Drug Administration. For over a decade, starting in 2008, McKinsey brought in tens of millions of dollars advising the division of the FDA responsible for drug regulation on a range of matters that directly affected the pharmaceutical industry, such as overhauling drug-approval processes and assessing tools used to monitor drug safety.

Yet the consultancy, which is known for maintaining a veil of secrecy around its client list, never disclosed to the FDA that other McKinsey consulting teams were simultaneously working for some of the country’s largest pharmaceutical companies. McKinsey’s commercial clients at the time included companies, such as Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson, that were responsible for manufacturing and distributing the opioids that decimated communities nationwide. In some instances, McKinsey consultants working for drugmakers even helped their clients ward off more robust FDA oversight. According to the sponsors of the new bill, “This has called into question whether consultants from McKinsey were providing biased advice to the FDA, and whether that advice was influenced by their relationship with the drug makers whose business practices are a root cause of the opioid epidemic.”

McKinsey’s extensive consulting for opioid makers began to emerge in 2019, when ProPublica first reported on it. Among the firm’s engagements was to help Purdue Pharma “turbocharge,” in McKinsey’s words, sales of the company’s flagship painkiller, the highly addictive OxyContin. Last year, McKinsey paid nearly $600 million to settle legal claims related to its opioid work, acknowledged in a statement that its efforts for Purdue “fell short” of the firm’s own standards and pledged not to take on opioid-related projects going forward. Also last year, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform launched an investigation into McKinsey’s role in the opioid epidemic and its potential conflicts of interest.

“We have directly seen the danger that conflicts of interest can pose in government contracting, such as when the consulting firm McKinsey worked for opioid manufacturers at the same time it was working for the FDA on opioid-related projects,” Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., one of the bill’s sponsors, said in the press release announcing the legislation. “Our bipartisan bill would help ensure that companies that enter into a contract with the government are acting in the best interest of the American people.”

The other sponsors of the legislation, which is titled the Preventing Organizational Conflicts of Interest in Federal Acquisition Act, are Sens. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa; Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa; and Gary Peters, D.-Mich., who chairs the Senate body considering the bill, the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

McKinsey spokesman Neil Grace contended in a statement to ProPublica that the firm was under no obligation to disclose its work for drug companies. (McKinsey is a sponsor of ProPublica events.) “Since McKinsey has not advised the FDA on regulatory policy or on specific pharmaceutical products, our consulting engagements with pharmaceutical companies did not create a conflict of interest with McKinsey’s consulting work for the FDA,” Grace said. “Given the absence of a conflict of interest, there was no requirement for any McKinsey disclosure.”

There’s no evidence that McKinsey consultants working at the FDA took steps to benefit the firm’s commercial clients. Yet existing federal procurement rules require contractors to disclose relationships that present not only actual but also potential conflicts of interest, as well as “the existence of any facts that may cause a reasonably prudent person to question the contractor’s impartiality because of the appearance or existence of bias.” Those rules were incorporated into McKinsey’s FDA contracts, which ProPublica obtained after filing a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.

A spokeswoman for the FDA, Lauren-Jei McCarthy, declined to comment. The agency previously told ProPublica that it takes its “role awarding contracts seriously” and works “to ensure the agency maintains high standards of integrity” under federal procurement rules. Last fall, an FDA official wrote in a response to inquiries from Hassan that the agency was not aware of McKinsey’s work for opioid companies until news reports on the subject emerged.

Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean and government procurement law expert at George Washington University Law School, called the legislation a welcome development. As government contractors have merged in recent decades, the industry has grown more concentrated, increasing the risk of conflicts of interest, and the federal contracting industry, Tillipman said, could use clearer guidance on disclosure requirements tied to the private-sector work of government contractors.

“Any attempt to address these growing problems is a good thing,” Tillipman said, “and important to ensuring that we reduce these risks in the government procurement system.”

by Abigail Kramer, THE CITY

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

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New York state has failed to provide children on Medicaid with the mental health care they are entitled to by law, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court Thursday by two adolescents acting on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Medicaid-eligible kids.

As a result, the lawsuit alleges, young people with serious mental health conditions suffer unnecessarily, ending up in hospitals and residential treatment programs because they don’t have access to services that would keep them safe at home.

New York’s mental health system for children “is languishing in a state of dysfunction, providing inadequate, inaccessible, and woefully underfunded mental health services,” according to the complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Central Islip, Long Island, by attorneys from the advocacy groups Disability Rights New York, Children’s Rights and the National Health Law Program, as well as the law firm Proskauer Rose LLP.

THE CITY and ProPublica reported Monday how New York’s vow to transform mental health care for children has left young people with inadequate access to outpatient treatment and hospital care. Under a plan launched in 2014 by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York cut the number of state-run children’s psychiatric hospital beds by nearly a third. While the plan shifted savings into outpatient and community-based services, it did not reduce demand for hospitalization in the first five years, and it increased the wait time for hospital beds for children with mental health emergencies.

For kids with serious mental health conditions, the stakes are life and death, said the mother of a plaintiff in the case, who lives on Long Island. “If I left it up to the system, my son would be gone already,“ the mother, who is identified by the initials P.K. in the complaint, told THE CITY and ProPublica.

Her son, who is now 15 years old, first showed signs of mental health problems when he was still a toddler. He was hospitalized for a psychiatric emergency when he was 4 years old, then cycled in and out of hospitals approximately 16 times before he was 10 — often as the result of violent episodes in which he hallucinated and tried to hurt himself or his mother, P.K. said. His symptoms grew frightening enough that he spent two years, from ages 10 to 12, in a residential treatment program for kids with very serious mental health conditions.

At the residential program, he learned skills to cope with his symptoms and was taken off of several psychiatric medications, his mother said. Eventually, he was discharged with a plan to receive intensive mental health services that were supposed to help him stay well at home.

But when the mother contacted the mental health agencies in her area, she was told that all the programs were full. “I’m calling everyone, and there’s nothing,” she told THE CITY and ProPublica. Her son went months without getting any home-based mental health services at all, according to the lawsuit. When providers were finally assigned to his case, they disappeared after a session or two, moving on to other jobs, the mother said. “It’s just: Boom, they’re gone. They never even really got started.”

While she struggled to find help for her son, she watched him become dangerously ill. He started cutting himself, she said, and ended up in emergency rooms and hospital beds after multiple suicide attempts. “I worry every day that I’m going to go home and not find my son alive,” she said. “I check on him at night like he’s a newborn. Is he breathing? Is he OK? It’s heartbreaking. I still cry every day.”

“I honestly feel if he had those services when he came home, he’d be in a whole different place today,” she continued. “I know he’s been failed by the system. I’ve been fighting and fighting. But my heart also says, if something happens, it’s my fault. Ultimately, I’m his mother. That’s my child.”

“Too Late for Us”

New York has long known that its mental health system fails to meet kids’ needs, according to the lawsuit, which names as defendants the commissioner of New York’s Department of Health, Mary Bassett, and the commissioner of the state’s Office of Mental Health, Ann Sullivan.

Both DOH and OMH declined to comment on pending litigation.

Under federal rules, the state is required to provide intensive mental health services to any child with a medical need who is enrolled in Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program that covers more than 2.2 million people under age 21 in New York. The services are supposed to be delivered in kids’ homes, schools and other places a child would naturally be — a model that mental health care providers say works better for many kids with serious challenges than requiring them to sit in clinicians’ offices like small adults.

In 2011, a Medicaid Redesign Team established by Cuomo acknowledged that the state’s mental health system was underfunded and inadequate, with “little accountability for the provision of quality care and for improved outcomes for patients/consumers.” As a result, the work group found, “harmful and costly developmental trajectories continue to be formed early in life.”

In response, the state created two new sets of services that were supposed to become available to hundreds of thousands of children. The first, called Children and Family Treatment and Support Services, would provide clinical help to any child on Medicaid who had a medical need. Kids would have access not only to in-home therapy, but also to providers who would take them out into the community so they could work on coping skills in public and to mental health professionals who could respond to a crisis, making it less likely that a family would have to call the police for help with a violent or suicidal child.

The second package, called Home and Community Based Services, would offer intensive support to kids at imminent risk of ending up in a hospital or residential program.

But, the lawsuit alleges, while the state “purports” to make these services available, they aren’t intensive enough to meet the requirements of federal law. And even if they were, the programs aren’t available to anywhere near the number of kids who are entitled to them.

The state does not track the number of kids who sit on waitlists for mental health care, but data from OMH shows that community-based services reach a tiny fraction of the kids who are supposed to receive them.

In 2017, OMH projected that more than 200,000 children and adolescents in the state Medicaid program have a medical need for Children and Family Treatment and Support Services. In 2020, fewer than 16,000 children received those services. That’s less than 8% of eligible kids, according to OMH data cited in the complaint.

Similarly, the state estimated that 65,000 children and adolescents would need its more intensive Home and Community Based Services. As of July 2020, approximately one-tenth of that number was enrolled in the programs, according to the complaint.

Without the care they are entitled to, young people’s “mental health conditions continue to deteriorate, causing disruption and harm to the children, their education, their families and relationships, their future adulthood, and their very lives,” the lawsuit charges. The plaintiffs are asking that a judge require the state to provide kids with the mental health services mandated by federal law.

The mother of the 15-year-old plaintiff said she thinks her son may have missed his chance to benefit from the kinds of services he was supposed to receive when he came home from the residential treatment program three years ago. “Those were prime years for him,” she said. “He missed all those years of developing, when he should have been learning social skills and how to cope.”

“I just hope this lawsuit gets up there and makes a difference,” she said. “It’s a little too late for us, but hopefully it’s not too late for others.”

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The law firm Proskauer Rose has provided ProPublica with pro bono counseling on employment matters.

by Jeremy Kohler, ProPublica, and Tom Scheck, APM Reports

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This story is a collaboration between ProPublica and APM Reports.

When the final numbers showed that St. Louis had reduced its murders last year while other big cities were hitting records, city officials said their success was due to smart use of crime data and effective anti-violence programs.

But over the past two years, St. Louis has quietly lowered its murder count in another way: classifying more than three dozen killings as what are termed justifiable homicides, sometimes in apparent violation of FBI guidelines for reporting crimes, a ProPublica/APM Reports investigation found.

And for a handful of slayings, the department has simply omitted the cases from its annual totals.

From 2010 through 2019, St. Louis police classified an average of six killings a year by private citizens as justifiable homicides, meaning incidents in which someone killed another person who was committing a serious criminal offense. Those cases were not counted in the city’s official murder tally.

In 2020, they counted at least 17 that way. In 2021, the number jumped to at least 22. Had just a handful of those justifiable homicides been classified as murders, St. Louis might have set its all-time murder record in 2020 and had its second highest annual total in 27 years in 2021 — changes that might have altered the conversation about the city’s success in reducing violent crime.

The news organizations found that over the two years, detectives sought murder charges in at least five cases labeled as justified. Prosecutors declined to file charges in four of them; in the fifth, prosecutors later charged a suspect with murder, but the case was still counted in police statistics as a justifiable homicide. FBI guidelines say police must count murders based on results from their investigation, regardless of a prosecutor’s action.

The news organizations’ examination of crime statistics doesn’t alter the overall picture of the city’s decline in murder last year — from what the department reported as 263 in 2020 to 198 last year, a drop of nearly 25%. But it adds important context to that picture, showing the city’s murder count is becoming less reliable as a measure of the number of lives that ended in violence.

In cities that have struggled to contain violent crime, as St. Louis has, the murder count is a rolling report card that is used to measure the success or failure of elected leaders and the police department.

The murder tally has long been the first item of business at the department’s Monday morning media briefing, which catalogs weekend violence. So far this year, the reduction in homicides has continued. But the rise in slayings classified as justifiable has not received much attention from the public.

When the murder count goes up, companies talk about leaving the city, residents consider moving away and local politicians debate new anti-crime measures. Officials in St. Louis even considered using surveillance aircraft to battle a reported rise in street violence. When the murder count goes down, officials cite it as an example of their sound leadership.

Two years ago, the issue of the city’s crime rate became especially urgent, with the metro area’s largest public company, the health care company Centene, getting involved. In November 2020, according to records, Jim Brown, a consultant to then-Mayor Lyda Krewson, suggested in an email to a consultant — who was working for Centene to evaluate the police department — that St. Louis could better manage the issue by combining its data with the much larger suburban St. Louis County.

If the city and county reported their crime data together, Brown wrote, “our sky high murder rates and other crimes statistics would come down considerably.”

Police compile and analyze data to track crime trends and guide crime-fighting strategies, so it’s imperative they be accurate and carry the same meaning from year to year, said Victor St. John, an assistant professor of criminology at Saint Louis University. When those statistics are used as a political measure, he said, “you can switch up the definitions, which will change what the trends look like and can confuse, intentionally or unintentionally, anyone looking at changes in the numbers.”

Jane Dueker, the lawyer and lobbyist for the St. Louis Police Officers Association, the union that represents rank-and-file officers, said she believed political pressure played a role in how the city counted murders.

“When you have such a high jump in justifiable homicide,” she said, “that’s definitely a red flag.”

Dan Isom, the city’s interim public safety director, disagreed, calling Dueker’s charge that politics colors how the city compiles crime data “yet another baseless accusation against the Police Department not based in reality.”

The investigation is based in part on 12 years of data provided by the department through a public records request. Some of the killings clearly appeared to be justified, based on the evidence laid out in police reports. And the department has also sometimes counted murders even in cases where prosecutors declined to press charges.

The department told APM Reports and ProPublica that its own data on how individual cases were classified might not be accurate, but it repeatedly failed to respond to requests to correct inaccuracies. It said it considers a broad range of evidence before making a decision and consults prosecutors, but refused to discuss specific cases.

“While the Circuit Attorney’s Office has the final say in the decision to prosecute, our department makes the final determination as to whether an incident is classified as criminal or justifiable homicide,” police spokesperson Evita Caldwell said in a statement. “This decision is ultimately made by the investigator, the supervisor, the commander of the Homicide Division, as well as the Commander of the Bureau of Investigative Services.”

Through a spokesperson, the office of St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner declined to comment. Prosecutors are independent from the police department and not involved in deciding how cases are classified for crime statistics.

A Shifting Definition of Murder

FBI crime reporting standards instruct police departments to count as a murder any death that results from a fight, argument, quarrel, assault or commission of a crime. The FBI defines a justifiable homicide more narrowly: a situation where an officer on duty kills a perpetrator of a serious crime or when a private citizen kills a perpetrator during the commission of a serious crime.

An example is when a homeowner fatally shoots someone who has broken into their home.

It’s difficult to tell if St. Louis is an outlier in reporting justifiable homicide by private citizens. Nationally, it is rare for police departments to count such cases: Just 405 total were reported to the FBI in 2020, compared with more than 17,000 murders the same year, the most recent year for which data was available.

While cities such as Indianapolis and Phoenix have recorded numbers of justifiable homicides by private citizens that are comparable to St. Louis’ numbers, police in Chicago, Kansas City and Baltimore did not report any in 2021. In Kansas City, which saw its second-highest murder total last year, police said they classify only officer-involved shootings as justifiable.

“That’s the whole idea behind uniform crime reporting, it’s supposed to be the same for everybody, and isn’t, especially with regard to this kind of subtle distinction” of determining who is at fault in each case, said Gary Kleck, a professor emeritus at Florida State University, who has studied justifiable homicide.

St. Louis Chief of Police John Hayden Jr. acknowledged the rise in justifiable homicides in a January interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, attributing the rise to changes in Missouri law. Those changes, he said, provided more latitude for people who carry weapons and use them in what they say is self-defense than a change in criteria by the department.

“The analysis of whether or not something is justified, that has not changed,” Hayden said. But when someone claims they acted in self-defense, he said, “I would say that makes the analysis very challenging.”

FBI guidelines advise against classifying a killing as justifiable based solely on a suspect’s claim they acted in self-defense.

“A claim of self-defense alone is not sufficient; there must be corroborating evidence to substantiate the claim,” an official with the FBI’s Global Law Enforcement Support Section said in a statement. “The agency must determine if there is corroborating evidence to classify the incident as a justifiable homicide. The investigation must determine the degree of responsibility of the participants.”

The investigation also found St. Louis police put in place procedures to classify some killings as justifiable even when detectives believe the killing was unjustified but prosecutors decline to bring charges because they believe a suspect could reasonably claim self-defense.

A memo from the homicide commander to detectives says detectives should review such cases to decide if they will be counted as murders.

This memo from the St. Louis homicide commander to homicide detectives earlier this year details how the department will decide whether to count a murder when detectives believe the killing was unjustified but prosecutors believe a defendant could make a self-defense claim. The FBI says police are supposed to base the decision on their own investigation. (Memo obtained by ProPublica and APM Reports)

“The FBI is very clear that it doesn’t matter what the prosecutors think,” said Jacob Kaplan, a Princeton University criminologist and the chief data scientist at Research on Policing Reform and Accountability. “These are police statistics. If they think it’s a murder, then it’s a murder. Even if the prosecutor later says this isn’t a murder, like a prosecutor drops the charges, that doesn’t matter.”

Dueker, the police union lawyer, said detectives believe the practice undermines their work and the integrity of crime data.

A Valuable Life

In October 2020, St. Louis police responded to a report of a car crash and found Staveion Durham shot in the chest. Police said that they were told that Durham and others in the car had shot at each other.

Three months after the incident, prosecutors charged one of the men in the crash, Marlon Hampton, with second-degree murder and other charges.

Dueker pointed out the contradiction between the department’s classification of the killing as justifiable and the murder charge against Hampton. She said if she were Hampton’s attorney, the department’s classification of the homicide as justifiable “would be Exhibit A.” Hampton’s attorney, Tyson Cole, said he could not comment on the case except that he was aware the police had classified the death as a justifiable homicide.

In another case in which detectives sought murder charges but police classified the killing as justifiable, Christopher Alexander was shot to death on March 8, 2020, by Jamal Johnson.

Alexander’s sister Sierra Alexander said in an interview that before the shooting, which she witnessed, her brother had taken drugs and was acting aggressively, choking one of her friends before a group of friends stopped him.

The medical examiner’s investigator said Alexander also pistol-whipped a man during the incident. A video of the incident from a surveillance camera showed that with a gun in his hand, Alexander lunged at and shoved another man, Jamal Johnson, who also had a gun, video shows. Johnson then shot Alexander several times.

Sierra Alexander said a detective told her he believed the case was murder. Police sought to charge Johnson with murder and other charges, but prosecutors took the case to a grand jury, which indicted Johnson for gun possession but not murder. Johnson pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years probation.

Johnson’s lawyer, Kristi Flint, said Johnson was well within his rights to shoot Alexander and that police were wrong to seek murder charges against him.

“When the detective arrested Mr. Johnson, he knew that my client had acted in self-defense,” Flint said. “Regardless of the facts, my client will now have an arrest for murder on his record.”

Precious Cunningham’s death, likewise, was not classified as a murder. She was driving two teens and two toddlers one afternoon in March 2020 when she got caught between two cars engaged in a gun battle.

Cunningham wasn’t shot, but she crashed, was ejected from the car and was killed. St. Louis police commanders said the case highlighted the dangerous reality of life in St. Louis: Gunfights can break out at any time and motorists should take extra precautions in the city. No one has been charged in the case.

“I don’t understand why she’s not even listed,” said Cunningham’s cousin, Tikisha Johnson. “Her life was just as valuable as anybody else’s on that list.”

The department has also made a change to how it counts some murders — which has led to several cases being left out of the totals that might have been counted in past years. In many cases when a victim was assaulted in one year and died in a subsequent year, the department historically counted the murder in the year of death. In 2018, for example, the police counted the murder of a store owner who died after having been shot more than two years before.

But after switching at the end of 2020 to the FBI’s next-generation reporting system, which lets departments amend crime data after it’s been reported, St. Louis police said they would now count it in the year of the initial incident, not when the victim died. That means the city’s murder total is not a final count when the mayor announces it at year’s end. Since the city said it had 195 murders in 2021, the tally has grown by three people who died this year from wounds suffered in shootings last year.

But St. Louis police are not amending years before 2021. As a result, at least nine murder victims are not counted in any year. Among them is 17-year-old Cameron Edwards, who was wounded in a shooting in November 2020 and died from his injuries in December 2021, according to records.

The Image of a City

Beyond the question of how killings are counted lies another question: Do these judgment calls about how to classify a killing influence the accuracy of a figure that people use to measure a city’s level of violence?

The fatal shooting of Jason Dudley on Jan. 2, 2020, goes to the heart of that question. The day after Jeffrey Brown Jr.’s car was stolen, Brown found it parked near his mother’s home. When he contacted the police, they told him to drive it home with a spare key and to secure it with an anti-theft device. But because he believed the thief also had gotten his mother’s house key when he stole the car, Brown decided to wait to confront anyone who came back for the car.

That was Dudley, who according to his family had a history of drug abuse. Brown told police he saw Dudley use the car key to open the driver’s door, dashed over to confront him, then pulled him out of the car and held him at gunpoint.

Brown, according to a video of the interrogation the Dudley family provided, told police that Dudley said to him several times, “You don’t have to do this.”

He said Dudley repeatedly tried to escape. Brown, according to the interrogation video, even demonstrated for a detective how he held the gun to Dudley’s back and ordered him to put his hands on the car. But Dudley turned and tried to wrestle away the gun.

Brown told police that he feared “it was him or me.” He said he had his finger on the trigger and the gun “went off.” Dudley collapsed on the corner with a gunshot wound to the head.

Dudley’s family insisted the killing was murder. They said Brown had no evidence that Dudley had stolen the car, had no legal right to hold him and could have called the police. Brown, they said, had gotten back his car. Under the circumstances, the family said, Dudley had as much right to defend himself as Brown. Brown did not respond to messages left with both of his parents. The detective in the case also did not respond to a request for comment.

Peter Joy, a professor at Washington University School of Law, said that if Dudley had gotten the upper hand, taken the gun and killed Brown, he also would have had a strong argument that he had a right to stand his ground, as Missouri law provides. Prosecutors might have declined to charge him with murder as well.

“What strikes me is how bad the ‘stand your ground’ law is, but also how reluctant people in law enforcement and prosecutors are to pursue cases that probably should be pursued but where it’s going to be difficult to prove, and where they are basically deferring to the fact that it’s going to be difficult so they just decide not to bring the case,” said Joy, an expert in legal ethics and criminal justice.

St. John, the criminologist at Saint Louis University, said there were “a lot of things wrong here.” How many cases like these, he wondered, were being included in the increasing numbers of justifiable homicides? “I don’t know if that’s justifiable in any way, and those numbers hide it.”

The detective, according to a video of Brown’s interrogation that Dudley’s family obtained, told Brown the homicide unit was busy. Dudley was the seventh homicide in two days. He said he would discuss the case with a prosecutor but “I don’t think you have anything to worry about, OK?”

Months after the killing, the police classified the death as a justifiable homicide.

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by Lydia DePillis

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A few days after the inauguration of President Joe Biden, Michal Freedhoff settled into her cramped home office in a suburb of Washington, D.C., to get to work as the nation’s new top chemical regulator.

It was a key role, charged with protecting Americans from toxic substances used in agriculture and manufacturing. But going back decades, the office had gained a reputation for being captured by the companies it regulated. Under the Trump administration, the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, like many federal agencies, had taken a hard turn away from science. Important new rules, years in the making, had been delayed or diluted.

In Freedhoff, Biden had found a public servant steeped in the risks of chemicals and what it takes to police them. Testaments to her drive surround her desk. On one wall hangs a framed front page of The Washington Post from the day that automakers struck a deal she helped broker with California on vehicle emissions standards; on another is an original copy of a 2016 law that gave the Environmental Protection Agency sweeping new authority to protect people from toxic substances. Seven senators had signed it, thanking her personally.

Freedhoff has long kept up a frenetic pace. The mother of four would stay out late for work events and then send emails at 4 a.m. before heading out on a pre-dawn bike ride. And she knew her new job would require a massive cleanup effort, working with a traumatized staff to rework decisions the Trump administration had pushed through based on skewed science. She was guaranteed just four years, and she had a list of critical to-dos that ranged from finally banning asbestos to fixing the process for authorizing new chemicals. A clock was ticking.

When Freedhoff dug in, what she found was often just … weird. Like a pile of simple, low-level tasks that had ended up on her desk: two hundred perfunctory notices that hadn’t been sent to the federal register, the daily log of official government actions. Fifteen months worth of new chemical rules that had been approved but not publicly announced. They weren’t controversial. It’s just that nobody but the office head had been allowed to click a button.

Gradually, Freedhoff, a hyperlogical fast talker who occasionally flashes a big smile when something amuses her, realized that her predecessor under then-President Donald Trump simply hadn’t delegated routine duties — a symptom of the distrust within the office between career employees and political appointees.

In those first strange weeks, Freedhoff would gaze out on a sea of staffers’ faces filling a Microsoft Teams grid on her screen and ask why something happened the way it did. No one would respond. Later, she’d learn that there was no thoughtful answer to “why”; the person responsible was simply following orders. Often, Freedhoff found, staff had been detailed to trivial projects to help companies that had relationships with Trump appointees.

“We thought we knew which rules were messed with, we thought we knew which policies and which offices were shrunk,” Freedhoff mused last fall, sitting on a bench in the courtyard outside the EPA’s imposing headquarters in Washington. “But I found the damage to be a lot more pervasive than that.”

A signed copy of the 2016 amendments to the Toxic Substances Control Act, which Freedhoff shepherded to President Barack Obama’s desk. (Nate Palmer, special to ProPublica)

There’s a saying in Washington that “personnel is policy”: Political appointees in federal agencies are essential to carrying out the president’s plans. With Biden’s legislative agenda stalled, progressives are pushing people like Freedhoff to make good on the president’s promise that government can tackle big problems again.

Biden’s own campaign slogan had been to “build back better.” But Freedhoff’s first year has been a process of learning just how much she’d need to build just to get back to the way things were before Trump arrived. She told me about it in a series of interviews that provide a window into the Biden administration’s struggles to deliver on the president’s promises.

“We all just assumed that everything would sort of snap back to normal,” said Freedhoff, who has been sleeping even less than usual these days. “There was this initial burst of, ‘Thank God, we made it,’ and there were expectations that things would change more quickly than they have.”

Her budget only recently got a small boost, after years of starvation. Her staff remains overstretched. Unexpected roadblocks have cropped up, both inside and outside the agency, hampering her ability to execute decisions. And now, while they acknowledge the positive steps taken so far, the environmentalists she once worked alongside are increasingly voicing frustration that Freedhoff isn’t doing enough.

“I’m concerned,” said Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “I firmly believe that she is committed to protecting public health and the environment. I think the jury’s still out as to where they’re going, and there’s been enough things that are worrisome.”

Freedhoff got her political education in an era when environmental protections were in retreat, and she quickly learned how to operate in a world where a hold-your-nose compromise was often the best-case scenario.

She had grown up in Toronto as a theater kid, attending a high school for the performing arts. Freedhoff took up science in college, taking a cue from her mother, who was a professor of theoretical physics. After Michal Freedhoff received a doctorate in chemistry in 1995, she moved to Washington and landed a job at the American Institute of Physics. There, she translated science into language that policymakers could understand, trying to protect basic research funding from a Republican drive to slice budgets.

Freedhoff with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, then-Rep. Ed Markey, and Freedhoff’s two daughters in 2007. (Courtesy of Michal Freedhoff)

Freedhoff soon jumped to Congress to handle science policy for then-Rep. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, dealing with everything from nuclear waste to vehicle emissions standards. She followed Markey to the Senate in 2013 and worked her way up to become director of oversight on the powerful Environment and Public Works committee.

By then, the limits of the nation’s main chemical safety law were all too obvious. The 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, was never as strong as its older siblings, the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act. What power it did have had been largely gutted in 1991, when an appeals court voided the EPA’s attempt to ban asbestos.

Freedhoff was haunted by stories about workers who’d died from exposure to chemicals that the EPA had never managed to take off the market, driving her to act.

“I remember meeting with families of young adults, who were trained, properly equipped, wore respirators and nevertheless dropped dead while refinishing someone’s bathtub from methylene chloride poisoning,” Freedhoff recalled. “The law was broken for so long.”

Even chemical manufacturers were looking to strengthen safety laws to bolster public confidence in their products. So Freedhoff began working with a close-knit, bipartisan group of staffers to craft an overhaul of the TSCA, relentlessly pushing both sides until they found something they could all live with.

“Trying to solve problems is at her core,” said Dimitri Karakitsos, who was formerly a counselor for Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe and now lobbies for industry. “Because it’s not ideological, it’s like, ‘How do we fix this.’” (Freedhoff also remains friends with Ryan Jackson, the committee’s Republican staff director who became the EPA’s chief of staff under Trump and now works for the National Mining Association.)

The amended law wasn’t perfect, but it was a step forward. It mandated new risk evaluations of chemicals already in use to decide if they should be restricted. It also made it easier for the EPA to order companies to test their chemicals to prove they are safe. In exchange, the chemical industry got a uniform federal regime that could preempt state governments from imposing their own rules — which Freedhoff called the “price tag” for passage.

After the bill was signed in June 2016, Freedhoff recalled talking to a lobbyist at one of the many parties that the group of staffers and interest groups threw to celebrate. He asked if she’d thought of running the toxics office in a prospective Hillary Clinton administration, which would implement the law she helped write. “It didn’t even occur to me,” Freedhoff told me later. But she warmed to the idea.

Instead, after Clinton lost, Freedhoff sat in her Senate office, working furiously to thwart the new administration’s efforts to weaken chemical regulations. When Trump picked a notoriously industry-friendly toxicologist to lead the chemicals office, she made sure enough Republican senators opposed the nomination to force the White House to withdraw the name. After that rare defeat, Trump subbed in a widely respected environmental lawyer.

But the office still finalized chemical risk evaluations that ignored harms to vulnerable populations. Another division, led by an official hired straight from DuPont, sped new chemicals through the vetting process.

Freedhoff wrote letters and issued warnings as key tasks prescribed by the new law were carried out very differently from how she had intended. “This is where I’m going to become the skunk at the garden party again,” she said on a panel with consultants and agency officials in the summer of 2020, predicting that many actions the agency had undertaken would have to be redone because they didn’t comply with the law.

One of the many fronts on which Freedhoff fought the Trump administration — and that she would later inherit responsibility for when she went to work for Biden — is the spread of a class of toxics known as “forever chemicals.”

So named because they don’t break down in the environment over time, these per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (or PFAS) have been used for decades to repel liquids in products such as food packaging and nonstick pans. The chemicals have also found their way into most Americans’ blood. In higher concentrations, they’ve been associated with an array of health problems, including several cancers, autoimmune disorders and fertility challenges.

As a Senate staffer, Freedhoff chastised the Trump EPA for dragging its feet on regulating PFAS and helped draft legislation that would force the agency to take action. Freedhoff had also already strengthened another tool that could help address PFAS: The 2016 TSCA amendments bolstered the agency’s authority to order chemical manufacturers to pay for testing regarding the effects of their products.

It seemed like the perfect tool for one community that was facing a PFAS disaster.

In 2016, researchers determined that North Carolina’s Cape Fear River contained alarming levels of several PFAS, potentially affecting 300,000 people. Many of the substances came from Fayetteville Works, a chemical manufacturing plant owned by Chemours, which spun out of DuPont in 2015. Critically, the local public utilities weren’t able to filter the chemicals out.

The discovery prompted a flurry of activism as residents mobilized to secure safe drinking water. In 2019, the state brokered a consent order that required the company to essentially stop releasing the chemicals. But it did nothing to help Cape Fear residents understand what decades of exposure to Chemours’ emissions meant for their health.

The last time Chemours’ corporate predecessor DuPont poisoned a drinking water supply with a type of PFAS, in the early 2000s, residents of Parkersburg, West Virginia, were able to use litigation to force the company to fund large-scale tests. Ultimately, 69,000 victims participated in a study that cost DuPont $33 million. The flood of data linked the chemical to health issues including ulcerative colitis, pregnancy-induced hypertension, thyroid disease and testicular cancer.

While Cape Fear residents and the state of North Carolina have also sued Chemours and DuPont, the companies have opposed the lawsuits, and any settlement would likely take years.

But Emily Donovan, a Christian youth group leader turned local community activist, found a potential shortcut.

In traveling the country talking about what was happening in Cape Fear, she learned that the TSCA has long allowed anyone to petition the EPA to compel polluters to pay for testing. Doing so got slightly easier in 2016, thanks to the amendments Freedhoff helped craft.

Community activist Emily Donovan at her home in Leland, North Carolina. (Cornell Watson for ProPublica)

“Every time I go to conferences and talk to scientists, they say, ‘You need the statistical power to prove it. Who’s going to fund it? How about the manufacturer,’” Donovan told me. “And guess what, TSCA allows that.”

So starting in 2019, Donovan worked with a nonprofit advocacy group and scientific experts to draft a 42-page petition for testing and build a coalition to campaign for it. Along with lab and animal studies on the mixtures of PFAS in the river, they wanted tests of at least 100,000 people who had been exposed to the company’s waste.

Such tests could help answer crucial questions for people like Marianne Ashworth, a freelance translator who lives on the outskirts of Fayetteville and started receiving dozens of jugs of water from Chemours after her well tested positive for PFAS. Ashworth had discovered a fibroid in her uterus, which a recent study suggested could be linked to PFAS exposure, although Chemours says that the types of PFAS examined in the study are not among those associated with its plant. She wonders if it might have to do with showering in, washing dishes in, jumping in a swimming pool full of the contaminated well water for the past seven years.

She has two young kids and wants to know what conditions she should be on the lookout for in them. “As a parent, you blame yourself,” Ashworth said. “There’s all this extra exposure that they didn’t need. You don’t think that there’s something in my water that’s going to slowly kill us.”

Donovan’s coalition filed its petition in October of 2020. Two weeks before Trump left office, his administration denied the request. The groups responded by suing the EPA last March. But then they paused the case, hoping that Freedhoff — who had just taken over the chemical safety office — would use her authority to grant the petition after all.

In January of last year, then-acting assistant administrator Freedhoff got to work in a room off the kitchen, within shouting distance of four middle and high schoolers doing remote classes and a wriggly black puppy. Freedhoff is short — barely peeking over the wheel of her sunshine-yellow Honda Fit — with frizzy blond hair; she favors chunky necklaces, wide-leg pants and practical shoes. A copy of Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope” props up her laptop.

At Freedhoff’s confirmation hearing in May, her former colleagues in the Senate hailed her nomination. Inhofe, an arch climate skeptic, addressed her two daughters sitting behind her. “Your mama probably is the only person in America that will have equal praise from Sen. Markey and me,” Inhofe pronounced. She sailed through on a voice vote.

For Freedhoff, it was a chance to finish what she started.

“That’s what I came to do,” she told me. “It wasn’t just, ‘Write a rule for this chemical or that chemical.’ It was, ‘Implement a law that I had the opportunity to help write.’”

But before she could make progress, she almost immediately had to make a big concession to corporations.

In 2016, Congress directed the EPA to prioritize regulating one class of hazardous chemicals. The Trump administration finalized rules limiting how the substances can be used and handled just before the end of Trump’s term in January 2021. Many industries apparently didn’t realize the implications. Out of nowhere, businesses that make everything from farm equipment to semiconductors began calling and sending letters to top EPA officials warning of dire consequences if the agency didn’t delay a compliance deadline.

“My initial reaction was, ‘Are you kidding me? The first thing I have to do under TSCA is weaken a rule?’” Freedhoff said. But if they didn’t, whole product lines would have to be taken off the market until supply chains could be re-engineered. Freedhoff held up her iPhone cable. “Do you really want another charge cable? It was really that ubiquitous.” The rule was pushed back for years.

Next, Freedhoff had to figure out what to do with the Trump administration’s reviews of the first 10 chemicals that the agency had decided to take on under the overhauled TSCA. They were a rogue’s gallery of mostly still-available toxics, including asbestos, which the agency had failed to ban back in 1991. She would have to balance redoing Trump-era risk evaluations that had narrowly defined hazards and downplayed exposure with the need to get the rules finalized before the end of Biden’s term.

Freedhoff had nowhere near enough resources to get it all done.

The EPA’s funding has been sliding downward since soon after the agency was founded. The decline began in the 1980s, when the EPA spent more than double (in inflation-adjusted dollars) what it did in 2020. As a result, its staff has contracted by more than 20% since the end of Bill Clinton’s administration.

The EPA Has Less Money With Which to Implement Environmental Laws

EPA spending in 2022 dollars.

Note: 2021 spending is an estimate. (Source: Office of Management and Budget)

Congress conferred heavy new responsibilities on the chemical safety office in 2016, fully anticipating that it would need more funding — but the Trump administration never asked for it. The law even allowed the EPA to assess higher fees on companies for their chemical reviews, but the Trump administration delayed doing so and then pursued less than it could have.

That put significant strain on the staff who remained. Freedhoff learned that under Trump, the staff routinely had 4:30 p.m. meetings involving tricky scientific questions and were asked to report back with answers the next morning at 8 a.m. Still, important duties had been neglected. Part of the office, the pollution prevention division, was raided to do more pressing work that was required under the revised TSCA.

Biden’s budget proposal for 2022 promised enough money to hire 87 new people, but it was tied up with one stopgap funding measure after another, while Biden’s $1.75 trillion climate and social spending bill floundered. As time dragged on with no reinforcements, Freedhoff started to go public with her appeals.

Last October, she was called to testify before her old colleagues at the House Energy and Commerce Committee, in a room with sky-high ceilings and huge portraits of the committee’s former chairs on the walls. With a severe case of nerves, she prepared for hours, thinking about how best to convey her key message: In order to do anything that representatives might ask for — whether it was reducing the backlog of applications to approve new chemicals or finally dealing with asbestos — she needed more money.

She sat alone before the panel of politicians, facing antagonistic questions from Republicans — a startling departure from the bipartisan spirit in which the new law had passed five years earlier — and also impatience from Democrats, who wanted rules to be made faster. Each time, she answered calmly.

“It’s a series of compounding resource errors that prevent us from hiring the kinds of scientific experts we need,” she told them, measuring her words. “Everybody’s been working on a shoestring for a long time now. And that’s going to take time to get back on track.”

Within the chemicals office, Freedhoff has encouraged staff to take time off, saying that deadlines weren’t everything. Yet one deadline is critical: the 2024 election.

In previous eras, a change in party control, while certainly shifting priorities, wouldn’t necessarily derail an entire regulatory process. But if another administration like Trump’s came to power, anything not finalized before Inauguration Day could wind up being tossed.

And the delays are mounting, pushing the regulatory agenda deep into 2024. Freedhoff learned that during the Trump years, the chemicals office had clashed with others within the EPA, creating rifts that took time to smooth over. While in the Senate, she had admonished the agency to follow certain consultation procedures, which she has now realized would slow her own progress.

“This is one of those karmic things,” she said ruefully. Isn’t that how it should be? I asked. She sighed. “It is how it should be.”

David Fischer spent 10 years at the American Chemistry Council before serving as deputy chemicals chief under Trump’s EPA and then rotating back out to the law firm Keller & Heckman. He points out that his team was poised to regulate several chemicals more quickly than Freedhoff will, even though they would have done so less comprehensively. “That effort will now have to wait for years to happen,” he said.

Fischer is just one of many former EPA officials who now circle Freedhoff’s office, watching for missteps. The crowd includes Freedhoff’s predecessor and another Trump appointee who has penned several op-eds critical of Freedhoff’s decisions. One lobbying shop that focuses exclusively on chemical regulation has at least eight ex-EPA staffers who now help represent clients before their former colleagues.

Freedhoff figures that litigation is inevitable. Winning cases quickly requires a certain amount of dotting i’s and crossing t’s. That takes time, which is in short supply, especially since new funding took so long to arrive. When it finally came through earlier this month, the 2022 budget included less than a third of the $15 million increase she’d asked for.

“There’s a stars-aligning thing that has to happen, and I am worried about that,” Freedhoff said.

“It all just kind of adds up. You have one government shutdown that goes for a month, or you have one legitimate scientific thing that takes a while to work through, and you’ve got problems.”

Environmental advocates are sympathetic to Freedhoff’s constraints, but they’re starting to lose patience.

Some decisions, they argue, wouldn’t take much time or money. For example, Freedhoff’s office decided to improve the Trump administration’s methodology for evaluating existing chemicals, which an independent panel had found to be flawed. But rather than simply switching to an already peer-reviewed playbook, as the panel recommended, the agency instead adapted the Trump version, saying the other options didn’t suit the requirements of the law. Public health experts have panned the revised method.

“It just is perplexing that they’re saying they’re following the best available science when they’re not,” said Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco. “She has the potential to make very important structural changes that she is not taking advantage of.”

When faced with this kind of criticism, Freedhoff gets a little exasperated. She sees a “disconnect” between academic experts and regulators who have to map science onto statutes that are fundamentally political documents.

“It doesn’t do anyone any good to ignore the words in the law,” she said. “Science is one driver in every law, but it’s not the only driver.”

Donovan and her fellow Cape Fear advocates were among those who had high expectations for Freedhoff, hoping that she would instill a new sense of corporate accountability and reverse the Trump administration’s rejection of their petition.

A June meeting with Freedhoff and her deputies, however, turned out to be a surprisingly chilly affair. Donovan recalled that the officials seemed reluctant to order Chemours to pay for health studies. Alarmingly, a high-level manager named Tala Henry reiterated some of the company’s original arguments about how it wasn’t necessarily responsible for all 54 PFAS listed in the petition. (The company said that its manufacturing process involved all but seven, and acknowledged that some of the rest may have arisen when its chemicals reacted with the environment.)

Henry referred questions to EPA’s press office. “Comments made by EPA’s Dr. Henry during various meetings with Ms. Donovan sought to provide relevant, factual information on the specifics of stakeholder requests, informed by career EPA staff, and legal counsel, and not based on personal feelings or beliefs,” a spokesperson said.

Donovan’s concerns grew when she saw a story in The Intercept soon after the meeting about EPA scientists who alleged that during the Trump years, Henry and other managers had warped their work in ways that favored industry. Since Henry seemed to be overseeing the response to their petition, it didn’t bode well. (The EPA told The Intercept that the complaints were being investigated and that the agency was taking steps to shore up scientific integrity.)

Nevertheless, in September, Donovan and others finally got a bit of good news: The EPA told them that it would formally reconsider their petition and respond within 90 days.

A few weeks later, Biden’s new EPA chief, Michael Regan, came to North Carolina to announce a nationwide plan for dealing with the types of chemicals that Cape Fear residents had been begging them to study. It was a homecoming: Regan had previously been North Carolina’s chief environmental regulator and had brokered the deal that got Chemours to stop dumping PFAS.

Standing outside on a podium, with the EPA logo in front of them and Lake Raleigh sparkling behind them, the governor and his top environmental official welcomed Regan, describing how their state had been sickened by PFAS emissions. Cape Fear had become a national symbol of the dangerous chemicals’ spread.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan announced a plan for addressing PFAS pollution in Raleigh, North Carolina, in October 2021. (Travis Long/The News & Observer/AP)

To cap the event, Regan laid out what he called the PFAS Strategic Roadmap, a timeline for research, regulation and cleanup. He promised to finally prioritize people over polluters. A forthcoming assessment of one of Chemours’ PFAS compounds, he said, would “ensure that no other community has to go through what the Cape Fear River communities had to endure.”

Donovan was in the audience, welling up with tears, wanting to believe him.

The EPA’s response to her petition was due on Dec. 28. Three days before Christmas, Donovan sat down at her desk to write a last-ditch appeal to Freedhoff and other top EPA officials. In her email, Donovan noted that the petition had been endorsed by the city of Wilmington, its county, and the local water utility (along with half of North Carolina’s congressional delegation and dozens of academic scientists).

In closing, she described two friends suffering from cancer, wanting to know whether the possibly carcinogenic chemicals in their water played a role.

“You have the power to protect and heal these communities,” Donovan wrote. “I pray you use your authority to lift up human health over corporate wealth.”

Donovan works from the desk where she wrote a last-ditch appeal to the EPA last year. (Cornell Watson for ProPublica)

Freedhoff responded the next day. “I wanted to thank you for your continued advocacy on behalf of your family, friends and community,” she emailed. “I also wanted to convey my hopes that the members of your community who are faced with the grave health challenges you described below are able to find peace and recovery in the new year.” She didn’t, however, betray what she was planning to do.

When the response came, in the form of a letter to the coalition’s legal counsel, Robert Sussman, the agency’s response at first sounded like a win. “EPA is granting the petition,” it began.

But while touting the agency’s PFAS Strategic Roadmap as a partial solution, the 29-page document promised to deliver little of what the petition had specifically asked for. Most importantly, it didn’t order Chemours to fund a human health study. The EPA argued that designing another study would consume scarce staff time, and that similar studies were underway elsewhere — a rationale also offered by the Trump administration in its initial rejection of the petition.

In a statement at the time, Chemours said it “supports national, industry-wide PFAS-related regulatory and testing requirements that are data-driven and based on the best available science.” (A spokesperson declined to comment further for this story.)

The petitioners were irate. Even Cape Fear River Watch, which wanted to stay on the EPA’s good side so it could get help with other campaigns, reacted angrily. “Their response was so unethical in its dishonesty,” said the group’s executive director, Dana Sargent. “If they had come out and said, like the Trump administration, ‘No we’re not going to grant it,’ I would have been less likely to come out so strongly.”

Freedhoff said she’d pushed as far as she legally could. In overhauling the TSCA, Congress had made it easier for the EPA to order companies to pay for testing — and in exchange, the agency had to prove the current data was insufficient before ordering new tests. Enough information is already either available or in progress that, she said, that if they’d ordered everything the petitioners asked for, Chemours could sue and might win.

“You can’t ask companies to spend a bunch of money producing data that already exists,” Freedhoff said, noting that her office also has some confidential company data on PFAS. “If you go in knowing that what you’re doing isn’t supported by science or the law, that’s not a good place to start. It’s not where anyone in this administration would start.”

That’s perplexing to Sussman, who served as deputy EPA administrator in the Clinton administration and as a senior agency adviser under Obama. The petitioners had done a comprehensive literature search and found that none of the chemicals had been studied enough to help residents understand the potential health consequences of Chemours’ pollution.

“These are weak arguments and EPA should not be afraid of taking them on,” Sussman said.

The decision is also perplexing to scientists who study PFAS contamination in the Cape Fear River watershed, like Jamie DeWitt, a toxicology professor at East Carolina University who signed a letter endorsing the petition. The state has provided a few million dollars for PFAS research, including DeWitt’s, but it’s halting and infrequent. When I visited her lab in Greenville, she was scrambling to submit a National Institutes of Health grant for more PFAS work. Without Chemours bankrolling a large study, it’s not clear how it could happen.

“I do think people have the right to know what is getting into their bodies from the food they eat, the water they drink, the products they use. It should be free,” DeWitt said. “The question is, who’s gonna pay for it?”

Around the midpoint of the Obama administration, when Republicans hardened their resistance to the Democratic leader’s legislative efforts, the president turned to executive action to try to advance issues ranging from immigration to power plant emissions.

This time around, progressive activists don’t want Biden to wait that long. They’re pushing him to use the executive branch in as muscular a fashion as possible, as the Trump administration did, using bold legal means — like granting a petition asking a polluter to pay for tests — to crack down on corporate malfeasance.

“We’re frustrated, throughout the administration, with a lack of creativity and willingness to just throw up their hands when they get to the first barrier,” said Dorothy Slater, a senior researcher with the Revolving Door Project, which focuses on agency appointments.

The EPA scientists who blew the whistle on managers who allegedly manipulated their work in favor of industry also wanted Freedhoff to take more aggressive action. Optimistic about her appointment, they originally filed their complaints soon after the 2020 election.

A couple months into the job, Freedhoff sent out an all-staff memo recognizing several examples of political interference and affirming her commitment to scientific integrity. Later, she announced new advisory councils and recordkeeping requirements. But none of it did what the whistleblowers really wanted: remove the accused managers, most of whom remain in their positions, engendering distrust both within the agency and outside it.

The EPA’s inspector general is investigating the complaints, and Freedhoff has said that she can’t simply move people around without due process, as the Trump administration did. Moreover, it bothers her when people accuse civil servants of acting in bad faith — she thinks the staffers just implemented policies from political appointees who were higher up the chain.

“You’re supposed to do what they tell you to do,” Freedhoff said. “You can complain, but I don’t think you should expect everyone to be Paul Revere. Only Paul Revere is Paul Revere.”

Emily Donovan doesn’t buy that explanation, and she finds it confounding that officials who facilitated Trump’s orders would now hold sway over her community’s fate.

In early February, Donovan and I walked out on a beach near the mouth of the Cape Fear River to see foam that she said looked unusually frothy. She’d gotten it tested last fall and found it contained several types of PFAS. She doesn’t let her kids swim there anymore, but people were fishing while standing on the sand, seemingly unaware of the dangerous chemicals in the water.

Donovan shows photos of PFAS-contaminated foam and points to a map of the area where samples were collected. (Cornell Watson for ProPublica)

When I told Donovan about Freedhoff’s rationale for leaving someone who had been accused of manipulating science in charge of the chemicals office’s response to her petition, she thought about it for a second.

“We lose in that. We lose,” she said, coldly, the wind whipping her hair. “I actually think it does a disservice to the American people, because we didn’t elect Biden to maintain the status quo.”

In late January, the Cape Fear coalition restarted the lawsuit it had originally filed after the Trump administration rejected its petition. Donovan finds it ironic that the agency seems more willing to be sued by citizens than by the corporation that had contaminated her drinking water.

Freedhoff hears Donovan’s frustration everywhere. There was a time when she might have felt the same. While on the Hill, she pushed for regulators to move faster and accomplish more. Now that she’s on the inside, she’s come to fully understand the handicaps the agency has faced for decades.

“When you’re sitting in Congress saying, ‘Hey, do a rule in a year,’ you keep getting told by the agency, ‘That is not possible,’” she told me, over lunch in January at a taco place near her house. “And you get to the agency and you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s right, it kind of is impossible.’”

She’s been thinking a lot lately about the parents she met years ago as they grieved children who died from exposure to toxic chemicals. Those kids would have been Freedhoff’s age now, and the EPA still hasn’t banned the chemicals that killed them. But she can’t make amends for the past.

“There’s all these examples where for generations, communities were exposed to chemicals, never told about it, and suddenly realized what happened to them, and want answers and want justice,” Freedhoff said. “And it is extremely hard to feel like I can’t do all the things they want.”

Do You Work for the Federal Government? ProPublica Wants to Hear From You.

Correction

March 30, 2022: This story originally gave the wrong name for the college at which Jamie DeWitt is a toxicology professor. She is at East Carolina University, not Eastern Carolina University.

by Justin Elliott

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With millions of Americans scrambling to file their taxes in the next few weeks, the Federal Trade Commission asked a federal court late Monday to intervene to stop Intuit from claiming in ads that Americans can file for “free” using the company’s TurboTax software.

The FTC began investigating TurboTax in 2019 in response to ProPublica stories describing how users had been lured into using the software with promises of free filing, only to discover later they had to pay fees to finish the process.

The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where Intuit is based, accuses the company of engaging in deceptive marketing for years.

It points, for example, to recent TV ads in which almost every word spoken is “free,” quoting from one featuring an auctioneer who says: “And free, and free, and free, and free, and free. Now a bidder and free! Now give me another bidder and free, and a free here and a free free free a free free free.”

An image from a recent TurboTax ad, as it appears in a complaint by the Federal Trade Commission. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

The FTC charges that, “in truth, TurboTax is only free for some users, based on the tax forms they need. For many others, Intuit tells them, after they have invested time and effort gathering and inputting into TurboTax their sensitive personal and financial information to prepare their tax returns, that they cannot continue for free; they will need to upgrade to a paid TurboTax service to complete and file their taxes.”

In a blog post, Intuit said it will “vigorously challenge” the FTC’s complaint.

“The FTC’s arguments are simply not credible. Far from steering taxpayers away from free tax preparation offerings, our free advertising campaigns have led to more Americans filing their taxes for free than ever before and have been central to raising awareness of free tax prep,” Intuit General Counsel Kerry McLean wrote. The post added that over the past eight years, TurboTax has helped “nearly 100 million Americans file their taxes for free.”

Intuit lawyers defended the accuracy of the ads in a response filed Tuesday but also asserted that the company, in correspondence with the FTC just days ago, agreed to take down its “free” TV spots. The company said that “after meeting with FTC Chair Lina Khan and in the spirit of cooperation, Intuit informed the FTC on March 24, 2022, that it would voluntarily ‘pull down the ‘free, free, free’ TV ads for the remainder of the tax season’ in response to concerns that those advertisements were deceptive.”

TurboTax still markets some of its products as “free” on its website.

The FTC’s request, which seeks a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction to stop Intuit’s “free” tax prep marketing, comes in parallel with an internal FTC proceeding against the company. In that proceeding, an administrative complaint was filed against the company Monday under the federal law that prohibits unfair or deceptive business practices. If the administrative case does not settle, it will be heard before an in-house FTC judge.

While that potentially lengthy process unfolds, the FTC said it is asking the federal court to intervene to “put an immediate stop to Intuit’s deception well before this year’s April 18 tax filing deadline.”

The Information reported in January that the FTC under Khan was pushing forward with the Intuit investigation despite a recent Supreme Court ruling that trimmed the agency’s authority in such cases.

The materials filed in court Monday show the FTC has obtained a large volume of internal emails and other documents in its multiyear investigation of Intuit, though some sections of the complaint and hundreds of pages of accompanying exhibits are redacted.

Much of the material hinges on what the FTC frames as intentional confusion and misdirection around competing versions of TurboTax labeled “free.”

TurboTax previously maintained a heavily advertised Free Edition alongside a similarly named Free File product. The Free Edition routed some filers to a version of TurboTax that charged them a fee based on which tax forms they had to file.

Meanwhile, the Free File product, which was offered as part of a partnership with the IRS, did not route users to paid products and was truly free for anyone making less than an income threshold. But it was difficult to find. (In July, Intuit announced it was leaving the IRS partnership.)

According to the complaint, Intuit employees were particularly concerned that users would find the truly free version of TurboTax, and they brainstormed ways to stop that from happening.

The complaint quotes an Intuit employee saying in September 2018: “It sounds like we have the ability to block our [Free File] offering/landing page from organic search if we rename to TurboTax Free Edition. This sounds like a great solution if we learn that TurboTax Free File does start to outrank our commercial Free.”

A series of articles by ProPublica have shown that, for many years, Intuit and other providers have steered taxpayers who were eligible for free online tax prep toward paid options. That included heavily marketing products that were labeled “free” but were separate from the Free File program and often led users to paid offerings. In 2019, Intuit went so far as to add code to its Free File website that kept the option from turning up in results on Google and other search engines. (That code was later removed.) Intuit also used “dark patterns,” ProPublica reported, which are “design tricks to get users of its website to do things they don’t necessarily mean to do.”

The FTC also hired an expert, Yale School of Management marketing professor Nathan Novemsky, to conduct a survey of consumers to assess their perceptions of whether they could use TurboTax for free. The survey found that many respondents who weren’t eligible for free tax filing believed, incorrectly, that they could file their taxes for free with TurboTax. “TurboTax advertisements and the TurboTax website were identified as a significant source of taxpayers’ misimpressions about using TurboTax for free,” Novemsky wrote.

by Erin Smith, and Heather Vogell, ProPublica

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Kim Fuller needed to move. Her 83-year-old mom was struggling to get around the narrow, three-story row house they shared in Baltimore. Heart problems made climbing the stairs too arduous, cutting the older woman off from the kitchen where she’d loved to cook.

Fuller, 57, found an apartment complex 3 miles away that billed itself as “luxury living” for people 55 and older, and she applied for a unit in early 2021. She figured she’d be approved: Her salary as a mental health services coordinator for the state of Maryland met the income requirements. She’d never been evicted and had brought her credit score up to 632 — which is considered fair — after a health crisis had forced her to file for bankruptcy eight years earlier.

Still, a few months later, when she logged into her online account with the property manager, she learned her application had been denied. No reason was given. She raised her credit score to 663 and applied to another complex owned by the same company, Habitat America, in August. Six days later her status again turned to “Declined.”

Fuller learned her rental application had been screened by RentGrow, one of more than a dozen companies that mine consumer databases to perform background checks on tenants. A form emailed to her said RentGrow determined she didn’t meet applicant screening requirements, highlighting in yellow the box labeled “credit history” as the reason.

The letter provided no further explanation. A RentGrow representative, through an executive at its parent company, declined to comment. Habitat America declined to respond to questions about Fuller’s application from ProPublica, citing privacy concerns.

“You don’t know why you got denied or if you were ever considered,” Fuller said. “It’s really murky out there.”

Fuller’s experience has become more common as landlords have increased their reliance on tenant screening to help them select renters. The industry has expanded dramatically as the number of renters has grown and new technology has made it easier to access vast troves of data, such as court records.

Tenant screening companies compile information beyond what’s in renters’ credit reports, including criminal and eviction filings. They say this data helps give landlords a better idea of who will pay on time and who will be a good tenant. The firms typically assign applicants scores or provide landlords a yes-or-no recommendation.

A ProPublica review found that such ratings have come to serve as shadow credit scores for renters. But compared to credit reporting, tenant screening is less regulated and offers fewer consumer protections — which can have dire consequences for applicants trying to secure housing.

Frequent errors on tenant screening reports, often related to false eviction reports or criminal records, led government watchdogs to admonish the industry last year to improve its accuracy. (The Markup reported a series of stories on the industry and regulators’ reactions to it.)

Yet errors are just one of the problems with tenant screening, ProPublica found. Tenants often can’t get enough information to understand why they were marked as a risk to landlords.

More than 40 renters responded to a ProPublica survey last year about tenant screening. Some were denied housing. Others were asked to pay double or triple deposits because of low tenant scores.

“It’s kind of chaos,” said Ariel Nelson, a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. “It’s really hard to figure out if you were rejected, why was it rejected. If it’s something you can fix or if it’s an error.”

The algorithms some screening companies use aren’t scrutinized by regulators and, tenant advocates say, may not accurately predict a tenant’s likelihood of paying rent. While screening companies say their algorithms remove the subjectivity of human judgment, advocates say the companies use data that can introduce racial or other illegal biases.

Fuller, who is Black, worried she might have been a victim of racial discrimination.

Her case baffled Carol Ott at the Fair Housing Action Center of Maryland. “You’re fighting against the company that uses secret algorithms,” said Ott, the center’s tenant advocacy director. “Where do you even go with that?”

Regional Property Manager Karin Scott said in an email that Habitat America’s policy is to treat all residents and visitors fairly, and “any concerns that a denial was based upon racial discrimination are unfounded.”

To be sure, the credit reporting industry also draws criticism from consumer advocates for failing to keep errors off credit reports and for using algorithms that critics say perpetuate racial biases.

ProPublica found that tenant screening receives even less oversight than credit reporting, which has been litigated intensely and is watched by the courts and federal agencies in an effort to minimize unfair treatment.

Federal agencies have “supervisory authority” to review the internal records of financial institutions such as banks to ensure that their scoring methods are predictive, statistically sound and nondiscriminatory, experts said.

A parallel process does not exist for tenant screening.

“Nobody’s supervising. Nobody’s checking the data,” said Chi Chi Wu, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. “Nobody’s checking these algorithms.”

A spokesperson for the Consumer Data Industry Association, which represents consumer reporting agencies, including screening companies, said in an emailed statement that the competitive tenant screening market pushes companies to continuously improve their tools for helping landlords comply with fair housing and other laws.

“Consumers expect and demand safe places to live, and our tenant screening members help protect residential communities, especially their most vulnerable populations,” the statement said.

The National Apartment Association, a trade group representing apartment owners and managers, said it supports new technology for rental operations and encourages members to research vendors to make sure they comply with regulations, according to a statement from Senior Vice President Greg Brown.

“Rental housing providers are committed to equal housing opportunity and utilize resident screening tools through this lens to balance risks that could impact the entire community,” Brown said.

“High-Risk Renters”

The rapid rise of tenant screening is one of the seismic changes to hit the rental market since the Great Recession. As ProPublica has reported, private equity firms have poured into the multifamily apartment market, often driving up rents in search of greater profits than those typically sought by mom-and-pop landlords. Algorithms now often replace human judgment in deciding who qualifies for housing and how much rent costs.

Bob Withers, a retired executive for corporate landlords and regional property managers, said when he left the industry temporarily in 2006, credit checks were still landlords’ main tool for assessing applicants.

“When I came back in 2010 or 2011, things had changed so much that everyone I knew was using tenant screening companies,” he said.

Nearly 2,000 companies offered background screening in 2019, most for either employment or tenant purposes, an industry survey found. It estimated that tenant screening brought in roughly $1 billion in annual revenue.

RealPage, a leading Texas-based property management tech firm, boasts that its algorithm uses artificial intelligence to “identify high-risk renters with greater accuracy.” The company says it uses a massive, proprietary database of 30 million lease outcomes, paired with consumer financial data, to evaluate rental applicants.

“This model is materially more effective than traditional screening solutions, with an average proven savings of $31 per apartment per year without negative impact to occupancy or revenue,” a company media release said.

RealPage did not respond to questions about the release.

Tenant score algorithms try to predict how risky it is to rent to a potential tenant based on characteristics they share with other tenants, according to Jean Noonan, an attorney and former Federal Trade Commission official whose law firm represents tenant screening companies.

Property managers are supposed to provide an “adverse action notice” (left) to applicants who are rejected because of their tenant screening score, but the notices typically provide little information. Renters often don’t see detailed screening reports like this one (right), from On-Site, which shows their score and the reasons for rejection. Even this detailed report does not show how the algorithm weighted each factor. (Obtained with permission by ProPublica. Red circles added by ProPublica.)

“A scoring model may find that certain characteristics help predict risk,” said Noonan. “They don’t predict it perfectly for every individual. Overall, they do a satisfactory job of predicting risk.”

Yet Withers, the retired regional property manager, said it was typical that several times a month he would need to override denial recommendations from the screening service his firm used. Often, it was because people had medical debt, foreclosures or student loans but otherwise looked like good candidates.

“If everything else looked clean to me, I would do an override,” said Withers, who oversaw thousands of apartments in Maryland and Virginia. Busy property managers may not realize that the screening service’s algorithm was set up in a way that would reject people who might be viable candidates, he added.

Tenant advocates say the consumer data used by screening companies too often results in negative recommendations for reasons that are not proven indicators of how good a tenant someone would be. One tenant in Washington state who contacted ProPublica received a screening letter that listed “too many different phone numbers reported” as a risk factor that contributed to lowering her tenant score.

Some of the personal details that screening companies are plugging into algorithms to rate potential tenants may reflect racial biases, tenant advocates said.

“We don’t know whether they’re predictive,” Nelson said. “Based on what little information we have about what factors go into them, we are concerned about racial disparities.”

A negative screening can not only result in a denial, it can also prompt a landlord to demand a higher deposit, potentially deterring the renter from taking the apartment at all.

Chloe Crawford is an artist who found an apartment to live in while she worked on her masters degree at Rutgers University. But when she arrived at her new building near campus in September 2018, possessions in tow, her new landlord asked for an extra month’s rent as a deposit because of her low tenant screening score, she said. The total deposit added up to more than $1,000. It was more than she planned to spend on a month’s worth of groceries, and her car needed repairs.

Though Crawford expected to devote a high percentage of her income to rent because she was attending classes, she had money in the bank, had lined up an on-campus job and had been careful to pay her bills on time to keep her credit score high.

Her credit score of 788 out of 850 was considered very good, high enough that she could qualify for a mortgage with good terms. But her tenant score was 685 out of 1,000 — too low for her to rent an apartment without paying an elevated deposit. The screening company, LeasingDesk, said in an email that another month’s rent was required because her credit history and rent-to-income ratio were “unsatisfactory.”

Crawford, who uses a wheelchair, pleaded with a property manager to let her move in without the extra fee, showing paystubs proving she had made additional money by working overtime during the summer. The manager relented, allowing her to pay the base-rate deposit of $300.

She finished her two-year program and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2020, never missing a rent payment before moving out early due to the pandemic. After she’d vacated, the apartment owners claimed she owed rent money for leaving before her lease was up.

“If they had just denied housing, I don’t know what I would have done,” she said. “Maybe I would have dropped out of the program.”

LeasingDesk’s parent company, RealPage, said it could not comment on individual cases, but that each LeasingDesk score is based on a property manager’s leasing criteria. RealPage applies those criteria “in an objective, consistent and non-discriminatory manner,” the company said in an emailed statement.

“In making leasing decisions, a property manager’s interest is not to turn away qualified applicants, but to quickly fill vacancies with people who will be responsible tenants and help maintain a safe community,” the statement said.

“What Is the Science Behind This?”

Credit reporting has faced more scrutiny over the years than tenant screening.

For instance, the big three credit bureaus — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — stopped reporting evictions in 2017 after reaching multistate settlements in response to lawsuits that accused the firms of persistent mistakes in their reports. The companies denied wrongdoing. Tenant screening companies continue to report evictions.

Large numbers of consumer complaints can also help spur federal financial regulators to examine a credit scoring model, but no federal agency has the same power over tenant screening.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau collects complaints about tenant screening services, but it doesn’t examine the firms’ algorithms. The agency could not provide a breakdown of how many complaints have been filed regarding tenant screening agencies.

A spokesperson for the consumer bureau declined to respond to a list of questions from ProPublica, but said, “The Bureau is committed to using its tools and authority to ensure that consumers are not harmed by improper screening and consumer reporting practices.”

The Federal Trade Commission can’t examine a screening company’s algorithm unless it is doing a formal investigation. The agency, which has obtained multimillion-dollar settlements from such firms over errors in their reports, has not to date announced any enforcement actions stemming from bias in screening algorithms.

Asked about the agency’s oversight, Assistant Director Robert Schoshinski said: “We are always looking to see if there are violations of the laws that we enforce.”

The federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, which covers credit scores and background checks, has received few updates since it passed in 1970, said Eric Dunn, director of litigation for the National Housing Law Project. The problems tenants are encountering with screening, he said, are the result of an antiquated regulatory system that is full of gaps.

Dunn said some of the scoring models he’s seen while litigating cases on behalf of tenants are crude, giving so much weight to factors like eviction, criminal history or debt that a person whose record includes even one of those things would get a negative recommendation.

“For a lot of these companies, it’s a way of putting a veneer of legitimacy or a veneer of mathematical expertise on what’s really a blanket policy against people with certain types of records,” Dunn said.

Wu, of the National Consumer Law Center, echoed his concerns. “What is the science behind this?” Wu said. “With credit scoring, we know how well it works.”

In a letter to the CFPB in March 2021, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and five other senators wrote that screening companies need to be watched more closely. “Effective oversight of these companies requires proactively investigating and auditing their effects on protected classes,” the letter said.

The Consumer Data Industry Association, in a letter to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs the following month, said screening is based on “race-neutral data” and removes subjectivity that could be a source of discriminatory behavior.

TransUnion, a credit agency that also offers tenant screening, said the system already receives scrutiny. “The rental screening process is well-regulated and governed by the Fair Housing Act and Fair Credit Reporting Act, with additional oversight from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,” a statement emailed by a spokesperson said.

Screening firms are supposed to show tenants what’s in their files if they ask. The data industry association told the Senate committee that “tenant screeners facilitate consumer participation by providing copies of reports to consumers.” But firms have often interpreted the disclosure requirement narrowly, tenant advocates say, and left out key information — such as the recommendations made to landlords.

Tenants have less protection than job candidates, who are entitled to a copy of their background check if an employer is planning to reject them because of the report. That is supposed to give candidates time to look for errors. While landlords are supposed to provide tenants notice of an adverse screening result, like the one Kim Fuller in Baltimore received, such notices typically provide sparse information.

Dunn said tenants often get the runaround when they complain about screening decisions. The screening companies say landlords decide what criteria to use. Landlords say screening companies make the decision.

Several renters told ProPublica that they couldn’t find out why their applications were denied.

“You really have no effective way of lodging a dispute with the screening company, unless it’s the accuracy of the record,” Dunn said. “If it has anything to do with judgment, or anything like that, the screening company says, ‘It’s not our job.’”

Leaving the City

Fuller kept up her search for a new place for herself and her mother in Baltimore. She worried not only that her denial was a form of illegal redlining, but also that her full tenant screening report, which she never saw, contained errors that had pushed the algorithm toward a denial.

She filed a complaint with the CFPB against RentGrow, a subsidiary of Yardi Systems, one of the largest property management software companies in the United States. She also filed one against Habitat America.

The CFPB rejected both complaints last fall, saying it was “unable to send your complaint to the company for a response.” The agency said either the company was not in its complaint system or the agency does not handle complaints “about this product or issue.”

The CFPB accepts complaints about tenant screening companies, but property managers are beyond its purview. A CFPB spokesperson declined to comment on Fuller’s complaints.

Fuller widened her search for a new home. Her mother had lived for 35 years in the porch-front row house they shared on the edge of the Belair-Edison neighborhood. Though her mother had hoped to stay in Baltimore city, Fuller began looking in the suburbs.

A co-worker told her about an affordable complex near Catonsville, just outside the Baltimore Beltway. A Walmart was within walking distance. Fuller watched for vacancies at the aging brown brick cluster of three-story buildings and applied when she saw one.

She and her mother moved into a ground-floor unit in January.

“We had to go a little further out than we intended,” she said. “This will be an adjustment.”

Have You Had Trouble Renting an Apartment and Don’t Understand Why? It Might Be Your Tenant Screening Score.

by ProPublica

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“Plot to Overturn the Election” is part of a collaborative investigation from FRONTLINE and ProPublica. The documentary premieres March 29 at 10 p.m. EDT on PBS stations (check local listings) and will be available to stream in the PBS Video App and on FRONTLINE’s website starting at 7 p.m. EDT.

Tonight, PBS stations across the U.S. will premiere “Plot to Overturn the Election,” a collaboration between ProPublica and Frontline. (The documentary will also appear at pbs.org/frontline.) “Plot to Overturn the Election” examines the roles and impact of key members of the movement to spread the belief that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was rigged. The documentary also explores how members of the movement helped launch and fund the audit of Arizona’s vote count and how they are working to influence future elections, in part by supporting secretary of state candidates who share their views that America’s voting systems are irredeemably corrupt.

Correspondent A.C. Thompson, along with reporters Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Kirsten Berg, obtained new information that helps explain why two-thirds of Republicans believe President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. In the coming weeks, ProPublica and Frontline will publish stories that further examine the movement’s past and ongoing efforts to find evidence of election fraud.

Part of the Frontline and ProPublica project focuses on a group that gathered in the weeks after the 2020 election on a South Carolina plantation owned by conservative defamation attorney Lin Wood. Using the property as a temporary headquarters, a team of lawyers and cybersecurity experts gathered and synthesized what they claimed was evidence of election fraud. This group, which included Michael Flynn, the retired three-star Army general and former national security adviser to Trump, and Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com, became a key originator of the since-discredited idea that foreign communist governments had hacked voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems. The belief was central to justifying the efforts of Trump and his allies to reverse the results of the election.

The reporting on the group’s activities draws on more than a thousand private emails, photos and videos, hundreds of text messages and dozens of hours of audio recordings, none of which have been previously reported on.

“It was almost like finding a key to understanding, you know, why much of the country believes that the election was stolen,” Clark tells Thompson in the documentary.

by Paul Kiel, Jesse Eisinger and Jeff Ernsthausen

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

Join us April 12 for a live discussion about how the ultrawealthy skirt the tax system and how Biden’s new billionaire tax proposal could change that.

Last year ProPublica, drawing on a trove of IRS data, gave the public its most extensive view ever of the taxes of the wealthiest Americans. The first article in the Secret IRS Files series put real numbers to a core truth about the U.S. tax system: Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett can easily shield their fortunes from taxation by avoiding the sorts of income captured on a tax return.

A proposal released today by the Biden administration takes direct aim at this issue. The policy, if enacted, would, for a sliver of the very wealthiest, close that escape hatch. Vast increases in wealth would result in owing taxes.

Generally, the IRS does not tax gains unless they are “realized,” typically when a person sells a stock that has gained in value. Billionaires who hold on to assets that have appreciated get the benefit of those unrealized gains — they often borrow against them — without owing any tax.

This is by no means a new bug in the U.S. system. But as ProPublica explained last year, the explosion of wealth inequality in recent decades, coupled with the particular nature of how these new fortunes have been built, has made unrealized gains particularly important at this point in our history.

Past U.S. presidents have, on occasion, pushed for higher taxes on the rich, but usually by hiking traditional income tax rates. Biden’s proposal calls for a paradigm shift: It would change what gets counted as income. “Although the taxation of unrealized gain is still far from enactment, and even if enacted would await an uncertain fate in the Supreme Court, presidential endorsement of the concept is a milestone in the history of the income tax,” said Lawrence Zelenak, a Duke University School of Law professor whose expertise includes income and corporate tax and tax policy.

As outlined by the White House, the new tax would apply only to households worth over $100 million. They would owe a tax of at least 20% on their “full income,” as a White House document terms it, a definition that includes unrealized gains. News of the proposal, which was included as part of Biden’s 2023 budget plan, was first reported by The Washington Post.

Under the current system, the wealthiest Americans pay nowhere close to that tax rate on gains in their wealth. The 25 richest Americans, as measured by Forbes, got $401 billion richer from 2014 to 2018. ProPublica’s analysis of the IRS data found that the group paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes during that time, a rate of only 3.4%.

In an analysis posted on Twitter, University of California Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman estimated that the 10 richest Americans alone would owe at least $215 billion under the plan.

In all, the Biden Administration estimates, the new tax would generate $360 billion in extra revenue over 10 years.

The plan would allow those hit by the tax a period of nine years to pay their “initial” obligations: In other words, someone whose fortune has increased by $10 billion as of when the bill became law would have that time to pay the $2 billion they owe. Going forward, further increases of wealth would result in taxes owed over a five-year period.

Although Biden’s Billionaire Minimum Income Tax, as it’s called, is a major departure from past presidential proposals, it would deploy features that are already part of current tax law.

For instance, there is the Alternative Minimum Tax, a measure first enacted decades ago in response to revelations that the richest were easily avoiding paying income taxes. The AMT is supposed to work as a kind of fail-safe, imposing taxes on rich people who have used huge deductions to wipe out income for tax purposes and thus avoid taxes. But it often fails. For instance, we found multiple examples of billionaires paying not a penny in income taxes, sometimes for years at a time.

Like the AMT, Biden’s minimum tax would work alongside the current tax code. If a billionaire happened to already be paying 20% of their full income, the Biden plan would result in no extra tax.

The existing tax code also has provisions that tax unrealized gains in certain situations. For instance, professionals who trade in securities, such as hedge fund managers, often elect to have their portfolios “marked to market” and owe tax based on their gains or losses relative to the previous year. Similarly, another provision hits wealthy Americans who choose to renounce their citizenship: All their property is valued and taxed as if it had been sold.

Versions of a tax on mark-to-market gains have been proposed before, going back several years, most notably last year by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., chair of the Senate Finance Committee. The idea, however, has its share of critics, both Republicans and tax experts who worry it would be too complicated to administer and would risk being struck down by the Supreme Court.

John Brooks of Georgetown University Law Center is among the supporters. He argued the idea is squarely constitutional, given “the many examples of taxing unrealized gain already in the tax code.” And as for complaints about its complexity, the wealthy already value their assets for their own financial purposes, he told ProPublica: “In the end, it would be a simple, formulaic approach that would require minimal work in addition to what wealthy taxpayers are already doing.”

by Cezary Podkul

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The chairman of a congressional subcommittee has asked Apple and Google to help stop fraud against U.S. taxpayers on Telegram, a fast-growing messaging service distributed via their smartphone app stores. The request from the head of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis came after ProPublica reports last July and in January revealed how cybercriminals were using Telegram to sell and trade stolen identities and methods for filing fake unemployment insurance claims.

Rep. James E. Clyburn, D-S.C., who chairs the subcommittee (which is part of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform), cited ProPublica’s reporting in March 23 letters to the CEOs of Apple and Alphabet, Google’s parent company. The letters pointed out that enabling fraud against American taxpayers is inconsistent with Apple’s and Google’s policies for their respective app stores, which forbid apps that facilitate or promote illegal activities.

“There is substantial evidence that Telegram has not complied with these requirements by allowing its application to be used as a central platform for the facilitation of fraud against vital pandemic relief programs,” Clyburn wrote. He asked whether Apple and Alphabet “may be able to play a constructive role in combating this Telegram-facilitated fraud against the American public.”

Clyburn also requested that Apple and Google provide “all communications” between the companies and Telegram “related to fraud or other unlawful conduct on the Telegram platform, including fraud against pandemic relief programs” as well as what “policies and practices” the companies have implemented to monitor whether applications disseminated through their app stores are being used to “facilitate fraud” and “disseminate coronavirus misinformation.” He gave the companies until April 7 to provide the records.

Apple, which runs the iOS app store for its iPhones, did not reply to a request for comment. Google, which runs the Google Play app store for its Android devices, also did not respond.

The two companies’ app stores are vital distribution channels for messaging services such as Telegram, which markets itself as one of the world’s 10 most downloaded apps.The company has previously acknowledged theimportance of complying with Apple’s and Google’s app store policies. “Telegram — like all mobile apps — has to follow rules set by Apple and Google in order to remain available to users on iOS and Android,” Telegram CEO Pavel Durov wrote in a September blog post. He noted that, should Apple’s and Google’s app stores stop supporting Telegram in a given locale, the move would prevent software updates to the messaging service and ultimately neuter it.

By appealing to the two smartphone makers directly, Clyburn is increasing pressure on Telegram to take his concerns seriously. His letter noted that “Telegram’s very brief terms of service only prohibit users from ‘scam[ming]’ other Telegram users, appearing to permit the use of the platform to conspire to commit fraud against others.” He faulted Telegram for letting its users disseminate playbooks for defrauding state unemployment insurance systems on its platform and said its failure to stop that activity may have enabled large-scale fraud.

Clyburn wrote to Durov in December asking whether Telegram has “undertaken any serious efforts to prevent its platform from being used to enable large-scale fraud” against pandemic relief programs. Telegram “refused to engage” with the subcommittee, a spokesperson for Clyburn told ProPublica in January. (Since then, the app was briefly banned in Brazil for failing to respond to judicial orders to freeze accounts spreading disinformation. Brazil’s Supreme Court reversed the ban after Telegram finally responded to the requests.)

Telegram said in a statement to ProPublica that it’s working to expand its terms of service and moderation efforts to “explicitly restrict and more effectively combat” misuse of its messaging platform, “such as encouraging fraud.” Telegram also said that it has always “actively moderated harmful content” and banned millions of chats and accounts for violating its terms of service, which prohibit users from scamming each other, promoting violence or posting illegal pornographic content.

But ProPublica found that the company’s moderation efforts can amount to little more than a game of whack-a-mole. After a ProPublica inquiry last July, Telegram shut some public channels on its app in which users advertised methods for filing fake unemployment insurance claims using stolen identities. But various fraud tutorials are still openly advertised on the platform. Accounts that sell stolen identities can also pop back up after they’re shut down; the users behind them simply recycle their old account names with a small variation and are back in business within days.

The limited interventions are a reflection of Telegram’s hands-off approach to policing content on its messenger app, which is central to its business model. Durov asserted in his September blog post that “Telegram gives its users more freedom of speech than any other popular mobile application.” He reiterated that commitment in March, saying that Telegram users’ “right to privacy is sacred. Now — more than ever.”

The approach has helped Telegram grow and become a crucial communication tool in authoritarian regimes. Russia banned Telegram in 2018 for refusing to hand over encryption keys that would allow authorities to access user data, only to withdraw the ban two years later at least in part because users were able to get around it. More recently, Telegram has been credited as a rare place where Russians can find uncensored news about the invasion of Ukraine.

But the company’s iron-clad commitment to privacy also attracts cybercriminals looking to make money. After the COVID-19 pandemic prompted Congress to authorize hundreds of billions of small-business loans and extra aid to workers who lost their jobs, Telegram lit up with channels offering methods to defraud the programs. The scale of the fraud is yet unknown, but it could stretch into tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars. Its sheer size prompted the Department of Justice to announce, on March 10, the appointment of a chief prosecutor to focus on the most egregious cases of pandemic fraud, including identity theft by criminal syndicates.

by Abigail Kramer, THE CITY, photography by Sarah Blesener for ProPublica

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

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

Moshe was in the hospital for the fourth time, and his mother, Rae, was desperate.

It was the spring of 2021. Moshe was 12 years old, and he’d been admitted to a psychiatric unit for children at South Oaks Hospital, not far from his home on the North Shore of Long Island.

In itself, the hospitalization wasn’t a surprise. Moshe had tried to hang himself when he was 9 years old. Since then, he’d picked up a long list of mental health diagnoses, including ADHD, anxiety, major depressive disorder and a condition called oppositional defiant disorder. He’d been on and off an even longer list of medications, some of which just made his symptoms worse.

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

• Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
• Text the Crisis Text Line from anywhere in the U.S. to reach a crisis counselor: 741741

Moshe spent a lot of time feeling sad and worthless. Other times, his mood would swing to explosive and angry, with outbursts that Rae said grew increasingly scary as he got older and bigger. (Both Rae and Moshe are being identified by their middle names to protect their privacy.) Rae had spent years fighting for mental health services that were infuriatingly hard to get, though the family had good insurance.

In 2020, a few months into New York’s COVID-19 shutdowns, Moshe had landed in the hospital after threatening to kill himself and Rae. This time around, in 2021, he’d punched through a glass window and wouldn’t stop banging his head against a wall.

Almost as soon as Moshe arrived at South Oaks Hospital, his treatment team said he needed more help than they could offer. The best option, the doctors told Rae, was a mental health hospital operated by New York state called Sagamore Children’s Psychiatric Center.

Unlike private hospitals, where clinicians say the length of a standard psychiatric stay has shrunk in recent decades to not much more than a week, New York’s state-run hospitals are designed to provide longer-term, high-level care to people who are experiencing a mental health crisis. Sagamore, the doctors said, was Moshe’s best hope of ending what had become a brutal cycle of mental health crises, emergency room visits and hospital stays.

There was just one big problem: He would have to wait for weeks, maybe months, to get a bed.

Under a “Transformation Plan” launched in 2014 by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the state of New York has cut nearly a third of state psychiatric hospital beds reserved for children. Cuomo’s plan shifted the savings into community-based and outpatient mental health programs that were supposed to prevent kids from needing to be hospitalized in the first place.

But eight years later, children like Moshe who are experiencing mental health emergencies find it harder to get hospital care when they need it, an investigation by THE CITY and ProPublica has found. It’s a problem that predated the COVID-19 pandemic but has only gotten worse as demand for mental health care has increased.

There is no evidence that the Cuomo administration’s plan has achieved its goal of reducing overreliance on hospitals.

In the first five years after the Transformation Plan’s launch, the number of mental health emergency room visits by young people on New York’s Medicaid program — the public health insurance plan that covers more than 7 million lower-income state residents — shot up by nearly 25%. The rate at which Medicaid-enrolled kids were admitted to psychiatric hospitals essentially remained flat over the same period.

The numbers remain high because kids still can’t get into community-based mental health programs before they end up in crisis, said Gail Nayowith, who was appointed by Cuomo to New York state’s Medicaid Redesign Team in 2011 but resigned after seven years in frustration over Cuomo’s failure to adequately invest in mental health care for kids.

“There’s no accountability, no funding for basic services,” Nayowith said.

Sagamore Children’s Psychiatric Center on Long Island, where doctors recommended Moshe receive care.

Children enrolled in Medicaid depend almost entirely on outpatient clinics that face chronic shortages and turnover of staff. Kids with private insurance plans fare just as badly or worse, as families often can’t find available providers in their networks at all.

Since the start of the pandemic, the demand for services has spiked, and the lines have only gotten longer. Intensive outpatient mental health programs, which provide full-day treatment to children at imminent risk of ending up in a hospital, have dozens of young people waiting for slots. Kids in crisis often have nowhere to go but emergency rooms, which are sometimes so crowded that families wait days just for an evaluation.

“The promise was ‘We’re going to pour all this money into the community and we won’t need these beds anymore,’” said Gina Corona, a social worker who has worked at Hutchings Psychiatric Center — a state-run hospital in Syracuse — for 16 years. “Unfortunately, our community resources are not meeting the needs.”

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Even among the state hospital beds that officially remain open, many sit empty for months on end, Corona said, due to a staffing shortage that started before the pandemic but then grew worse.

At Hutchings, the state permanently shut down seven beds in 2015, bringing the official count of available beds to 23. Before the pandemic, staffing shortages meant that just 19 of those beds were in use, Corona said. Over the last several months, that number has dropped to just five usable beds — as 20 or more children urgently wait for admission at any given time.

Inevitably, Corona says, some of those kids get sent home before they’re stable, only to end up back in emergency rooms — or worse.

On Long Island, Moshe spent more than two months at South Oaks Hospital, alongside other kids in crisis in a unit designed for stays of no more than a week or two. It’s a situation that can cause patients to regress, doctors say. By the time Moshe was admitted to Sagamore, he’d been punched in the head and kicked in the groin by other kids in the unit, and he’d been restrained multiple times by hospital staff — both physically and with the use of injected medications.

“It was hell,” Rae said. “Like I was living in The Twilight Zone.”

“I Would Never Be Normal”

Moshe’s bedroom on Long Island. A poster of aircraft encouraged him to build things, a favorite pastime.

Rae knew something was wrong when Moshe was still little. His speech was delayed and, well into elementary school, he’d have wild tantrums, sometimes screaming and hitting his head for more than an hour.

Rae had worked as a behavioral therapist before Moshe’s older sister was born. She tried every intervention she knew, carefully tracking Moshe’s behaviors and his responses to different stimuli. But when she brought her concerns to his pediatrician and teachers, they seemed to dismiss her as overreacting, she said.

Moshe “had amazing qualities,” Rae said. He was kind to other kids and protective of his dog. Teachers liked him. He built elaborate sculptures out of toys and stuff he’d find in the backyard. But by third grade, he still wasn’t learning to read. “He’s noticing this gap between himself and the other kids,” Rae said. “The divide is just getting wider and wider, and he can’t do anything about it.”

In childhood pictures, Moshe is a bright-eyed kid with a mischievous smile, like he’s about to pull a really hilarious prank. He has a thing for costumes. Sometimes he’s a pirate. Other times he’s Batman or a dinosaur. He looks tiny for his age until the pictures reach 9 years old, when he started taking psychiatric medication that made him gain a lot of weight. “That was really hard on his self-esteem,” Rae said. Around that time, his eyes start looking different too. They’re duller, and he doesn’t look at the camera anymore. He’s rarely smiling.

It was multiplication and division that made everything come crashing down, Rae said. Suddenly, Moshe wasn’t just slow at reading; he was bad at math, too. Rae was sure that Moshe was dyslexic — a diagnosis that would later be confirmed by a neuropsychologist, along with dyscalculia and dysgraphia, learning disabilities that can make math and writing hard. But Moshe just felt like there was something wrong with him, he said. Other kids made fun of him, and he felt like an outsider in his own family. Moshe’s dad is a scientist, and his older sister learned to read when she was 3. ​​

“I was depressed because I was different,” Moshe said. “I thought I would never be the same as other kids. I would never be normal and I would always fail, so there was no point to learning.”

A desk drawer in Moshe’s bedroom includes a geometric ruler. He struggled with math in school. A Rubik’s cube belonging to Moshe, alongside his bike. He loves and has mastered the puzzles.

Moshe started disengaging from school, putting his head down on his desk during classes. At home, he said he didn’t want to be alive anymore.

What Rae didn’t know was that, as Moshe’s problems were growing, New York state was rolling out a massive health care reform that would, within a few years, collide with her son’s life.

When Cuomo first took office as the governor of New York in 2011 — not long before Moshe’s third birthday — he inherited a public health care system that was notorious for achieving mediocre outcomes at fantastically high costs: In the year before Cuomo was first elected governor, New York ranked second-highest in the nation for per-enrollee Medicaid spending, but 21st for overall health system quality and dead last for avoidable hospitalizations.

In his first year in office, Cuomo rolled out a series of sweeping reforms to New York’s public health care system, including an overhaul of the state’s Medicaid program. Under his leadership, he promised, New York would rein in spending while simultaneously improving care and getting better results for patients.

State-run psychiatric hospitals were an obvious target for cuts. When Cuomo took office, the state was spending more than $1,400 for each day a child stayed in a state-run psychiatric hospital.

New York was “overly reliant on extended inpatient hospitalization for those with serious mental illness,” Cuomo’s Office of Mental Health wrote in 2013. The system was bad for patients, who would be better off receiving care in their communities.

In July 2013, when Moshe was 5 years old, Cuomo announced a plan to shut down nine of New York’s 24 psychiatric hospitals to free up funds for outpatient care. The proposal met with vociferous pushback — including from families on Long Island, who said their kids needed the beds at Sagamore.

The 2014 Transformation Plan emerged as a compromise: Instead of closing entire hospitals, the state Office of Mental Health would shut down psychiatric beds that had remained empty for 90 days. For each closed bed, the state would be required to reinvest no less than $110,000 annually into outpatient and community-based mental health programs.

Between 2014 and 2021, OMH closed more than 660 beds in state hospitals for adults, reducing the total number to just over 2,200 as of December, the last month for which data is available. The kids’ system saw its official bed count fall by 32%, from 460 to 314. The biggest reduction took place at the New York City Children’s Center, where the bed total was cut nearly in half — down to 92 in 2021. Currently, because of staff shortages, far fewer beds are open and usable, according to the Public Employees Federation, which represents close to half of OMH employees.

Then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks about New York’s health care system on July 30, 2018. (Kevin Coughlin/State of New York via Flickr)

OMH declined an interview request, but in response to detailed questions, spokesperson James Plastiras said in a written statement that the Transformation Plan “significantly increased access to mental health care for New Yorkers.” Plastiras wrote that the closed beds are more than offset by new services in the community, adding that the agency now serves 200,000 more people than it did in 2014.

As of December, the state had accumulated close to $83 million in annual reinvestment funds from closed state-run hospital beds. The money has gone to long-term housing programs for adults with mental illnesses who would otherwise be homeless and a package of community-based services for children, as well as clinic expansions and crisis intervention teams. Nearly 30% of the savings from closed hospital beds is reinvested into services for children and adolescents, OMH said.

Plastiras also noted that health care staff shortages are a national problem. “Unfortunately, OMH is not immune,” he wrote. To help address the shortages, OMH has increased salaries for nurses and other direct care staff, rolled out recruitment campaigns and agreed to temporarily pay a higher overtime rate to critical staff.

In response to a request for comment from Cuomo, Rich Azzopardi, a spokesperson for the former governor, wrote, “Institutionalization was never a one size fits all approach and many experts were clear that an investment in wraparound and supportive services will reach more people in need with the resources that were available.”

“You Have to Fight Tooth and Nail“

By the time Moshe was in third grade and saying that he wanted to die, Rae was frantically searching for some kind of intervention that would help him. It was something she was well-positioned to do compared to many parents. The family had health insurance through Moshe’s dad’s job. Rae is meticulous and dogged by nature, and as a stay-at-home parent she had the time and capacity to spend what would add up, over the next few years, to hundreds of hours searching for mental health services, calling providers, navigating waitlists and arguing with insurance representatives. “You have to fight tooth and nail for everything,” she said. “This was literally a full-time job.”

Rae convinced Moshe’s school district to pay for a full neuropsychological evaluation, but there was a six-month waitlist to get the testing done. After several weeks of phone calls, she managed to find a therapist who worked with kids of Moshe’s age and accepted her family’s insurance plan. “That was a victory,” she said. But when the therapist suggested that Moshe might need to see a doctor who could prescribe him medication, Rae discovered that all of the psychiatrists listed by her insurance company either had left the plan or weren’t accepting new patients.

As she met other parents of children with mental health issues, Rae learned that none of what she was experiencing was unusual. If Moshe had had a physical illness, she doubted it would have been so hard to get appropriate treatment.

Documents pile up at Rae’s home, many of them medical records of Moshe’s treatment. “This was literally a full-time job,” she said.

It didn’t help that Rae often felt like Moshe’s providers were judging her. As the mother of a child with behavior problems, “you are constantly being criticized,” she said. “I’m too clinical. I’m not emotional enough. My house is too structured. It isn’t structured enough. Don’t use reflective listening, but do use reflective listening. It is excruciating to have every decision you make Monday morning quarterbacked.”

Mental health care operates with a level of dysfunction that would never be tolerated for kids with physical health problems, said Dr. Jennifer Havens, chair of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU Langone Health and director of child and adolescent behavioral health at NYC Health + Hospitals. In many ways, the problems come down to money. Mental health providers and advocates argue that reimbursement rates for outpatient services are much too low. Many independent therapists and psychiatrists don’t accept insurance at all, only working with families who can pay out of pocket. At outpatient clinics — where children on Medicaid get the majority of their treatment — pay is typically low, turnover is high and kids often see brand-new social workers who are still logging the hours they need to become licensed, according to clinic providers.

“Clinics are staffed by very junior people,” Havens said. “Once you get better, you go somewhere you can make more money.”

In her proposed budget for the coming fiscal year, which starts on April 1, New York’s current governor, Kathy Hochul, is asking state legislators for an increase in Medicaid reimbursement rates for outpatient mental health clinics and nonstate hospital beds, a cost-of-living adjustment for programs overseen by OMH, and a significant bump in spending on children’s mental health. In all, the governor’s proposed budget would increase OMH funding by $730 million, bringing the total to nearly $4.7 billion.

The state Assembly’s proposed budget bill also includes a $53 million increase in funding for OMH services for kids, while the Senate has proposed to reinstate 200 state hospital psychiatric beds — though it’s not​ clear whether any of those would be for children and adolescents.

“Providing the best possible services and treatment options for New York’s children and families are among OMH’s highest priorities,” Plastiras wrote.

If the proposed increases make it into the final budget deal, it will be “a great, incredibly welcome start,” said Lauri Cole, the executive director of the New York State Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare, which represents more than 100 community-based agencies. But it would take years of increased investment to dig the mental health system out of the hole created by chronic underfunding and staffing shortages, Cole said. “This lessens the pain, but it does not take it away.”

Havens said the problem with mental health care is not just how much insurance plans pay; it’s also what they do and don’t pay for. In the world of physical health, pediatricians offer preventive services as a matter of course. There are no equivalents in the mental health system because providers can’t bill Medicaid and insurance companies for them.

An effective mental health system, Havens said, would screen kids while they are young and treat them early. And it would allow providers to work with entire families. There are good, clinically proven models that bring case management and intensive therapy into families’ homes, Havens said. But they can’t be done by a clinic that relies on insurance reimbursements.

“The worst part is we actually know what to do,” Havens said. “We know what works. We just can’t do it.”

A Mental Health Emergency

Rae shows a picture of Moshe on her cellphone posing with a Lego project.

For Rae, the questions are torture: What if Moshe’s learning disabilities had been diagnosed earlier? If she had fought harder or found help sooner, would things have turned out differently?

When Moshe was in third grade, Rae’s search for services that could help him led her to a nurse practitioner who was willing to evaluate him for psychiatric medication. She gave him a prescription for paroxetine, widely known by its brand name Paxil, an antidepressant that can increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in children. A few months later, Moshe came to Rae in tears. He had tried to hang himself, he said, but it hurt too much, and he got scared and stopped. “He was 9 years old,” Rae says. “We were stunned. Horrified.”

Rae and her husband packed Moshe into the family’s Toyota and drove him to the psychiatric emergency room at Long Island’s Stony Brook University Hospital, where a doctor instructed them to discontinue the Paxil. For a time, Moshe stopped saying he didn’t want to be alive, but his mood and behavior became more volatile.

Moshe’s temper tantrums had never gone away. As he got bigger, they grew into fits of rage that he seemed completely unable to control. He’d break things and throw furniture. In the car, he’d explode over the smallest frustrations, like not being able to buy candy or a smoothie, Rae said. “He’s yelling, screaming, throwing things at my head. I’m starting to get bruises. Things are getting bad.”

Between ages 9 and 12, Moshe ended up in psychiatric emergency rooms nine times. Sometimes Rae was able to drive him herself; other times, she had to call 911 and ask for a police car or ambulance. He was hospitalized twice, each time for about a week. He came home calmer, Rae said, but the respites didn’t last long.

Then the pandemic came, and everything got worse. Rae and her husband both have medical conditions that make them vulnerable to COVID-19, so Rae tried to enforce strict social distancing. To Moshe, the house felt like a cage. The things he looked forward to — hanging out with friends, Boy Scout trips — disappeared. He already felt like a failure at school, and he gave up hope when classes went online.

With Moshe trapped at home, his anger narrowed in on Rae. He’d block her path and try to intimidate her physically, raising his fists and yelling insults and curses. She locked herself in her room during his episodes. He’d pound on the door for hours. Afterwards, when the rage passed, he’d often feel terrible, Rae said. Then he’d bang his head on the wall and say he was going to kill himself.

Moshe’s bedroom, left. His parents replaced the door with a curtain in order to keep him safe.

In the fall of 2020, soon after Moshe started seventh grade, Rae realized that he had been stealing money from her purse. He’d spent most of it on Nerf guns, but he’d also bought a pellet gun and knives.

That was when Rae realized that the situation had spun out of her control. “I just couldn’t anymore,” she said. “I can’t keep him safe. I can’t keep the family safe. I decided, ‘My kid needs serious help. I’m not going to push this under the rug, I’m going to get him the help he needs.’”

The idea of shutting down psychiatric hospital beds in favor of outpatient care is not new. In the early 1960s, more than half a million people were living in state-run mental asylums across the country, many of which were rife with abuse and neglect. When President John F. Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act in 1963, he made federal seed money available to open community-based mental health clinics that would, he said, allow people with mental illnesses to return to “a useful place in society.” Over time, the plan was, federal funds would be replaced by an influx of state and local investment.

That influx never came. In the following decades, hundreds of thousands of people were released from state asylums, while the number of state-run psychiatric beds across the country dropped by more than 90%. Meanwhile, federal funds for community clinics dried up, eventually replaced by a mental health block grant that states could spend how they chose.

With limited access to outpatient treatment, hundreds of thousands of people with mental health problems ended up in what are sometimes called systems of last resort. As of 2018, according to the federal government, 140,000 people with serious mental illnesses in the United States were homeless, and another 392,000 were in jails and prisons.

Critics charge that Cuomo’s Transformation Plan represents a spectacular failure to learn from history. At a February press conference with New York City Mayor Eric Adams — held in response to a high-profile incident in which a homeless man with a history of schizophrenia was charged with shoving a woman in front of a train — Hochul announced an initiative to increase psychiatric hospital beds for adults. “For too long our mental health care system suffered from disinvestment,” she said. “We see New Yorkers clearly suffering in plain sight.”

Mental health services for kids tend to receive less attention than those for adults, in part because the system’s failures aren’t nearly as visible on the streets. But young people who don’t get the mental health care they need are often shunted into last-resort systems of their own — especially low-income kids and kids of color, said Jeremy Kohomban, the president and CEO of the nonprofit social service agency The Children’s Village. “They often get booted down to foster care or juvenile justice. Or maybe they just end up on the street and get lost there,” he said.

The idea that Moshe could slide from the mental health system to jail or prison terrifies Rae. “I don’t know if my son will stay out of the justice system,” she said. “It’s certainly not hard to imagine. He’s already done things that could land him in jail.”

That’s why, back in the spring of 2021, Rae agreed that Moshe should stay at South Oaks Hospital until a state hospital bed opened up. No one could tell her how long it would take. Before the pandemic, it was common for children to spend two months waiting for an admission to Sagamore, said Dr. Youssef Hassoun, the medical director at South Oaks Hospital. By mid-2020, in a couple of cases, that wait time stretched as long as six months, due to staff shortages and COVID-19 quarantines at Sagamore, he said.

Once a hospital applies for a child to be transferred, the state will often ask for more information and documentation, delaying the application for weeks at a time, Hassoun said. If there’s any disruption in care — say, the child needs to leave the psychiatric unit for treatment in a medical bed for a few days — the process starts all over again. “It’s ridiculous,” Hassoun said, adding that the delays effectively limit the number of kids that state hospitals are pressured to accept.

Hassoun did not comment on Moshe’s or any other child’s individual case. But generally, he said, the delays can be damaging to patients. Part of the reason for a transfer to Sagamore is that kids can progress toward stability. They start in a unit for patients who are acutely ill, then graduate through units that are increasingly less restrictive.

At South Oaks Hospital, on the other hand, patients remain in the most restrictive possible setting, constantly interacting with other kids who are at the height of their own crises. The result is they sometimes get worse instead of better, Hassoun said. “It can be a source of destabilization and disappointment and acting out.” For some kids, that’s when you see an increase in incidents like fights and restraints. “The fact that you don’t know whether it’s going to be three weeks or three months, that’s very frustrating,” Hassoun said.

South Oaks Hospital on Long Island, where Moshe stayed while waiting for a bed to open at Sagamore

As far as Rae can tell, Moshe’s first serious altercation at South Oaks Hospital started over a tub of cream cheese. No one witnessed the beginning, but by the end, Moshe had been punched in the head and kicked multiple times in the groin, according to an email from OMH to a lawyer representing South Oaks Hospital. A nurse wrote in Moshe’s medical records that he had been writhing on the floor in pain.

In the weeks that followed, Rae received calls about one incident or another every couple of days. Often, Moshe would instigate a verbal argument, according to hospital notes, and another child on the unit would retaliate physically. He was kicked and slapped. A staff member found him sobbing because, Moshe said, a patient had threatened to slit his throat. Kids dumped water and orange juice on him. Four times, during or after an incident, hospital staff injected him with an antipsychotic medication known under the brand name Thorazine to calm him down. Once, Moshe received the injection and was also placed in a four-point restraint, with his arms and legs immobilized, for 30 minutes, hospital records show.

“It was very scary,” Moshe said. “It feels like your body’s out of it and your emotions are gone, like you’re a zombie. It’s very, very bad.”

Northwell Health, which owns South Oaks Hospital, said it seeks to use restraints as little as possible and “takes considerable care to enforce policies and practices that are the least restrictive to patients in order to promote a safe environment for patients, staff and others in the facility.”

For Rae, it felt like a nightmare. “I have been fighting to keep my child safe for his entire life,” she said. “Now I’m putting him somewhere he’s not safe, a place that’s causing him more trauma. And I have no choice. This is the only way to get him to a place where he can get the help he needs.”

At first, Moshe cried when a social worker told him about the plan to transfer him to Sagamore. He missed his mom and dad and wanted to go home. But as time passed, he stopped caring about the destination — he just wanted to get out of South Oaks Hospital. He’d been admitted on March 21, a week before his 13th birthday. Three and a half weeks later, on April 14, Rae told a social worker that Moshe was 11th on the waitlist for Sagamore. By the end of that month, he’d made it to number eight. Two more weeks, and he was number three.

When Moshe finally made it to Sagamore — after nine weeks at South Oaks Hospital — his treatment team decided he needed a longer-term program. He applied and was eventually accepted to a residential school in upstate New York for kids with mental health problems, paid for by his home school district. After eight months at Sagamore, he left for the school. In all, he spent close to a year of his life in psychiatric hospitals — much of it just waiting for the next placement. “It’s really sad to be in the hospital for that long,” Moshe said.

Moshe’s chair at his family’s dinner table, empty while he receives treatment. “I’m going to try my best and put in the work to get better so I can come home,” he said.

Rae said she has high hopes for the residential school, and for Moshe. When she thinks about what she wants for her kids, she refers back to a Hebrew phrase, tikkun olam, that’s often interpreted as an injunction to do good deeds — to take one’s part in repairing the world. “I wanted to raise them to be productive members of society,” she said. “To have a job and be independent. To contribute, even if in a small way.”

Moshe likes his new school too. “I’m going to try my best and put in the work to get better so I can come home,” he said. He hopes that telling his story will help other kids who need mental health care.

Reach Abigail Kramer via email at akramer@thecity.nyc.

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

• Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
• Text the Crisis Text Line from anywhere in the U.S. to reach a crisis counselor: 741741

Correction

March 28, 2022: This story originally misstated who proposed to reinstate 200 psychiatric beds in state hospitals. The state Senate made that proposal, not Gov. Kathy Hochul.

by Lisa Song

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

After learning from a ProPublica analysis that his Missouri city is a hot spot of toxic air pollution, Verona Mayor Joseph Heck demanded that government officials look into the local cancer rate.

Three months later, the state health department confirmed his fears: The rate of Non-Hodgkin lymphoma in the Verona zip code is more than twice as high as that of the surrounding county and state, officials told him. Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer that begins in the lymphatic system, can be caused by exposure to ethylene oxide, a potent carcinogen released by the BCP Ingredients plant in Verona. ProPublica’s unique analysis of air pollution data from the Environmental Protection Agency found the facility’s ethylene oxide emissions substantially increased local cancer risk; in some areas, the estimated industrial cancer risk was 27 times what the EPA considers acceptable.

This month, state regulators sent Heck a letter about the “statistically significantly higher” Non-Hodgkin lymphoma cancer rate for the 65769 zip code, saying that a committee of health and environmental experts had opened an inquiry. The department asked Heck to distribute a health survey to local cancer patients, which could prompt additional study.

Heck said he was encouraged by the cancer inquiry and the surveys. “If we get these filled out and it does show a high number, maybe this will prompt the EPA to take the next step, or there could be funding available for more health studies,” he said.

Pamela Dorton, a former schoolteacher who volunteers for Verona’s city government, was also heartened. “This is kind of the first light we’ve seen as far as anyone who’s willing to listen,” she said. “I welcome any kind of investigation, any kind of realization that there may be health issues.”

Pamela Dorton hopes a state investigation can shed light on the health impacts of carcinogens in Verona. (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)

Following ProPublica’s investigation last fall and a segment on Verona’s cancer risk by TV station KY3, the EPA held a community meeting where residents including Heck called for regulators to protect them. The following day, Heck asked the state health department to investigate broader health effects in Verona. “While cancer is of the highest concern, we understand that there may be other ailments that are triggered or caused by exposure” to ethylene oxide, he wrote to officials.

A spokesperson for BCP Ingredients said in an email this week that the company would not comment on the health survey. “We would like to bring your attention to the language that is listed on the form that states, ‘Confirmation of a cancer excess in a community does not necessarily mean that there is any single, external cause or hazard that can be identified,’” the spokesperson wrote. The statement said the facility “is in full compliance with both federal and state regulations” and has “strict protocols in place to ensure that we’re safely manufacturing, storing and transporting ethylene oxide which is used to sterilize medical and surgical equipment for life-saving surgeries and medical procedures.”

The BCP Ingredients facility in Verona is a known emitter of ethylene oxide. (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)

Verona is also the site of an old toxic waste site that contains dioxin, a contaminant that’s linked to Non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other cancers.

Lisa Cox, a state health department spokesperson, said the agency would focus on responses involving Non-Hodgkin lymphoma for its study.

Cox provided data showing 17 counts of Non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosed between 1999 and 2018 in the zip code of roughly 2,900 people. That’s more than twice the rate expected based on diagnoses from the rest of the county and state, the data showed. (Verona itself has a population of 620.)

“This type of study is an opportunity to provide useful community-level health information,” Cox wrote. It is “unlikely” to “provide a link to a common identifiable risk factor and cannot provide information about individual health causes or concerns."

Heck said the surveys are available at Verona City Hall. He publicized the survey on Verona’s Facebook page and asked a local newspaper to write about it. Heck urged current and former residents of the 65769 zip code, BCP Ingredients employees and the families of those who’ve died from cancer to fill one out. The survey asks people to explain the type of cancer they have, when they were diagnosed and where they lived at the time of diagnosis. Each respondent should mail their completed survey to the state health department to maintain medical privacy.

Verona, Missouri and the estimated excess lifetime cancer risk due to emissions from BCP Ingredients. (Graphic by Lucas Waldron and Al Shaw/ProPublica)

Since December, Verona has also repeatedly requested air monitoring from the EPA to track ethylene oxide emissions. Heck said the initial conversations were so promising that the city decided not to apply for an EPA air monitoring grant, since it believed the agency would provide monitoring services. But on March 3, the regional EPA office told Heck that it “does not have the equipment to deploy immediately to conduct ethylene oxide monitoring.”

“We recognize the concerns in Verona,” said EPA Region 7 spokesperson Ben Washburn in an email to ProPublica. “On January 27, EPA Region 7 committed to evaluating what an air monitoring campaign in Verona would look like. Region 7 staff have been working since the December 2021 public meeting to seek access to the air quality monitors necessary for such a study, as we do not house such equipment in our regional office in Kansas City.”

Heck expressed “disgust” in a reply to the EPA. “I do not understand how you say that you don’t have air monitoring systems or the technology, because we have paperwork that shows that in other cities, EPA does have this equipment and technology,” he wrote. “There is no trust, respect, or even hope that you and the agency will ever be honest and keep to your word.”

by Melissa Sanchez and Anna 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.

This story mentions self-harm, suicidal ideation and sexual abuse of children.

Seven months after the fall of Kabul, shelters in the U.S. caring for children evacuated without their parents are experiencing unprecedented violence while workers at the facilities have struggled to respond to the young Afghans’ trauma.

Some children have run away, punched employees and stopped eating. Others have tried to kill themselves. At one shelter, ProPublica has learned, some children reported being hurt by employees and sexually abused by other minors.

At least three shelters in Michigan and Illinois have shut down or paused operations after taking in large groups of Afghan children, prompting federal officials to transfer them from one facility to another, further upending their lives.

“This is not acceptable,” said Naheed Samadi Bahram, U.S. country director for the nonprofit Women for Afghan Women, which provides mentors to children in custody in New York. These children “left their homes with a dream to be stable, to be happy, to be safe. If we cannot offer that here in the U.S. that is a big failure.”

ProPublica reported in October on serious problems at a Chicago shelter that took in dozens of young Afghans. Since then, we’ve found that the troubles in the U.S. shelter system are more widespread.

This account is based on law enforcement records, internal documents and interviews with nearly two dozen people who have worked with or have talked with the children in facilities across the country, including shelter administrators and employees as well as interpreters, attorneys and volunteers.

Advocates for the children acknowledge that the Office of Refugee Resettlement — the federal agency responsible for overseeing the nation’s shelters for unaccompanied immigrant minors — is navigating an exceptional challenge. The haphazard evacuation of tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan last year as U.S. troops pulled out of the country left little time to prepare ORR facilities, which are accustomed to housing Central American children and teens. The COVID-19 pandemic created additional complications.

In all, some 1,400 unaccompanied Afghan minors were brought to the U.S. last year and placed in ORR custody. Of those, more than 1,200 have gone to live with sponsors, typically relatives or family friends.

Nearly all the remaining 190 are teenage boys with nobody here who can take them in. As of March 8, more than 80 Afghan children had been in ORR custody for at least five months, according to government data analyzed by the National Center for Youth Law. In a system that normally houses children for about a month, the young Afghans have been waiting in what seems like never-ending detention.

It’s unclear how or when children will be reunited with their families. The State Department is working to obtain travel documents for parents who remain in Afghanistan, a spokesperson said, but coordinating departures from Taliban-ruled Kabul has proven challenging.

The ORR said it has placed 56 of the 190 children in its custody into long-term or transitional foster care as of this week and is recruiting more families to take them in.

An ORR official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the agency is doing its best to support the Afghan children by providing interpreters, mental health services, additional staffing and, in recent months, Afghan American mentors. But those efforts won’t “change the reality for a child that their parent is hiding from the Taliban or that their family has died or that they are grappling with some really terrible things that nobody should have to grapple with.”

“I do struggle to know what else we could be doing that we’ve already not been trying to do.”

And the ORR may soon face another challenge. With the Biden administration’s announcement Thursday that the U.S. will accept 100,000 Ukrainians fleeing war, people who work in the system are bracing for the children who may arrive without their parents.

On a cold and cloudy evening in early January, 19 boys were shuttled in vans to a shelter run by the nonprofit Samaritas in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Employees at the shelter had heard that they might receive Afghan children but thought they’d have two or three weeks to prepare for their arrival.

Instead, they had 24 hours’ notice, according to one worker. (The ORR says it gave the shelter two weeks’ notice.) A federal emergency intake site that housed dozens of Afghan children almost 85 miles away in Albion, Michigan, had abruptly shut down, scattering children to facilities across the country, including Samaritas.

The shelter was not ready.

“Everything from the food to the reading material [to the] grievance procedures and the rules — everything that we had was set up for Central American kids,” one Samaritas employee said. “And now we were really screwed.”

On a given day, some 10,000 or so children and teens are in ORR custody around the country, the vast majority of them from Central America. Facilities that receive them tend to have employees who know their language and culture. Workers often speak Spanish or are Latin American immigrants or children of immigrants. They understand what motivates Central American teens to immigrate each year: pursuing a better education, fleeing gang violence and earning dollars to support families.

The children, too, often know what to expect because they’ve heard stories from friends and relatives who immigrated before them. They know it’ll be about 30 days in ORR custody before they’re sent to live with a sponsor.

“The Afghan kids were a completely different story,” said a former worker at a Pittsburgh shelter run by the nonprofit Holy Family Institute. “I felt so sorry for them. They’ve been there three, four months, and they still did not know if they would ever see their families again.”

The pivot to housing Afghan children left shelters flat-footed. Many needed prayer rugs, halal meat and connections to local Muslims who could lead Friday prayers. Even with interpreters who spoke Pashto or Dari, communication between children and employees was difficult, leading to misunderstandings and mistrust.

In the hours before the Afghan children arrived in Grand Rapids, the Samaritas worker said staff members were scrambling: “OK, like, what language do they speak? ... It was a culture shock for them. It was a culture shock for us.”

There were many “unexpected complications,” said Samaritas Chief Operations Officer Kevin Van Den Bosch, but “we looked at the challenge, and said, ‘If not us, who is going to do it?’”

Employees at several shelters described the trauma among the youths as more severe than anything they’d seen. Children are desperate to call home to check on their parents and other relatives, some of whom worked for the U.S. government or for contractors and are now potential targets for the Taliban.

Some feel guilty for being in the U.S. while their families fear for their lives in Afghanistan.

After the Afghan children arrived at Samaritas, Grand Rapids police responded nearly every other day to calls for incidents like missing persons, suicide threats, fights and assaults. The police reports were unavailable, but internal shelter records document many of those incidents.

One boy put a rope around his neck, “acting like he wanted to hang himself.” Another day, a boy tried to suffocate another child with a plastic bag. A few days later, a worker found a boy scratching his forearm. He told her that “when his body is in pain, it prevents his head from thinking about his problems.”

Meanwhile, Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the state’s Children’s Protective Services, is investigating allegations related to Samaritas, though it’s not clear what the allegations involve. A department spokesperson, Bob Wheaton, said the agency was prohibited by law from disclosing details.

Samaritas officials said that, while the nonprofit could not provide information about the allegations, the agency follows robust safety protocols to protect the youth in its care. That includes background checks, cameras at the facility and safety plans for children at risk of self-harm. “We take every, every allegation, or everything that a youth says seriously,” Van Den Bosch said, “and everything gets reported.”

Advocates said the struggles of some of the Afghan children should have been anticipated.

“Even children who have no prior traumatic experiences would begin to show signs of distress at this point, being in shelter care for this long,” said Saman Hamidi-Azar, who visits children in ORR facilities as a volunteer with Afghan Refugee Relief, a community organization in California. “There is nowhere to pinpoint blame except for the manner in which Afghanistan is evacuated: way too fast. No one was prepared on the ground here. No one could have expected what happened.”

In Chicago, ProPublica reported last fall on how the challenges involving Afghan children at a shelter operated by Heartland Human Care Services were exacerbated by the lack of on-site interpreters.

After the story was published, lawmakers called for an investigation and Heartland received interpreters.

But in the months that followed, police were called repeatedly to the facility. In January, officers arrested a 16-year-old boy accused of kicking and punching two workers. According to the police report, the boy said he was upset about being separated from his friends.

(Anuj Shrestha, special to ProPublica)

In a statement, Heartland said it’s not equipped to provide the mental health support some Afghan children need. “Heartland is not alone in our experience of how the severe lack of access to mental health resources dramatically impacted unaccompanied Afghan youth who arrived in this country last fall,” an official wrote.

The official said it stopped taking in children “after the challenging past few months” to support front-line staff through team-building and training. Heartland recently resumed operations, though at a reduced capacity.

Starr Commonwealth, the emergency intake site in Albion, seemed to get off to a better start. It offered a welcoming setting with residential cottages on a lush green campus when Afghan children arrived last fall. Unlike Heartland, it had Dari and Pashto interpreters on site from the outset.

But attorneys who visited children at Starr raised red flags early on. The site was too restrictive, they said, and children complained about a lack of physical activity and phones to call their families.

What’s more, because of its status as a federal emergency intake site, Starr wasn’t licensed by the state. Immigration advocates have long criticized the government’s use of these emergency facilities because they operate without independent state oversight.

The federal government had begun leasing the campus from a nonprofit with the same name last spring in response to large numbers of Central American children crossing the border. Starr later shifted focus to housing Afghan children.

As the children remained long past the short stays Starr was designed to accommodate, the local sheriff’s office started fielding calls about fights, runaways and suicidal behavior. A volunteer who often visited the facility — and asked not to be identified to avoid the risk of losing access to children in ORR custody — said children would tell her they “were crying all night long” and ask for prayers to help with depression.

She told her husband the shelter reminded her of a prison.

Before Starr shut down in early January, the sheriff’s office in Calhoun County received referrals for at least five child welfare allegations in the final three weeks, records show. In one case, a 16-year-old said two workers shoved and yelled at him. When interviewed by a deputy, one of the workers acknowledged yelling out of frustration but said he “does not put his hands” on the children.

The other worker was separately suspended after being accused of kicking a boy who was praying, according to a report. Neither led to charges. In the case in which the 16-year-old said he was shoved, the Calhoun County prosecutor’s office determined an assault did not take place. In the second, the child who said that he was kicked could not be located because he had been transferred elsewhere, Prosecuting Attorney David Gilbert said.

There were other troubles. Authorities responded to three allegations of sexual abuse or inappropriate behavior between children, including one from an 8-year-old boy who told a counselor that a 13-year-old boy came into his room at night and touched him. “He is scared and does not feel safe,” according to a sheriff’s department report. But by the time the prosecutors got this case, too, the children were no longer at Starr and could not be located, Gilbert said.

It’s unclear who employed the workers, as Starr was mostly staffed by PAE Applied Technologies, a federal contractor. A company representative declined to comment. Other workers came from a variety of federal agencies that loaned their services to the ORR.

A spokesperson for Starr said the nonprofit “did share a number of concerns” with both ORR and PAE. But Starr was “purely serving as a landlord,” she added, and “the government, not Starr, is solely responsible for programming and caring for children through its ORR program.”

Wheaton, from the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, said the agency had no jurisdiction over Starr but forwarded allegations to local law enforcement and federal authorities.

The ORR official said that the agency has a “zero-tolerance policy for abuse of any kind” and that employees accused of abuse are immediately terminated or put on administrative leave. Facilities also send allegations to local law enforcement, child protective services, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general and the FBI.

At Starr and shelters around the country, workers said that they were overwhelmed. Some expressed frustration, calling the youth “spoiled” for asking for more phone time and Afghan food — which, over time, they received. Other employees suspected their colleagues were afraid of the children. One volunteer called the situation inside a shelter a “pressure cooker.”

Workers and others at several facilities said they heard children say they'd been told that if they misbehaved, they’d be sent back to Afghanistan.

ORR officials said any threats against children are unacceptable, and employees accused of maltreatment are placed on leave until all the details of what happened are understood.

Staffing shortages exacerbated tensions. In recent weeks, Samaritas administrators offered workers a $500 bonus if they picked up an extra shift, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.

“The depth and breadth of the need, and the sudden nature of it ... put everybody in a really tough spot,” Sam Beals, Samaritas’ chief executive, said. “When I think of what these kids have gone through ... it’s shocking they don’t act out more.”

Last week, Samaritas paused operations at the Grand Rapids shelter to hire and train staff.

The decision was made by the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, which holds Samaritas’ grant with the ORR, according to federal officials. Lutheran Immigration did not respond to requests for comment.

Less than three months after they arrived at Samaritas, the Afghan children were on the move again, transferred to new facilities. Employees made it a point to prepare the children by taking them on virtual or physical tours when possible. The last child left the Samaritas shelter last weekend.

Melissa Adamson, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law who is authorized to interview children in U.S. immigration custody, said the repeated transfers of the Afghan youth “further destabilizes their already fragile sense of security.”

Last fall, the ORR began offering special training for staff at shelters serving Afghan children. The agency also began allowing volunteer mentors from the Afghan American community to visit and provide emotional support to children, federal officials said.

In January, the ORR began sending Muslim and Afghan American mental health specialists to shelters through a program with the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants.

The changes made a difference, said Hamidi-Azar — whose organization is part of a coalition of Afghan American community groups, advocates and others that mobilized last fall to assist evacuees in the U.S. “You have to give credit where it’s due,” she said. “From government agencies to community activists, we have all been trying to find a way to make the situation better.”

After visiting children at one shelter in California, one Afghan American volunteer realized she could do more: She became a foster mom and welcomed two small boys — cousins — to her home.

The woman, who asked not to be identified to protect the children’s privacy, took time off work to bond with the boys and enroll them in the neighborhood school.

“They have adjusted well and are so happy to be in a home environment,” she said. “Being able to experience many firsts has been pretty special” — including a trip to the beach and a ride on a carousel.

Theirs is the kind of story advocates around the country want for Afghan children languishing in ORR custody. But the foster care system is backlogged, and finding homes for teenage boys is especially difficult. Foster parents often prefer and are licensed to care for younger children.

The ORR has partnered with organizations like the Muslim Foster Care Association to recruit more foster families. Approximately 80 Afghan families are awaiting licensing, a process that varies by state.

The foster mom in California thinks often about all the children still waiting for what’s next.

“As happy as I was that these boys were placed [with me], there were kids at the shelter that were devastated,” she said. “I know that one kid was crying: ‘Why? Why didn’t a family want me? What did I do?’”

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

• Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
• Text the Crisis Text Line from anywhere in the U.S. to reach a crisis counselor: 741741

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

Clarification, March 25, 2022: This story was updated to add that the ORR says it gave a shelter run by the nonprofit Samaritas in Grand Rapids, Michigan, two weeks' notice that it would receive Afghan children. A worker said it received 24 hours’ notice.

by Jeremy Schwartz, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Mike Hixenbaugh, NBC News

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

The story was also produced in partnership with NBC News.

In early January, a day before students returned from winter break, Jeremy Glenn, the superintendent of the Granbury Independent School District in North Texas, told a group of librarians he’d summoned to a district meeting room that he needed to speak from his heart.

“I want to talk about our community,” Glenn said, according to a recording of the Jan. 10 meeting obtained and verified by NBC News, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Glenn explained that Granbury, the largest city in a county where 81% of residents voted for then-President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, is “very, very conservative.”

He noted that members of Granbury’s school board — his bosses — were also very conservative. And to any school employees who might have different political beliefs, Glenn said, “You better hide it,” adding, “Here in this community, we’re going to be conservative.”

That’s why, he said, he needed to talk to them about some of the books available in the school district’s libraries.

An attendee at a Jan. 10, 2022, meeting captured this audio of Glenn speaking to a group of librarians about books he felt should not be in the school district’s libraries.

For months, conservative parents and politicians across Texas had been pressuring districts to remove from school libraries any books that contain explicit descriptions of sex, labeling several young adult novels as “pornography.” Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, called for criminal investigations into school employees who make such content available to students.

Many of the titles targeted statewide have featured queer characters and storylines, but those calling for the books’ removal have repeatedly said they are concerned only with sex and vulgarity, not with suppressing the views of LGBTQ students and authors.

Glenn made a similar argument during his closed-door meeting with librarians in Granbury, which is about an hour’s drive southwest of Dallas.

“I don’t want a kid picking up a book, whether it’s about homosexuality or heterosexuality, and reading about how to hook up sexually in our libraries,” Glenn said.

He also made it clear that his concerns specifically included books with LGBTQ themes, even if they do not describe sex. Those comments, according to legal experts, raise concerns about possible violations of the First Amendment and federal civil rights laws that protect students from discrimination based on their gender and sexuality.

“And I’m going to take it a step further with you,” he said, according to the recording. “There are two genders. There’s male, and there’s female. And I acknowledge that there are men that think they’re women. And there are women that think they’re men. And again, I don’t have any issues with what people want to believe, but there’s no place for it in our libraries.”

Minutes later, after someone asked whether titles on racism were acceptable, Glenn said books on different cultures “are great.”

“Specifically, what we’re getting at, let’s call it what it is, and I’m cutting to the chase on a lot of this,” Glenn said. “It’s the transgender, LGBTQ and the sex — sexuality — in books. That’s what the governor has said that he will prosecute people for, and that’s what we’re pulling out.”

Over the next two weeks, the school district embarked on one of the largest book removals in the country, pulling about 130 titles from library shelves for review. Nearly three-quarters of the removed books featured LGBTQ characters or themes, according to a ProPublica and Texas Tribune analysis. Others dealt with racism, sex ed, abortion and women’s rights.

Two months later, a volunteer review committee voted to permanently ban three of the books and return the others to shelves. But that may not be the end of the process.

In his recorded comments to librarians, Glenn described the review of 130 titles as the first step in a broader appraisal of library content, and a new policy approved by the school board later in January grants him and other administrators broad authority to unilaterally remove additional titles they deem inappropriate, with no formal review and no way for the public to easily find out what has been pulled from shelves.

Legal, education and First Amendment experts contacted by ProPublica, NBC News and the Tribune said the audio of the superintendent, combined with the decision to abruptly remove books from circulation, even temporarily, raises constitutional concerns.

Glenn’s comments also call into question the district’s commitment to fostering a safe and inclusive school environment for LGBTQ students and could be grounds for a complaint to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which enforces federal anti-discrimination laws, the experts said.

“This audio is very much evidence of anti-LGBTQ and particularly anti-trans discrimination,” said Kate Huddleston, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, who reviewed the recording at the request of NBC News, ProPublica and the Tribune. “It is very much saying the quiet part out loud in a way that provides very significant evidence that book removals in the district are occurring because of anti-LGBTQ bias.”

In a written statement, Glenn said the district was committed to supporting students of all backgrounds. And although he said the district’s primary focus is educating students, “the values of our community will always be reflected in our schools.”

“In Granbury and across Texas we are seeing parents push back and demand elected officials put safeguards in place to protect their children from materials that serve no academic purpose, but rather push a political narrative,” Glenn said in the statement. “As a result, classrooms and libraries have turned schools into battle grounds for partisan politics.”

Glenn, second from left (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica/The Texas Tribune/NBC News)

None of Granbury’s school board trustees responded to messages requesting comment. District spokesperson Jeff Meador sent a statement emphasizing that all of the books permanently removed from shelves in Granbury are “sexually explicit and not age-appropriate” and noting that district libraries “continue to house a socially and culturally diverse collection of books for students to read, including books which analyze and explore LGBTQ+ issues.”

The three books the committee voted to remove were “This Book Is Gay,” a coming out guide for LGBTQ teens by transgender author Juno Dawson that includes detailed descriptions of sex; “Out of Darkness,” by Ashley Hope Pérez, a young adult novel about a romance between a Mexican American girl and a Black boy that includes a rape scene and other mature content; and “We Are the Ants,” by Shaun David Hutchinson, a coming-of-age novel about a gay teenager that includes explicit sexual language.

At least one member of the volunteer review committee was dissatisfied that only three books have been permanently removed so far, and she has started calling for a second review of the ones that have been returned.

“There are people who want to tear down values and force theirs and then also force acceptance,” Monica Brown, the committee member, said in a Facebook video following the decision. Brown did not respond to a request for comment.

One of the Granbury ISD employees in attendance at the Jan. 10 meeting with librarians said that regardless of which books are pulled from shelves or returned, Glenn’s comments left her afraid to display or purchase LGBTQ books going forward — a chilling effect that she said could limit the diversity of Granbury library catalogs for years to come. The staff member, who was not the source of the audio, spoke on the condition that she not be named, because she feared retaliation from the district.

“He literally said books on trans issues have no place in a school,” she said. “It was alarming.”

The superintendent’s comments reflect a broader national debate. Conservative state legislatures across the country have been considering bills to restrict the ways educators teach about gender and sexuality in schools. This month, the Florida Legislature passed the Parental Rights in Education bill, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by its critics, which restricts or bans discussion of LGBTQ issues in the classroom.

Conservative activists and politicians pushing these changes nationally say the goal is to prevent teachers from having sensitive conversations with students unless the parents give their consent. Some have at times conflated sex and sexual orientation, accusing educators of attempting to “groom” young children because the teachers had discussed the existence of transgender people and same-sex relationships. Opponents contend that the measures discriminate against LGBTQ students and educators and violate federal laws meant to prevent discrimination in schools.

These changes coincide with attempts in several conservative states to limit the rights of transgender minors to participate in school sports and to access gender-affirming medical care. Last month, Abbott issued a directive — temporarily halted by a Texas judge — ordering the state’s child welfare agency to open abuse investigations into any reported instances of minors receiving such medical care, including the prescription of puberty blockers or hormones.

As superintendent of a district that’s home to more than 7,400 students, Glenn is responsible for implementing and enforcing policies that ensure that children are not discriminated against based on their gender identity or sexual orientation.

After listening to the recording of Glenn’s remarks, Lou Whiting, a nonbinary junior at Granbury High School, said they were outraged. Whiting and another student who’s part of the LGBTQ community said classmates at Granbury have harassed them at school, but they’ve avoided reporting the harassment because they worried administrators wouldn’t take their complaints seriously.

Glenn’s comments validated those fears, Whiting said.

“I don’t feel incredibly safe or welcomed by a large majority of the students at my school,” Whiting said. “I’ve been called slurs. I’ve been verbally attacked. I’ve been physically attacked. But it kind of feels worse when the attacks are coming from adults, from the people who are supposed to keep us safe.”

Lou Whiting, a nonbinary student at Granbury High School, said, “I’ve had my fair share of active hate against me, and my friends, and my community. I’ve always kind of been ‘that queer person.’ … I’ve always put myself in that danger because I’m more comfortable being myself.” (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica/The Texas Tribune/NBC News) “A Very Conservative Board”

The meeting with librarians wasn’t the first time Glenn had publicly embraced socially conservative values in schools.

In 2014, when he was superintendent at another district, he and a pair of education professors wrote a book called “Daily Devotionals for Superintendents,” which lamented the legalization of same-sex marriage and the passage of state laws “making it a crime to counsel gay young people about changing their sexual orientation.”

In another section of the book, Glenn and his co-authors said those pushing for broader acceptance of “alternative lifestyles” and other cultural changes are doing so through the indoctrination of children in schools, as “was done by Hitler when he took over Germany.” They warned that school superintendents will face pressure to “recognize the demands of alternative life-style adults,” adding, “As a superintendent, you will have to be strong and courageous to stand against the onslaught of the enemy. Your country and your children’s future are at stake.”

Glenn, who arrived at Granbury ISD in 2018 following stints leading two other Texas districts, said he couldn’t recall if he wrote those specific passages, but he acknowledged co-authoring the book, adding, “It’s fair to say I am aware of its content.”

In November, voters in Granbury elected a pair of school board members who, while campaigning, also raised concerns about the spread of LGBTQ-affirming curricula in schools. Melanie Graft rose to local prominence after leading a conservative movement in 2015 to remove a pair of LGBTQ-themed picture books from the children’s section at Granbury’s public library. She ran alongside Courtney Gore, the co-host of a local far-right internet talk show.

As candidates, the women promised to stop the “indoctrination” of students and rid the district of educational materials they said promote LGBTQ ideology or what they referred to as critical race theory, a university-level academic framework based on the idea that racism is embedded in U.S. legal and other structures.

In the weeks after Graft’s and Gore’s election victories, Glenn began asking district administrators about several books, including “This Book Is Gay,” that an unnamed school board member had found on the district’s online card catalog, according to text messages obtained by a parent through an open records request and shared with the news organizations.

The text messages included screenshots of eight titles, all of which deal with LGBTQ topics, with the keyword search terms “gay,” “trans” and “gender” highlighted in some of the book descriptions.

In a December text message, Glenn asked an administrator in charge of overseeing district libraries if any of the books were physically on shelves and available to students. Librarians needed to have a sense of urgency in responding to community complaints about books, Glenn wrote, “otherwise this will consume us in the spring.”

The list comprised titles that were aimed at helping transgender and LGBTQ teens navigate life and that told teen love stories through an LGBTQ lens, as well as an LGBTQ-themed fairy tale. Although some of the books included descriptions of sex, others did not.

Glenn referred to concerns from a board member during his Jan. 10 meeting with librarians.

“We do have a very conservative board,” Glenn said, according to the recording. “They are elected, and recently more conservative. And so that’s what our community is. That’s what our job is.”

NBC News, ProPublica and the Tribune spoke to three Granbury teachers who were not present at the Jan. 10 meeting but who have listened to the recording and said they were troubled by Glenn’s remarks. The teachers said they’ve seen additional library books being pulled from district shelves — mostly young adult books containing talk of sex — that haven’t been subject to a formal review, raising concerns among staff members that content is being eliminated with no oversight from the public.

The teachers said they feared retribution and spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing Glenn’s comments advising educators against sharing opinions that don’t align with the conservative views of district leaders.

“I was disturbed that our superintendent would say those things,” one of the teachers said, referring to Glenn’s comments about there being no place for transgender and LGBTQ content in school libraries.

Whiting holds their copy of “This Book Is Gay” by Juno Dawson. “I’ve read this book however many times I questioned my identity,” said Whiting. The book was one of three that a review committee marked for permanent removal from the school district’s libraries. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica/The Texas Tribune/NBC News)

Schools have wide latitude to remove library books that are deemed age-inappropriate or “pervasively vulgar.” But free speech advocates say Republican politicians and school districts have applied an overly broad definition to the phrase in recent months, mislabeling coming-of-age stories and sex-ed books as pornography.

“The most striking feature of the current crop of book challenges is this effort to mischaracterize literature and sexual education resources, which clearly have educational value, and stigmatizing them by claiming that they violate obscenity statutes,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.

Under a 40-year-old U.S. Supreme Court legal decision, Island Trees School District v. Pico, a public school system can’t remove a book because school board members or administrators disagree with its viewpoints or ideas, including its discussion of LGBTQ identities.

The 1982 case dealt with the removal of books deemed “anti-American” and “anti-Christian” by a school district in Levittown, New York. At the time, a school board member testified that he believed it was his duty to make decisions for the school district that reflected the community’s conservative values. Those comments were echoed decades later in the Granbury superintendent’s directive to librarians.

“If the evidence shows that the motivation for a book removal is to keep these ideas from getting to children, then the courts are very skeptical,” said North Carolina attorney Neal Ramee, who advises school districts on constitutional issues. “That could potentially lead to a finding of a violation of the First Amendment.”

Justin Driver, a Yale Law School professor, former clerk for two Supreme Court justices and author of “The Schoolhouse Gate,” which analyzes legal battles over education, said the similarities between the Pico case and the Granbury situation are “striking and overwhelming.” As a result, he said, Glenn’s statements to librarians “would seem to place the school district in an unenviable litigating position.”

Yet because the Pico case was a divided opinion, some legal scholars said the issue is ripe for another appearance in front of the Supreme Court.

LGBTQ Students Push Back

On Jan. 11, a day after Glenn’s meeting with librarians, Kennedy Tackett, a 17-year-old senior at Granbury High School, was working in a student-run store on campus when one of her friends approached, looking upset.

The friend had been volunteering in the school library and noticed several boxes filled with books that had been taken off of shelves.

“She said, ‘Kennedy, a lot of them look like they’re LGBTQ,’” said Tackett, who is bisexual. “And so I immediately texted my parents, and I was like, ‘Hey, have y’all heard about this?’”

In the days that followed, Tackett and her father, a former school board trustee who has criticized the school district’s conservative shift, used public records requests to unearth what the district hadn’t shared publicly: the list of more than 130 books that librarians had been directed to immediately remove from shelves. (The records also included the December text messages about the eight LGBTQ books.)

Some of the 130 books had no sexual content whatsoever, including “George” by Alex Gino, a book meant for children in elementary school that tells the story of a transgender child who’s coming to terms with her gender identity.

Most of the books appeared to come from a larger list of 850 titles dealing with racism, sex and LGBTQ themes that had been compiled by state Rep. Matt Krause. The Republican lawmaker said in a letter sent to districts across Texas that the books might violate a new state law that restricts the ways teachers can talk about “currently controversial” issues, including racism and sexuality. Krause did not respond to a request for comment.

Tackett created an online petition calling on the district to return the books to shelves, quickly drawing more than 600 signatures. A couple of weeks later, on Jan. 24, she and several other LGBTQ students showed up at a meeting of the Granbury ISD board of trustees and called on the district to reverse course.

Instead, the board voted to amend a district policy that required contested books to remain on shelves while a committee reviewed them, giving administrators more discretion to remove titles that they deem to lack “educational suitability.”

“The job of the superintendent and the school board is not only to protect the students in this district, but to make them feel like they have a place in this community,” Tackett told the board during public comments prior to the vote. “But I gotta tell you, from what I’ve seen so far, you are failing at your job.”

The comments, which would later go viral and be broadcast on national news reports, drew a rebuke from Glenn during the meeting. Glenn announced that the district had previously removed five books unrelated to LGBTQ themes that were written by Abbi Glines, an author known for including explicit sex scenes that push the boundaries of young adult fiction.

“​​Let’s not misrepresent things. We’re not taking Shakespeare or Hemingway off the shelves,” Glenn said, at one point referring to those who frequently speak out at school board meetings as “radicals” and emphasizing that the district was focused on sexually explicit content. “We’re not going and grabbing every socially, culturally or religiously diverse book and pulling them. That’s absurd. And the people that are saying that are gaslighters, and it’s designed to incite division.”

Those comments gave Whiting, the nonbinary Granbury junior, an idea: Using Granbury’s G logo, Whiting designed a T-shirt with the words “Radical Gaslighter” and created a page where students could buy them. They ended up selling nearly 250 to people all over the country, raising more than $2,000 for the American Library Association’s Freedom to Read Foundation.

Left: Whiting speaks against the removal of books from school libraries at a Granbury ISD school board meeting. Right: After speaking at the March 21 school board meeting, Whiting rejoined their father, David Whiting, in the audience. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica/The Texas Tribune/NBC News)

By early February, word began to spread through Granbury that someone had recorded Glenn’s comments to librarians. The employee who’d made the recording did not post it publicly or share it with reporters, but soon a copy of it was circulating among a small group of educators and community activists.

That month, the ACLU of Texas sent a letter to Granbury calling on the district to apologize for the book removals and to release a statement affirming its commitment to “LGBTQ+ and racial inclusivity.” That was before Huddleston, the ACLU lawyer, reviewed the recording at the request of reporters.

Huddleston said the recorded comments also raise serious questions about what else has been said behind closed doors, not just in Granbury, but also in other districts where books are being banned.

“This is very strong evidence of what is happening in the background,” she said. “But it also raises a host of questions about all the other districts in Texas where this is happening and we don’t have audio.”

Tackett, the Granbury senior, cried after listening to the recording of Glenn’s remarks. She thought of his public comments accusing critics of trying to deceive the public about the district’s motivations for removing and reviewing books. If anyone was gaslighting the community, Tackett said, it was him.

“It’s unsettling,” she said. “You can’t just turn your back on the students you’re supposed to be protecting.”

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

by Neil Bedi

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

A congressional oversight subcommittee is investigating the Food and Drug Administration’s regulation of a high-risk heart pump, citing safety issues detailed by ProPublica.

The HeartWare Ventricular Assist Device, created to treat patients with severe heart failure, stopped meeting key federal standards as early as 2014. But the FDA took no decisive action even as those problems persisted, and thousands of Americans continued to be implanted with the pump.

By the end of 2020, the FDA had received more than 3,000 reports of deaths related to the HeartWare device, according to a ProPublica data analysis. A father of four died as his children tried to resuscitate him when his device suddenly stopped. A teenager died after vomiting blood in the middle of the night, while his mother struggled to restart a faulty pump.

“I am concerned by FDA’s slow action, over multiple administrations, to protect patients from this product despite early warning signs,” said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., in a scathing letter sent Tuesday to the agency’s commissioner, Dr. Robert Califf.

Krishnamoorthi, the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy, requested information on how the FDA made regulatory decisions related to the HeartWare device and why it didn’t take further action.

The FDA did not provide comment to ProPublica on the subcommittee’s investigation and said it would respond directly to Krishnamoorthi. It also reiterated its response to ProPublica’s findings and said the agency had been closely overseeing the HeartWare device since 2012, with patient safety as its “highest priority.”

Medtronic, the company that acquired HeartWare in 2016, took the device off the market in June 2021. The company said that new data showed a competing heart pump had better outcomes. In response to the ProPublica investigation two months later, the company said it took the FDA’s inspections seriously and had worked closely with the agency to address issues with the device.

Medtronic declined to comment on the subcommittee’s investigation.

Krishnamoorthi asked in the letter if any steps were being taken to address how patients, doctors and other federal agencies are notified of problems that the FDA finds with medical devices.

Many patients told ProPublica they were never informed of issues with the HeartWare pump before or after their implants. Some people who still have the device said they weren’t told when it was taken off the market. Medtronic said in December it had confirmed 90% of U.S. patients had received notification of the HeartWare discontinuation, but that it was still working to reach the other 10%.

About 2,000 patients still had HeartWare pumps as of last year. The FDA and Medtronic recommended against removing those devices barring medical necessity because the surgery to do so carries a high risk.

In his letter, Krishnamoorthi gave the FDA a deadline of April 5 to respond.

by Jessica Priest, Lomi Kriel and Perla Trevizo

Texas has spent billions of state tax dollars on border security for nearly two decades. Last year, state lawmakers approved a budget that included an unprecedented $3 billion for such initiatives.

As the state puts more money into border security measures, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune are seeking to better understand how the funding is used, what the investment is accomplishing and how the initiatives affect border residents.

Hearing your experiences can help us shape our stories with your communities in mind and hold relevant institutions accountable. Please fill out this questionnaire if you are a border resident or if you’re familiar with how border operations are run.

We appreciate you sharing your story and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these stories for the purposes of our reporting, and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.

We are the only ones reading what you submit. If you’d rather use an encrypted app, such as Signal, see advice on secure ways to reach us at propublica.org/tips. Lomi Kriel’s Signal is 832-729-3421, and Perla Trevizo’s is 512-574-4823. You may also email Kriel at lomi.kriel@propublica.org or Trevizo at perla.trevizo@propublica.org.

by Lomi Kriel and Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Andrew Rodriguez Calderón and Keri Blakinger, The Marshall Project

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Border Updates to be notified when we publish stories about immigration and the U.S. border.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans, and with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for newsletters from The Texas Tribune and The Marshall Project.

Thomas King-Randall had been waiting for two hours to drop his daughters off at his ex-girlfriend’s apartment in Midland, Texas. It was 10:30 on a school night in August and it was her turn to care for the two girls.

The ex-girlfriend showed up drunk and was arguing with her new boyfriend in his truck, police later wrote in a report. King-Randall, who is Black, said in an interview that the woman’s Latino boyfriend called him a racial slur, which led to a fight.

By the end of the encounter, the woman’s boyfriend had a bloody nose and swollen eyes. King-Randall was gone, and local police issued an arrest warrant for the 26-year-old California native. A month later, Texas Department of Public Safety officers arrested King-Randall when he tried to renew his driver’s license.

King-Randall’s arrest was one of thousands used to bolster claims of success for Operation Lone Star. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott launched the initiative last March, citing an urgent need to stop the flow of drugs and undocumented immigrants into the state through Mexico.

But the alleged assault had nothing to do with the border. King-Randall, a U.S. citizen, was arrested more than 250 miles from the border with Mexico. Neither DPS nor the Texas Military Department, the state agencies carrying out Operation Lone Star, played a role in the investigation. And the family violence assault charge King-Randall faced wasn’t linked to border-related crime or illegal immigration.

Operation Lone Star has helped increase the state’s budget for border security to more than $3 billion through 2023 by deploying thousands of DPS troopers and National Guard members and allocating funding to build border barriers. As part of the operation, troopers are also arresting some immigrant men crossing into the U.S. on state criminal trespassing charges.

Abbott and DPS have repeatedly boasted in news conferences, on social media and during interviews on Fox News that the border operation has disrupted drug and human smuggling networks. A year into the operation, officials touted more than 11,000 criminal arrests, drug seizures that amount to millions of “lethal doses” and the referrals of tens of thousands of unauthorized immigrants to the federal government for deportation as signs that the program is effective.

But the state’s claim of success has been based on shifting metrics that included crimes with no connection to the border, work conducted by troopers stationed in targeted counties prior to the operation, and arrest and drug seizure efforts that do not clearly distinguish DPS’s role from that of other agencies, an investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and The Marshall Project found.

King-Randall’s charges were among more than 2,000, including some for cockfighting, sexual assault and stalking, that the agency stopped counting toward Operation Lone Star more than nine months into the exercise, after the news organizations began raising questions about the ties between the arrests and border security. Of those, about 270 charges were for violent crimes, which are defined by the FBI as murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.

King-Randall said in an interview that he was fighting the allegations. The case is pending, according to the Midland County district attorney’s office.

Claiming such arrests is “inherently flawed” and misrepresents the accomplishments of the operation, said Patrick O’Burke, a law enforcement consultant and a former DPS commander who retired in 2008.

“The problem could be simply related to crimes in those communities,” O’Burke said. “It’s not battling cross-border crime.”

Operation Lone Star Arrests Extend Beyond the Border

Texas officials have expanded the number of counties from which they report arrests and charges related to Operation Lone Star, including counties far from the border that do not benefit from the operation’s additional resources.

Source: Analysis of Texas Department of Public Safety data, public statements and emails. Data as of January 2022. (Andrew Rodriguez Calderón and David Eads, The Marshall Project, José Luis Martínez, Texas Tribune)

Asked by the news organizations why such charges were not excluded from the operation’s metrics at the start, DPS officials said they are continuously improving how they collect and report the data “to better reflect the mission” of securing the border. The governor’s office maintained that “dangerous individuals, deadly drugs, and other illegal contraband have been taken off our streets or prevented from entering the State of Texas altogether thanks to the men and women of Operation Lone Star.”

But DPS and Abbott have provided little proof to substantiate such statements. A year into the initiative, Abbott, DPS and the Texas Military Department have fought two dozen public records requests from the news organizations that would provide a clearer picture of the operation’s accomplishments.

DPS, the only agency to release some records related to Operation Lone Star’s results, has made several significant revisions to the arrest data, including removing charges. The agency did not provide details that would help determine how the cases that remained are connected to the initiative’s goal of deterring border-related crime. The agency also failed to identify arrests and drug seizures that could have occurred without the additional personnel made available through the operation.

The absence of clear metrics for measuring its accomplishments points to a larger problem with the border operation and more than a dozen others launched by the state’s two governors during the past 17 years. Lawmakers have repeatedly increased state funding for border security while providing minimal oversight of the operations launched by Abbott and his predecessor, Gov. Rick Perry.

Over the years, some legislators have balked at state agencies’ calls for more accountability from border security efforts.

“It’s almost offensive to say, ‘What are the results?’” former state Rep. Dan Flynn, a Republican from East Texas, said during a hearing in 2018. At that hearing, the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission, which determines whether there’s a continuing need for state agencies and programs, raised concerns that DPS was not providing “sufficient information to the public and policymakers about the return on investment for border security.”

Texas, which shares a 1,200-mile border with Mexico, spends more money on border security than any other state. And at a cost to taxpayers of more than $2.5 million a week, Operation Lone Star is by far the most expensive of the state’s border operations, and the one with the broadest mandate and scope.

Concertina wire recently installed in Eagle Pass, Texas, by the National Guard as part of Operation Lone Star. (Verónica G. Cárdenas for ProPublica/The Texas Tribune)

In South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, which was at the center of last year’s immigrant influx, Hidalgo County Judge Richard Cortez said he doesn’t know what Operation Lone Star has accomplished beyond “arresting people and making them criminals.”

Cortez said the problem is not criminal activity, but the sheer number of immigrants seeking better opportunities who sometimes attempt to cross into his community at once, straining resources and overwhelming Border Patrol. The solution, he said, is a comprehensive approach to address the reasons people are trying to come to the U.S. and provide more legal avenues to do so.

“We’re spending millions and billions of dollars in trying to manage something,” Cortez said about Operation Lone Star. “But instead of getting me the plumber to stop the leak, they’re sending me people to mop up the floor.”

Politics of Border Security

With DPS SUVs lined up behind him as if forming a wall, Abbott promoted his new initiative during a March 2021 news conference in Mission, a city in the Rio Grande Valley where more immigrants were crossing the border.

While federal officials started apprehending a greater number of immigrants during Donald Trump’s presidency, Abbott blamed newly inaugurated President Joe Biden for not doing enough to stem record levels of arrivals at the border.

During his first two months at the helm, Biden temporarily halted a policy that required people seeking asylum to wait in Mexico until their cases could be heard by U.S. immigration judges. A federal judge in Texas later ordered the administration to reinstate part of the policy. Under a Trump administration pandemic health order that Biden kept in place, more than three-fourths of immigrants apprehended at the border during that period were immediately turned away.

“If you were president in 2024, which some of us hope that you are, what’s the first thing that you would do to enact something down here?” asked a man in the crowd whom Abbott’s staff singled out for the final question.

“Secure the border. Period,” Abbott said.

Gov. Greg Abbott speaks to reporters at University Draft House in Edinburg, Texas. (Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune)

With the presidential election in the distance, Abbott has made border security a cornerstone of his gubernatorial reelection campaign, playing offense against his primary opponents, attacking Biden and using the issue as a way to distinguish himself from his general election challenger, former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat from the border city of El Paso.

The governor handily won the Republican primary early this month with Trump’s support. The former president’s success rallying the Republican base by pushing hard-line policies and promoting the construction of a border wall has become a model for Texas GOP candidates, who saw Trump make inroads with Latino voters in border counties in 2020.

The results emboldened Republicans, who doubled down on Trump’s rhetoric, pushing some of his more restrictive border measures, said James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

“It’s almost as if he gave permission for more straightforwardly nativist rhetoric, but he didn’t do that in a vacuum, certainly at least not here,” Henson said, pointing to anti-immigrant sentiment among Republican voters prior to Trump’s election.

In launching Operation Lone Star, Abbott went further than any other governor in recent history, attempting to curtail immigration by using state trespassing charges to directly target those who cross the border on private property.

Texas Department of Public Safety special agents apprehend five undocumented immigrants from Honduras who were caught on private property in Kinney County as part of Operation Lone Star. (Verónica G. Cárdenas for ProPublica/The Texas Tribune)

The federal government has sole authority to enforce immigration laws, but Abbott increased trespassing penalties under a declaration that gave him more power akin to what he would have after a natural disaster.

In June, the governor shifted the operation’s emphasis from the Rio Grande Valley, where political leaders opposed some of his efforts, to a vast rural region of mostly private ranches around Val Verde County, about 170 miles west of San Antonio. Trump won the county by a 10-point margin in 2020. Until this year, Val Verde and Kinney were the only two counties prosecuting people crossing into the country through private property for trespassing.

The misdemeanor charge, punishable by up to a year in jail, makes up about 40% of the operation’s arrests from mid-July to Jan. 27, an analysis by ProPublica, the Tribune and the Marshall Project found.

The governor’s office said the operation is based on facts, not politics, and is geared to provide “maximum assistance to the counties greatest affected.” But federal statistics show some of the counties in the Rio Grande Valley that DPS shifted additional resources away from were among those experiencing the greatest influx of immigrants and drugs.

Abbott’s Disaster Declaration Includes Counties Far From the Border

The number of counties participating in Gov. Greg Abbott’s disaster declaration, which included increasing penalties for state trespassing charges, has grown to 53 as of Feb. 22. Some are far from the border.

Source: Compiled from the governor’s declarations (Perla Trevizo, ProPublica/Texas Tribune, Andrew Rodriguez Calderón and David Eads, The Marshall Project, José Luis Martínez, Texas Tribune)

Command Sgt. Maj. Jason Featherston, a Texas Army National Guard veteran who helped oversee the guard’s deployment under the operation until his retirement in November, said he and his colleagues believed politics was the main driver for the mushrooming initiative. He said he recalls commanders saying things like, “We’re going back to the border, the governor is trying to get reelected.”

Federal and state Democratic lawmakers have urged investigations into the constitutionality of the trespassing arrests and the poor working conditions, pay delays and suicides among National Guard members assigned to Operation Lone Star, problems reported by the Tribune and the Army Times. And some state Democrats, led by the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, announced a task force early this month to investigate “many layers of grave concerns” about the operation, including alleged human rights violations and a lack of accountability. Abbott’s office has said the arrests and prosecutions under the operation “are fully constitutional.”

But the broader operation’s goals and results have received little scrutiny.

In July, DPS began counting toward Operation Lone Star a number of arrests and drug seizures from a 63-county region almost the size of Oregon that officials dubbed the area of interest. The area included counties that did not receive additional resources from the operation, and some of the newly credited actions included work already conducted by troopers stationed there before the governor’s initiative began.

Before then, DPS had been counting arrests and drug seizures from what the agency called the “more focused” area of operation, a smaller group of counties closer to the border.

The governor and DPS declined to answer questions about who ordered the change and whether all the counties in the larger area of interest received extra resources from the operation. DPS officials said the area of operation is fluid as the department is continuously monitoring the border and adjusting its use of resources as needed.

Abbott pointed to some of those arrests last year as he sought additional funding for border security efforts, bringing lawmakers back for a special legislative session. Abbott’s office received $1.3 billion of the $3 billion total, marking the first time that the governor’s allocation for border security was larger than that given to DPS.

Texas Department of Public Safety special agents monitor four undocumented immigrants from Honduras who were caught on private property in Kinney County. (Verónica G. Cárdenas for ProPublica/The Texas Tribune)

The growing share of border security funding managed by the governor’s office raises questions about transparency, said Eva DeLuna Castro, a budget analyst for the progressive think tank Every Texan. She said such spending is harder to track because the governor’s office doesn’t report its expenditures with the same level of detail as DPS.

While the governor’s office argues that the agencies it funds have to report spending, DeLuna Castro said some are not subject to such rules.

In January, after increasing the number of National Guard members at the border to 10,000, the governor and a handful of the state’s Republican leaders moved nearly half a billion dollars from DPS, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission to help cover the increased costs.

“He’s just running up a tab that the Legislature, and taxpayers, will have to cover,” DeLuna Castro said.

Trouble With the Numbers

Fentanyl seizures have become shorthand for Operation Lone Star’s success.

Abbott repeatedly highlights them in press conferences and on social media, boasting that the state is helping to stop Biden’s “open border policies.” He has used seizures of the synthetic opioid, which is 100 times stronger than morphine, as a way to attack O’Rourke, who is challenging him in the November gubernatorial election.

At a February event in Austin before the primary election, Abbott’s campaign handed out pill bottles with a fake label that read “Beto Biden open border” and pointed to 1,334 Texas fentanyl deaths in 2021.

Inside was a mock warning label that credited the seizure of 887 pounds of fentanyl, or what he called more than 201 million deadly doses, to Operation Lone Star. Days later, Abbott repeated similar claims in a press release from the governor’s office.

The figure reflects seizures across the state and contradicts the number DPS has given for what is attributable to Operation Lone Star. About 160 pounds of fentanyl were seized from March 2021 to January 2022 in the regions that DPS uses when reporting metrics from the operation.

Abbott’s office defended using statewide seizure numbers, saying they are directly tied to Operation Lone Star because the drug generally enters from Mexico.

“DPS can’t always seize fentanyl right at the border; but they will not stop until they find it, even if it is in North Texas,” Nan Tolson, Abbott’s spokesperson, wrote in an email.

Including statewide seizures is “just disingenuous,” said O’Burke, the former DPS commander.

“Chicago has a border nexus. Are we going to count drugs that were seized in Chicago? That’s just not transparent,” he said. “It’s just not a measure of success. It’s just conflating these statistics because it makes the general public feel safer.”

Instead, O’Burke said, Operation Lone Star’s results should only count actions in which its added resources were used.

That number comes with its own caveats. All but 12 of the 160 pounds of fentanyl were captured in El Paso County, which was not one of the ones listed by DPS officials in November as receiving additional troopers and National Guard members from the operation. The county was one of several that declined to sign on to the governor’s border disaster declaration.

Fentanyl seizure claims are not the only example of the difficulty of measuring the return on investment for taxpayers.

DPS has a history of taking credit for work, such as drug seizures, carried out by other agencies. As part of the operation, DPS and Texas Military Department officials reported apprehending more than 200,000 migrants in the past year and referring them to the federal government for deportation. That included eight migrants who were caught rafting across the Rio Grande by DPS troopers, National Guard members and Border Patrol agents in November. But while DPS counted the immigrants it referred to Border Patrol as part of its reporting for Operation Lone Star, that same group may also have been included in the National Guard’s tally, meaning both agencies could be getting credit for the same arrests. The Texas Military Department did not answer questions about the case.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined multiple interview requests. Officials did say that the federal agency “does not have a role or partner in any way” with DPS on the operation and that they don’t track the state’s referrals.

DPS officials acknowledged in an interview that more than one agency could be taking credit for some of the same detentions because the Texas Military Department does not share with DPS the details of immigrants it refers to the federal government, and such data is not publicly available.

Featherston, the retired Texas Army National Guard senior enlisted adviser, said he believes immigrant apprehensions are “double counted.”

In another case, DPS posted on its Facebook page in September that it encountered more than 700 gang members as part of the operation. But officials declined requests to provide records detailing such arrests, saying gang affiliation “was not a metric the Department is tracking.”

And despite removing more than 2,000 charges from the arrest data credited to Operation Lone Star, DPS still includes other charges without explaining how they align with the operation’s goal of capturing dangerous criminals. (DPS disputed this characterization of the removed charges; a full explanation of our rebuttal is described in the methods section at the end of this piece.) In May, for example, troopers arrested a 20-year-old woman in Coke County, about 200 miles from the border in West Texas.

The woman was driving 9 mph over the speed limit in a no-passing zone on a rural highway. After troopers stopped her for speeding, they discovered a Ziploc bag with “loose leaf marijuana in the glovebox,” according to the arrest report.

The woman, who could not be reached for comment, does not appear to have a prior criminal record. The arrest report doesn’t note her immigration status. She was charged with possession of less than 2 ounces of marijuana.

“The whole reason for all this, you know, playing with statistics, is for optics so that the governor could get reelected. And so from that perspective, has it worked? Yes. It's worked for him,” said Gary Hale, a former chief of intelligence in Houston for the Drug Enforcement Administration who is now at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “But what’s the net gain? I don’t think there’s any. Zero. We really haven’t had any significant impact on migrant smuggling or drug trafficking.”

A group of undocumented immigrants from Mexico are detained after Texas Department of Public Safety special agents caught them on private property in Kinney County as part of Operation Lone Star. (Verónica G. Cárdenas for ProPublica/The Texas Tribune) A Year Later

A year after Operation Lone Star launched, a panel of three Texas senators sought to better understand how to gauge the costly initiative’s accomplishments.

“What metrics are you using to measure success in terms of defining the arrests for which you’re responsible for, to make sure we’re using our DPS officers in an effective way?” state Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, a Democrat from the border city of McAllen, asked DPS’ chief, Col. Steve McCraw, at a hearing on March 8.

Success could not be measured through arrest and seizure numbers alone, McCraw responded.

For the first time since the operation began, he offered a different metric: securing the border by stopping the flow of drugs and unauthorized immigrants in Texas’ 103 Border Patrol zones, one at a time. That is accomplished when each area has enough barriers, technology and law enforcement resources to “prevent transnational criminal activity,” according to DPS, which said it has met that goal in four zones that make up some parts of Hidalgo and Starr counties.

During the hearing, McCraw didn’t say how the agency knows it has secured a region. He also did not explain how DPS would be able to continue committing the resources needed to sustain that level of security. The senators didn’t ask.

“The challenge we have is when trying to decide what success looks like, is that if the numbers go up, do we claim success because we’re more efficient?” McCraw asked, adding that arrest and drug seizure statistics fluctuate. “You can’t have it both ways, you can’t be successful when the numbers go up and when the numbers go down.”

Since the start of the operation, DPS and Abbott have repeatedly touted success using arrests and drug seizure numbers. While continuing to cite the statistics, McCraw sought to minimize their significance, saying that what matters most is “not how much crime you’re enforcing. It’s the absence of it.”

By the end of that Senate hearing, lawmakers remained uncertain about the return on their multibillion-dollar investment.

“How do we know whether the amount of money was appropriate for what was needed?” state Sen. Bob Hall, a Republican from Rockwall, northeast of Dallas, asked the state’s financial analysts. “And how do we know when we’ve accomplished what we set out to do, so that we can figure out what to do next, other than just appropriate more money and then wonder what to do next?”

The question has plagued lawmakers since the first border security operation launched nearly two decades ago.

About the Data: How We Analyzed Criminal Charges Linked to Operation Lone Star The Data

Beginning in June 2021, reporters from The Marshall Project, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune began making records requests to the Texas Department of Public Safety for data on arrests and charges associated with Operation Lone Star. The department was responsive to those requests and provided information over the course of several months, though the format and contents of the files they sent changed over time in notable ways.

DPS sent us two data releases, one in July and another in August 2021, with records of arrests and charges associated with Operation Lone Star. Those releases came as separate files from three branches of DPS. However, in November, agency officials said that these records were incomplete, only capturing one of two broad border regions. In December, they then said they had retroactively started removing charges that did not “reflect the mission” of Operation Lone Star.

From November 2021 to January 2022, DPS sent three data snapshots, each of which the department said represented the totality of its records of Operation Lone Star charges and arrests at the time the files were created. This data was organized with each charge on its own row. An arrest can include multiple charges.

What We Found

DPS emphasized that it is continuously improving how it collects and reports data for Operation Lone Star. As such, we used the latest data snapshot, from January 2022, when describing the criminal charges that the agency attributes to the operation, including how many charges were related to trespassing and how the charges were distributed geographically.

We also examined the evolving nature of the department’s record-keeping by looking at changes between the data snapshots provided to us. In comparing the first and second complete data snapshots (one provided in November 2021, the other in December 2021), we found more than 2,000 charges that had been removed from the data.

Vetting Our Findings

DPS said that our approach did not account for the fact that “each spreadsheet represents an extract from a live database, and information is subject to change.” The agency stated that our analysis “assumes that any row that does not appear exactly the same in each spreadsheet can be described as either ‘added’ or ‘removed.’”

We did not require rows to match exactly when identifying charges preserved or removed. Rows were matched using arrest IDs and charge descriptions, and we looked only at charges from dates covered in both files. For about half of the more than 2,000 charges we identified as being removed from the data, the arrest IDs for these charges were not included in the later data snapshots — for example, Thomas King-Randall’s arrest only appears in the first snapshot. For the other half, the arrest ID did appear in later data snapshots, but with fewer charges associated with it. Additionally, looking only at the number of charges in each dataset, we observed that for arrests that occured in the same time period, there were fewer charges in later data snapshots than there had been in the earlier snapshot. DPS declined to answer questions about why particular cases were removed and declined to answer many of our specific questions about the dataset.

The constantly changing nature of the database is not unique to Operation Lone Star. Methods for comparing datasets are commonly used and actively studied. It is valid to analyze changes in such databases (with the appropriate caveats) and to describe them as additions or removals. DPS itself told reporters the department “identified offenses that should be removed” in a December 2021 email about changes to Operation Lone Star data collection.

Help Us Investigate Texas Border Security Initiatives

Jolie McCullough of The Texas Tribune contributed reporting.

by David Armstrong and Ryan Gabrielson

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Most Americans know St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital through television advertisements featuring Hollywood celebrities asking for contributions or the millions of fundraising appeals that regularly arrive in mailboxes across the country.

But a select group of potential donors is targeted in a more intimate way. Representatives of the hospital’s fundraising arm visit their homes; dine with them at local restaurants; send them personal notes and birthday cards; and schedule them for “love calls.”

What makes these potential donors so special? They told St. Jude they were considering leaving the hospital a substantial amount in their wills. Once the suggestion was made, specialized fundraisers set a singular goal: build relationships with the donors to make sure the money flows to the hospital after their deaths.

The intense cultivation of these donors is part of a strategy that has helped St. Jude establish what may be the most successful charitable bequest program in the country. In the most recent five-year period of reported financial results, bequests constituted $1.5 billion, or 20%, of the $7.5 billion St. Jude raised in those years. That amount, both in terms of dollars and as a percentage of fundraising, far outpaces that raised by other leading children’s hospitals and charities generally.

While a financial boon to St. Jude, the hospital’s pursuit has led to fraught disputes with donors’ family members and allegations that it goes too far in its quest for bequests.

St. Jude is a major research center with a 73-bed hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, that primarily treats kids from the Mid-South. Its bequest operation has a broad reach, with fundraisers based across the nation and a willingness to challenge families in court over the assets their loved ones leave behind. These battles can sometimes be lengthy and costly, spending donor money on litigation and diminishing inheritances. Family attorneys who specialize in such fights say that St. Jude can be especially aggressive, often pursuing cases all the way to state supreme courts.

“At the end of it, there is very little to hold on to feel good about,” said Vance Lanier, of Lafayette, Louisiana, who won a yearslong legal battle with St. Jude over his father’s estate but not before both sides spent heavily on the case.

“Think of all the fees for lawyers that didn’t go to St. Jude, not one child, not one cancer patient,” Lanier said. “Where is the sanity in all this?”

The nonprofit even courts those who aid in estate planning and drawing up wills, sponsoring conferences where attorneys, financial advisers and estate professionals gather. On at least one occasion it offered attendees a chance to win a golf trip.

The prospective donors wooed by St. Jude are often people like Nona Harris: elderly, childless women with substantial wealth. Harris notified the charity in 1996 that she was considering leaving it a bequest. St. Jude spent the next two decades cultivating Harris. An internal database, built to collect information on donors, tracked nearly 100 calls and other contacts between Harris and the charity’s fundraisers during that time — an average of almost once every two months. It also noted information Harris shared with fundraisers.

By the time she died in 2015, the charity knew just about everything there was to know about her. It knew about the health problems of her husband, J.D., from the medicines that he took to the heart defibrillator that needed to be replaced. St. Jude knew that J.D.’s mother died when he was 13 and that one of Nona’s relatives had a rare tongue cancer. It knew the couple owned a condominium in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and a ranch with cattle and horses in Kansas.

Most importantly, the charity knew the couple planned to leave their nearly $6 million estate to St. Jude. But Nona died before J.D., and after he changed his estate plan — reducing St. Jude’s payout by about $2.5 million — the charity went to court, triggering an expensive, drawn-out legal battle that pitted the hospital against several of J.D.’s family members.

A log maintained by fundraisers for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital collected personal information about Nona Harris and her family. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Estate matters can be contentious, and many nonprofit organizations, including ProPublica, seek donations in people’s wills.

But St. Jude’s pursuit of such donations stands out. Bequests to St. Jude, as a percentage of total contributions, are more than double the national average of 9% as calculated by Giving USA.

And it receives more than other children’s hospitals that list bequest donations. Boston Children’s Hospital reported that estate and trust donations ranged from 3% to 6.5% annually during the three-year period of 2014 through 2016. Donations from estates to Children’s Hospital Colorado Foundation represents 3.5% of total giving at that hospital, according to its website. Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, said its bequest giving was aligned with national benchmarks such as the 9% figure from Giving USA.

For such organizations, any decision about waging legal fights with family members often comes down to a public relations decision.

“A legal fight could mar the reputation of a charity,” said Elizabeth Carter, a law professor at Louisiana State University who specializes in estate planning. “A lot of charities decide it is just not worth it; we don’t need that bad press. Occasionally you will see them fighting it, but not often because of the bad PR that comes from it.”

In a statement issued through its fundraising arm, the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities, or ALSAC, St. Jude said its bequest program “operates with the highest ethical standards and with bequest program best practices like other large charities.”

But it declined to answer specific questions about its bequest program, including how many cases are in litigation, or to respond in detail to questions about individual cases in which it has contested wills.

In 2017, Fred Jones, the ALSAC lawyer who oversees bequest matters, told an Oklahoma court that the charity was involved in more than 100 legal fights over disputed estates. Jones said many of those involved other parties challenging an estate in which St. Jude had an interest, but that it did pursue legal action on its own in some cases. Jones said St. Jude received about 2,000 new bequests in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2017. In a statement, ALSAC said it litigates less than less than 1% of the thousands of estate donations that it receives.

Jones told the court that neither St. Jude nor ALSAC “is in the business of trying cases,” in part because such efforts are funded with donations for the treatment of sick children. As a result, Jones said, St. Jude only initiates cases in which due diligence reveals substantial evidence to support a claim. “In effect, we’re using donor dollars — which we very carefully protect — in those cases where we believe that there has been a curtailment of the donor's actual intent,” he said. Jones did not respond to a request for comment. St. Jude declined to provide further details on the use of donor funds to pay legal costs. In some jurisdictions, courts allow winning parties in a case to seek legal fees from the losing side and legal costs are sometimes reimbursed as part of settlement agreements.

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To make the case that estate proceeds should go to St. Jude, the charity sometimes argues that relatives are not entitled to any proceeds from their family’s estates.

“Where I think the line is crossed is when they promote the disinheritance of children or families,” said Cary Colt Payne, a Las Vegas attorney representing a son who is battling St. Jude over his father’s estate.

In its statement, ALSAC said ProPublica’s reporting on bequests was “highly selective and flawed as it focused on a small handful of contested cases over several years out of the many types of these donations received each year. These contested estate matters often cover complex and sensitive family matters, include multiple charities, and involve local lawyers advising ALSAC/St. Jude.”

St. Jude’s responsibility, according to the statement, is “to carry out the clear written intent of a donor, typically stated in a written will or trust drafted by an independent lawyer, most often witnessed and notarized. These are beautiful legacy gifts with enduring impact, enabling us to remain focused on our mission: Finding cures. Saving children.”

(Isabel Seliger, special to ProPublica) “Love Calls”

St. Jude, founded by the entertainer Danny Thomas, makes a unique promise as part of its fundraising: “Families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing or food — because all a family should worry about is helping their child live.”

That pledge, and the ubiquitous appeals for donations that accompany it, has helped St. Jude become the country’s largest health care charity. Recent years have seen record-breaking fundraising gains. The hospital raises so much money that between 2016 and 2020, it annually steered an average of $400 million into a growing reserve fund that totaled $5.2 billion as of June 30, 2020 — the most recent figures publicly available.

To raise money, St. Jude depends on the related nonprofit ALSAC, which conducts the hospital’s fundraising and awareness campaigns.

ALSAC’s interactions with Nona Harris provide a window into the techniques used by the charity to encourage bequests and cultivate those who express an interest in making them.

In January 1996, Nona called St. Jude to let the hospital know she was considering making a large bequest, which at that time she said could be up to $500,000.

Phone calls from potential donors like Harris are just one of the ways ALSAC learns of potential bequests. Other times, the hospital is alerted by a financial planner or estate lawyer of plans by clients to leave money to St. Jude. Most times, proceeds from bequests just show up with no prior notice after a person has died. The charity also solicits them in fundraising materials, encouraging anyone open to considering St. Jude in their will to notify it using an enclosed information card and envelope.

Harris, after notifying St. Jude of the potential bequest, then asked that no one contact her. That request was apparently ignored as an ALSAC staffer was tasked with getting in touch with Nona a few months after her call, according to a printout of a computerized log of interactions with Nona filed in court.

ALSAC bequest specialists maintain a “portfolio” of estate donors who are ranked by importance, according to current and former ALSAC employees. The size and range of the ALSAC bequest operation gives it the advantage of being able to meet in person with donors anywhere in the country.

ALSAC sent Nona handwritten birthday and holiday cards, and in one case, just a note to say, “I thought of you today.” The cards were often followed by phone calls around the holidays to check in with her.

On four occasions — in 2000, twice in 2001 and in 2005 — Nona was listed for what were described in the log as “love calls.” St. Jude declined to provide details on what such calls entailed.

Call logs between St. Jude and Nona Harris show several “love calls” placed between 2000 and 2001. (Obtained by ProPublica)

The ALSAC staff invited the Harrises to special events, including a 50th anniversary gala party in Los Angeles, as well as asking them repeatedly to come to Memphis and visit the hospital. “I will be sure to be at the front door waiting for your arrival,” a staffer wrote in 2007. Family members do not believe the Harrises ever visited.

One hint in the notes of why Nona chose St. Jude as a beneficiary of her estate was a comment she made in 2004 that she “was thrilled to do it since St. Jude is her patron saint.” Although the hospital is named after the saint, it does not have any religious affiliations. J.D. also had a fondness for the children’s hospital, according to family members, and would occasionally wear a St. Jude baseball cap sent to the couple by fundraisers.

The Harrises were different from other large bequest donors in one significant way. It doesn’t appear anyone from ALSAC ever visited them at their home.

Former ALSAC employees who worked on bequests said they would visit some donors dozens of times. They said some of those were older donors who were lonely and enjoyed the companionship. Internally, the jobs came to be known as “the tea and cookie positions” since that’s what many visits to donors involved. One staffer said he became so close to one donor that he attended holiday dinners at the family’s home.

An ALSAC employee based in Rhode Island said she would meet in person with 150 to 200 people a year throughout New England and upstate New York who indicated they planned to leave money to St. Jude or were considering it, according to testimony she gave in 2015 in a New Hampshire estate dispute.

The employee, Maureen Mallon, was an estate lawyer in private practice for 20 years before joining ALSAC as a philanthropic adviser in 2010.

“Part of my role is to connect them, to build a relationship with them, to give them more information about the hospital,” she said of visiting potential donors.

Mallon testified about her relationship with one donor, whom she visited at her home in person five times, usually for an hour or more. The woman — who was elderly, widowed and did not have children — would have lunch ready for the two of them and always sent Mallon home with baked goods. One time she called to make sure Mallon made it home safely. Mallon said the woman discussed details of her estate and shared family histories and relationships. She confided that certain relatives would be unhappy if they learned she planned to leave her home to the Memphis hospital. The visits and notes about what was discussed were recorded in a database, according to the testimony. Attempts to contact Mallon were unsuccessful.

The Harrises were private people who had retired to their ranch in Kansas following years of traveling the world as part of J.D.’s work in the oil industry. They used their Tulsa condo when they came for medical care in the city.

On the ranch, J.D. would rise early each day to drive the foreman around the 320-acre property to feed the scores of cattle and horses. He typically dressed in blue jeans, black cowboy boots with his initials on them, a cowboy hat and a white oxford shirt with two pockets that he used to carry a small notebook, a pencil and his checkbook.

J.D. was plainspoken and frank, friends recalled, while Nona was described as a generous person who was always impeccably dressed.

After Nona died on the day after Thanksgiving in 2015, J.D. became closer with his remaining family members, including two nieces and a nephew, according to court testimony.

J.D. was particularly fond of his great-nephew Brent Neitzke, who lived in Indiana and visited him at the ranch on a regular basis after Nona’s death. Most Sunday nights, J.D. and Neitzke would talk for hours on the phone. Neitzke said they discussed politicians, happenings in the world and J.D.’s travels. He said J.D. also talked about his estate and his plans to split it.

J.D. told his accountant that the estate plan he formed after Nona’s death was something of a compromise. He would still be honoring Nona’s wish to help St. Jude while at the same time taking care of his family.

When J.D. called ALSAC two months after Nona died to share the news that his wife had passed away, he told the staffer who was the main contact for Nona that he wanted “to talk to me at length about his codicile (sic) to their will,” according to court records. A codicil modifies or revokes parts of a will.

Call logs show J.D. Harris wanted to discuss his will after the 2015 death of his wife, Nona. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Later, the ALSAC staffer tried to set up a meeting with J.D. at his home, but J.D. said that it was too soon for a visit and that he wanted to speak to his attorney first, according to notes of the conversation recorded by ALSAC.

For ALSAC, the next step was the courtroom.

(Isabel Seliger, special to ProPublica) Court Battles

That’s where Vance Lanier found himself when St. Jude fought him over the distribution of his father’s estate.

Lanier is a financial planner in Lafayette, Louisiana, who helps clients with estate and trust matters. His father, Eugene, died in December 2015. His will directed that $100,000 from the proceeds of the sale of his home go to St. Jude.

But there was a problem. The elder Lanier did not own his home, according to his son. More than a decade earlier he had placed it in a trust, along with other assets, to benefit his three children.

To Lanier, it was a simple matter. St. Jude was not entitled to any money from the house sale. “He had given away his assets to put into a trust,” Lanier said. “My dad did not own it. He could have changed that while he was alive, but he didn’t.”

Still, recognizing that his father did want to make a donation to St. Jude, and hoping to avoid spending money on legal fees, Lanier said he offered St. Jude $25,000 to settle the matter. The offer was rejected, according to Lanier and his attorney, and St. Jude instead pursued the matter in a yearslong court fight. St. Jude argued that the elder Lanier, through his will, “clearly directed the sale” of the property and that $100,000 of the proceeds should go to the hospital.

A trial court ruled in favor of Vance Lanier. St. Jude appealed that ruling but eventually lost. The charity then asked the state Supreme Court to reverse that ruling, but the request was denied, ending the matter.

Lanier said the legal dispute was expensive for both sides. He spent $50,000 in lawyer fees. Even if St. Jude had won the case, he said, much of the money it would have received from the elder Lanier’s estate would have been wiped out by legal costs. St. Jude did not respond to questions about how much it paid its lawyers.

Lanier said he wrote to the chief executive of St. Jude complaining that the legal fight was a waste of time and the charity’s resources.

Before the estate dispute, Lanier said he and other members of his extended family were supporters of St. Jude and had collectively donated thousands of dollars to the Memphis hospital. That is no longer the case, he said.

“After this and seeing the waste, I don’t want anything to do with them,” he said.

(Isabel Seliger, special to ProPublica) Influence and Attorneys

One sign of the significance of bequests to St. Jude is that it frequently underwrites conferences for estate lawyers and financial planners, who can help clients determine which charities to leave money to in their wills.

In some cases, it is the only charity involved. Typical sponsors are mostly banks, trust companies and consultancies.

St. Jude has been a top-level diamond sponsor for the past several years of the Heckerling Institute on Estate Planning, an annual conference that typically draws more than 3,000 attendees.

The $30,000 cost of a diamond sponsorship allows St. Jude to bring as many as 10 employees to work at its deluxe suite on the exhibit hall floor. St. Jude also gets a list of all attendees and their emails and expanded networking times with conferencegoers.

At the 2017 conference, St. Jude raffled off a free trip to attend a PGA Tour golf event in Memphis.

The winner, estate and tax adviser Jack Meola, of New Jersey, said that in addition to attending the golf event, he and his wife were taken on a tour of St. Jude. “It’s a very emotional experience,” he said.

At the Heckerling conference the next year, ALSAC asked him to give a luncheon talk to attendees about St. Jude, Meola said.

He said he shares his experience of visiting the hospital with his clients when they are considering charities as beneficiaries.

“I always talk to clients and give them the example,” Meola said. “They may not end up choosing St. Jude, but I give them the emotional side.”

St. Jude’s relationship with a Las Vegas estate lawyer ensured it learned about a lucrative estate case in time to fight for the bequest all the way to the state Supreme Court, and it raised ethical questions about whether the lawyer had been fully transparent with her client.

The lawyer, Kristin Tyler, drafted a will in October 2012 for Theodore Scheide Jr. that directed his estate go to St. Jude. But after Scheide died in 2014, the original of that will could not be located. A guardian who served as the administrator of Scheide’s estate concluded that he destroyed it, rendering it null and void, and determined his money should go to his son.

In 2016, just as a court was on the verge of finalizing the passing of Scheide’s $2.6 million estate to his son, Tyler learned of the plans for the money and alerted Jones, the ALSAC attorney. Tyler knew to call Jones because in addition to Scheide she had another client: St. Jude.

Tyler was vague about what prompted her to look into the matter at the last minute, writing in one email at the time that “for some reason I recently thought about Theo Scheide.” She was certain, however, that the money should go to St. Jude and not Scheide’s son. The two were estranged and Tyler said Scheide was adamant about disinheriting his son.

After calling Jones, Tyler then contacted a partner at a prominent Las Vegas law firm that worked with the charity. In an email, she advised the partner that St. Jude would be reaching out to him and “you need to jump on this quick.” She offered to help, writing, “I want to make sure this estate goes 100% to St. Jude and not to Theo’s estranged son.” She wrote that it would be “a shame” for the money to go to the son.

Tyler later testified that she had represented the hospital in at least two, and perhaps three, estate matters. She testified that she was unsure if she was working for St. Jude at the same time she helped Scheide draft his will. In any event, she said that it wouldn’t have been necessary to tell Scheide about her work for St. Jude because the interests of the two parties were not opposed to each other — meaning there was no conflict of interest. St. Jude did not respond to questions about its relationship with Tyler.

Legal experts said the need to disclose the relationship with St. Jude would depend on the nature and extent of Tyler’s dealings with the charity. Tyler declined to comment.

A district court judge, after a hearing, ruled that the estate should go to the son as there were not two independent witnesses who could vouch for the existence and substance of the missing original will. St. Jude appealed that decision to the state Supreme Court, which overturned the lower court in 2020 and ruled in favor of the charity. Appeals in the case continue.

Key to the supreme court ruling were affidavits from Tyler and her assistant testifying to the legitimacy of the missing will, saying that they witnessed Scheide sign it and that, to their knowledge, he had not intentionally destroyed or revoked it.

For Scheide’s son, Chip, the most painful part of the legal fight with St. Jude was not potentially losing out on his father’s estate but the way he was characterized by the charity and years of uncertainty over the potential inheritance. In appealing the case to the state Supreme Court, St. Jude repeatedly referred to Chip as a “disinherited” son and claimed his father had “no interest” in contacting him. He called it “intentionally hurtful.”

Chip acknowledges an estrangement from his father but says it was not rooted in anger or a dispute. Instead, Chip said, it was the result of a decision his father made in the wake of his parents’ divorce to remarry and move from Pittsburgh to Florida when Chip was 11 or 12. After he moved away, Chip only saw his father a few times.

“He made a choice,” Chip said of his father and the distant relationship between the two. Still, he said, the two stayed in touch. They regularly exchanged holiday cards and just a year before he died, Theodore sent Chip a congratulatory card and a check when he married for a second time.

Chip was in Las Vegas about a year before his father died and tried to contact him, without success. Later he learned his father was in the hospital at that time.

Despite the contention of St. Jude that Theodore did not want to contact Chip, Diane Prosser, a case manager for the guardianship service that managed Theodore’s affairs, said in an interview with ProPublica that Theodore talked frequently about his son toward the end of his life.

“I know towards the end, he mentioned his son a lot,” Prosser said. “I remember saying, should we be looking for his son?” Prosser said she discussed the matter with her boss but doesn’t remember any effort by the guardianship service to find Chip before Theodore died on Aug. 17, 2014.

(Isabel Seliger, special to ProPublica) “He Knew Exactly What He Wanted to Do”

J.D. Harris was admitted to the hospital for a heart valve procedure on Dec. 15, 2016, a little over a year after his wife died. During the operation, his kidneys failed, according to court testimony. Doctors told J.D. that if he didn’t begin dialysis he would die within days. J.D., who was 92, told the doctors he wasn’t interested in the treatment.

By this point, J.D. had not yet made the changes to his estate that he talked about during the previous months. On Dec. 19, he called his longtime accountant, Dwight Kealiher, from the hospital and told him he wanted to rework his trust and will.

Attorney Jerry Zimmerman, a well-known Tulsa estate lawyer, met twice with J.D. at the hospital on Dec. 21. Zimmerman questioned J.D. to make sure he was competent, asking him personal questions and inquiring about his assets. He said in court testimony that J.D. was lucid and accurately recalled details of his estate and his existing trust.

Zimmerman said J.D. told him he wanted to change his estate plan to split it between St. Jude and four family members, including Neitzke. J.D. also wanted $100,000 to go to Jim Tibbets, the foreman of his ranch, whom he considered a friend, Zimmerman testified.

Zimmerman returned to the hospital the next day with the reworked estate documents, but J.D. said he wanted Kealiher to be there to review them and didn’t sign. A day later, on Dec. 23, Zimmerman came back with Kealiher, who had just been released from a different hospital.

J.D., however, was in no condition to sign, according to his medical records. A hospital notary said he was “laboring” and might be confused. A nurse, concerned that J.D. was too weak to sign and incoherent, eventually asked everyone to leave the room.

Tibbets slept in J.D.’s room that night and said that J.D. woke up several times asking about the estate documents and requesting that Zimmerman come to the hospital so he could sign them. Tibbets explained it was the middle of the night and that wasn’t possible, court records show.

The next day was Christmas Eve and Zimmerman was not available to come to the hospital, court records show. He gave the papers to be signed to Tibbets. Overnight, Tibbets said J.D. again woke up and asked about the estate documents as well as inquiring about the animals on his ranch.

“He was adamant about it,” Tibbets said in an interview of J.D.’s desire to finalize his estate plans. “His mind was still sharp right until he passed away.”

Tibbets said he put a piece of cardboard underneath the papers and that J.D. meticulously signed each letter of his name, understanding the importance of the moment. When he finished, he told Tibbets he was “glad” it was done. He died later on Christmas Day.

Six months later, St. Jude began the court fight seeking to overturn a district court finding that the restated trust was properly executed and requesting a new trial on the matter.

The hospital said that it didn’t receive proper notice of the nature of the district court hearing on J.D.’s estate and that it was unfairly denied a chance to introduce medical records showing that J.D. was often incoherent, comatose or otherwise incapable of decision-making at the times he was asked to sign the reworked estate plan. The charity did not contest that J.D. signed the documents.

“He talked to his lawyer. He talked to his accountant. He talked to his family. He talked to his ranch hand, who was family to him,” Tulsa District Court Judge Kurt G. Glassco said in a ruling, which found that J.D.’s reworked estate plan was valid. “And he knew exactly what he wanted to do.”

After Glassco denied St. Jude’s request for a new trial, the charity then appealed to the state Supreme Court, which delegated the matter to the Court of Civil Appeals.

As the case dragged on, J.D.’s nephew Doug Holmes, who was one of the family members named as a beneficiary in the restated trust, wrote a letter to the St. Jude board of directors.

“The continued unfounded litigation has caused significant pain to family members, as we repeatedly have to relive the final days of our dear uncle,” he wrote in December 2018. “With each of St. Jude’s legal filings, the attorney fees increase, sapping precious dollars that could go to St. Jude families.”

In December 2019, the appeals court upheld the lower court ruling. In 2020, more than three years after J.D.’s death, his family members finally received their shares of his nearly $6 million estate.

Neitzke said his family remains mystified as to why St. Jude challenged the distribution of J.D.’s trust. The charity was still being granted a generous, multimillion-dollar bequest and J.D. even told the charity to expect a change from what Nona had promised before she died, he said.

Neitzke said he had been a supporter of St. Jude, but the litigation had changed his view.

“I thought this was a waste of time and money,” he said. “I will never give them another dime.”

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Former ProPublica reporter Marshall Allen contributed reporting.

by Sarah Alvarez, Outlier Media, with data analysis by Agnel Philip, ProPublica

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

During the early stages of the pandemic, Michigan’s largest power company leaned in to a chance to show its charitable side, helping buy laptops for Detroit’s public school children and publicizing that it would not disconnect the gas and electric service of people who could not pay their bills. DTE Energy said it was on “high alert to help those customers whose lives are being disrupted.”

But the relief from the threat of a shut-off ended quickly for DTE’s customers, who pay some of the highest electricity rates in the country. DTE’s moratorium on disconnections lasted just over three months.

An analysis by ProPublica and Outlier Media shows the extent to which one of the nation’s poorest cities and other communities across Southeast Michigan have been impacted by electric service disconnections since the COVID-19 pandemic began. DTE disconnected customers 80,600 times in 2020 and more than doubled that number in 2021. Its 178,200 disconnections for nonpayment last year were its highest annual total since 2016.

The shut-offs reflect an unrelenting reality in Detroit and surrounding areas, where low-income residents have long struggled to keep their lights on while avoiding crushing debt tied to a basic service. It’s a problem rarely discussed except among activists and advocates, as regulators and legislators have focused on other issues, like reliability of service.

DTE has more than 2 million customers, but size alone does not explain its shut-off numbers, nor does the level of poverty within the company’s service area. The analysis by ProPublica and Outlier is the first to examine DTE’s disconnections and compare them to shut-offs by other Michigan utilities.

During the pandemic, DTE’s rate of electricity shut-offs — disconnections as a proportion of customers — outpaced the six other utilities in Michigan that are owned by private investors and have their prices regulated by the state. DTE’s rate was twice as high as the state’s second largest utility, Consumers Energy, which serves areas with a similar share of low-income residents, according to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.

Prior to the COVID-19 emergency, from 2013 — the earliest year for which data was available — through 2019, DTE disconnected electric accounts 1.2 million times. That represented 47% more shut-offs than Consumers during those years, adjusted for the number of customers each utility had. (Both utilities also provide gas service and combine those costs into one bill for many customers, but electricity is the more expensive of the two.)

DTE’s Rate of Shut-offs Outpaced Others During Pandemic

From April 2020 to December 2021, DTE’s average monthly shut-offs for nonpayment per 100,000 customers far outpaced Michigan’s other investor-owned electricity providers.

(Agnel Philip/ProPublica. Source: Michigan Public Service Commission.)

DTE responded to the findings of Outlier and ProPublica in interviews and through email. The utility said that in most cases, customers have service restored within 48 hours. DTE spokesman Christopher Lamphear stressed that the utility works with customers to help arrange affordable payment plans or get financial assistance and contributes millions of dollars annually to a range of programs for low-income communities and customers. He said DTE forgave $2.6 million in debt for struggling customers in 2020.

But DTE, which told state regulators it has half a million customers living in poverty, has acknowledged the struggles faced by customers who can’t afford electricity. In recent testimony before state regulators, DTE described how some people build up significant debt on their monthly bills and then see the problem exacerbated by late fees, shutoffs and security deposits required for reconnection.

Many of the customers who experience shut-offs “are stuck in a repeated cycle of disconnects and reconnects” and must “make tough choices about which monthly bills get paid, and which ones don’t,” a company representative testified.

Watch video ➜

Outlier Media helps Detroit residents access useful and verified information via an automated text messaging system monitored by reporters who will follow up with them. This winter, Outlier heard from hundreds of DTE customers who were looking for resources to help pay their bills.

Of those, 136 said they had had their power shut off or owed money to DTE. Another 343 said they needed help to pay their current DTE bill. Among their comments:

“I was diagnosed with covid and stuck in bed so I missed my notice.”

“Insurmountable debt owed to DTE. I live in an apartment which has very little insulation, thereby causing my heating charges to be extreme.”

“My service was shut off due to nonpayment just last month. I had to come up with $135 to get my service restored.”

One Detroit man who responded to Outlier was shut off earlier this year and reconnected the same day. His bill shows he currently owes more than $2,500 to DTE. In an interview, the recent widower described the stress of not knowing if he could keep the electricity on for his children so they could use the internet for school.

“I open the door and I’m just hoping that my service is not off,” said the man, who didn’t want to be named in the story to protect his family’s privacy. “When the power is off, that stops the kids from being able to go to school.” DTE confirmed that his account had been shut off.

Even though many customers routinely scramble to pay their bills, the state’s utility regulators are not empowered by state law to directly consider affordability when setting prices. Echoing a dynamic seen across the country, Michigan’s regulators focus primarily on keeping utilities profitable enough to satisfy investors and on ensuring customers receive power without unexpected blackouts.

Watch video ➜

“There’s not sort of a clear place in Michigan law where it gets to ‘And also can customers afford to pay for it?’” said Dan Scripps, chair of the entity charged with overseeing utilities, the Michigan Public Service Commission.

Over the last decade, the MPSC has granted DTE a regular series of price hikes worth billions of dollars in revenue to the company.

The state has rules prohibiting shut-offs during extreme weather and requiring notices before disconnection, but it’s often up to utilities to decide how much leniency to show customers.

DTE’s Lamphear said in an email that it has “an obligation to all customers” to manage unpaid bills in a cost-effective way, so that lost revenue doesn’t result in higher costs for all.

“Given these challenges we continue to advocate for additional financial support from federal and state sources to provide a safety net for the most vulnerable people we serve,” Lamphear wrote.

Federal data shows that DTE’s price, as measured in cost per kilowatt-hour, is the second highest among investor-owned utilities in Michigan, behind the Upper Peninsula Power Company, a utility with only about 50,000 customers in Northern Michigan. Consumers’ rate, meanwhile, is about 10% lower than DTE’s.

DTE’s price per kilowatt-hour is also higher than the price charged by the largest utility in each of the other Great Lakes states of Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.

Despite the rate it charges, DTE said, its average monthly bill is on par with the national average, in large part because Michigan residential customers use less electricity than the average American customer.

Outlier and ProPublica employed the same methodology used by DTE to compare its average bills to those of the largest utilities in those five Great Lakes states. DTE’s average bill turned out to be the second most expensive among that group in 2020, the most recent year with full data.

Researchers have developed another way to measure affordability called “energy burden,” which accounts for price and income by calculating the share of customers’ monthly earnings that goes toward utility costs. A recent study of 25 large metropolitan regions determined that the burden for low-income Detroit residents was particularly severe.

Watch video ➜

Michigan regulators don’t require utilities to disclose where shut-offs happen or which communities are most affected, and DTE declined to provide that information to an Outlier reporter. But advocates in Detroit’s low-income neighborhoods and researchers say Black communities are significantly impacted. The percentage of Black residents in DTE’s service area is nearly three times as high as Consumers’, according to a ProPublica and Outlier analysis of census data.

Jeremy Lark of Greenpath Financial Wellness, a nonprofit that helps customers to access payment plans for DTE debt, said more than 60% of people working with Greenpath to manage their DTE debt are Black.

“The customers that come to us,” he said, “it’s pretty common that past due bills are in the thousands of dollars.”

High Prices and Oversight That Favors Utilities

Thomas Edison grew up in Port Huron, Michigan, before going on to help develop electric power generation. One of his first licensees for generating electricity was the Detroit Edison Company; it was reorganized into DTE Energy in 1996.

In the early part of the 20th century, as industry and ordinary households demanded more electricity, governments across the country didn’t have the funds, expertise or will to build a brand new electric grid. Instead, they struck deals with large power companies to supply and distribute power; the utilities would be subject to government oversight but also would be insulated from future competition.

These “investor-owned utilities” — some, like DTE, with publicly traded stock — provide utility service for the majority of Americans and often need government approval to set prices.

The Michigan Public Service Commission, which negotiates these rates through an administrative proceeding, is not empowered to reject rates on the grounds they’re too expensive for low-income customers. Instead, it “has an obligation under Michigan law to set rates based on whether the investments proposed are reasonable and prudent and then allowing for the opportunity to earn a profit on those that are,” saidScripps, chair of the commission.

He added: “Affordability is always a front-of-mind issue, but it’s not tied to how we evaluate utility investments.”

Similar dynamics are at play across the country. Two recent exceptions can be found in Oregon and Massachusetts, where recent legislation gave regulators power to take customers’ ability to pay into consideration when setting gas or electric rates.

Since 2011, the MSPC has approved six rate increases for DTE, each for amounts that were about half of what the company had requested. Over that same time period, according to the commission, DTE’s revenues have increased by several billion dollars, due in part to those rate increases. DTE is currently asking for a seventh rate increase, worth an additional $388 million in annual revenue.

Nationally, the rate DTE charges residents ranks in the top 5 percent of all investor-owned, public and cooperative electric suppliers, according to government data analyzed by Outlier and ProPublica.

In DTE’s service area, the increases in residential rates stand in contrast to what’s happened with businesses and industry. The commercial rates businesses pay have been relatively stable in recent years, while industrial users saw their rates decline between 2010 and 2019, according to federal data analyzed by the Citizens Utility Board of Michigan, a state-funded consumer advocate.

Amy Bandyk, executive director for CUB of MI, said her organization — and by extension residential ratepayers — is outspent by the utility companies, which can afford more lawyers and experts to argue their side in rate cases.

“DTE and Consumers have lots of lobbyists and lawyers and analysts all focused on getting a better return for their shareholders,” she said. “I like to think our arguments are good, but the utilities are just very well-funded.”

She’d like to see the state move toward a billing structure that caps bills at a percentage of income for those who might otherwise struggle to pay, a reform that is popular with advocates nationally.

The MPSC has urged DTE and Consumers Energy to take some steps in this direction, and both companies have taken steps to test this approach. DTE’s pilot program, which began in January, caps bills at 10% of income for some households who use DTE for both gas and electric service, with the company absorbing the rest of the cost. The program will last two years for no more than 2,000 customers living at or below 200% of poverty.

Even as Bandyk observes what’s happening with the MPSC, she would like to see more urgency.

“There are so many people that need help right now,” she said. “High utility rates affect everyone, and, obviously, there are specific groups of customers hit especially hard.”

Donald Lutas is one of those customers. A retiree on a fixed income, he has tried to make his 105-year-old Detroit home more energy-efficient by adding insulation in its attic and replacing windows. But his house is still large and drafty, and he has problems keeping up with his gas and electric bills, especially in winter when he’s seen monthly charges of more than $500.

Donald Lutas in the entry hallway of his home in Detroit (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)

“Right now I have to make a choice between paying my part of Medicare or paying for utilities,” said Lutas, who used to run a residential care facility for people with mental health challenges. “I couldn’t afford both. I had multiple shut-off notices last winter, and I couldn’t allow myself to get disconnected.”

Lutas said he chose to forgo his primary care visits and only keep his hospitalization insurance in order to afford to pay DTE. As he struggles to make payments, Lutas can’t help but think about how DTE continues to thrive financially.

“It is a problem which is more glaring considering that DTE is constantly posting a profit, a major profit,” he said.

Even as the pandemic upended lives in the Detroit area, DTE saw strong earnings in 2020 and 2021. Cash dividends paid out to investors in the electric company, bolstered by rate hikes, rose 76% from 2010 to 2020, to $539 million. DTE’s financial success is important to everyone in the region, the utility argues, because it allows DTE to attract additional investors and borrow money at a lower financing cost.

Beyond its investor dividends, the health of the company’s finances is reflected in the pay of its top executive. CEO Jerry Norcia received a salary of $1.2 million as part of total compensation of $9.7 million in 2020, his first full year on the job. In every other year since 2017, the company’s compensation package for its CEO has topped $10 million.

DTE Shut-offs Outpace Other Utilities’

When the pandemic began in 2020, causing a wave of medical and financial hardship, 34 states directed utilities to stop shutting off customers’ service, according to the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. But Michigan was not one of those, relying instead on voluntary pauses by the state’s utilities.

DTE’s shut-off moratorium was shorter than those put in place by the largest utilities in Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.

MPSC chair Scripps defended the utility’s decision to limit its self-imposed moratorium to only three months in a commentary published in the Detroit Free Press in December 2020. Citing experience from Michigan’s recession in the early 2000s, Scripps said people who stop paying their bills during a longer moratorium might be unlikely to ever catch up. He argued that focusing instead on aggressively distributing assistance dollars would have more long-term benefit.

Watch video ➜

Consumers Energy, meanwhile, voluntarily extended its shut-off moratorium to eight months for most residential customers, through October 2020. The longer moratorium did not lead to more shut-offs once it ended, according to data filed by the company with the MPSC. Consumers’ shut-offs in 2021 were the third fewest for any year since 2013. Only 2016 and 2020 had fewer.

Looking back on its moratorium, Consumers said it did the right thing for its customers. “We believe our approach was the right one,” the utility said in an email, “as we did not want to add additional stress onto our customers during an already stressful time.”

The MPSC has required utilities to file frequent reports on shut-off numbers during COVID-19, every two weeks for the first few months of the pandemic and then every month since. But those reports only tally the number of people who remain shut off from electric, gas or both services at the end of each month-long period. Because these reports don't account for shut-offs where service was later reconnected, they underrepresent the true problem.

But Michigan utilities also file quarterly reports with the MPSC tallying every disconnection for nonpayment. Through examining these, a more complete picture of the breadth of shut-offs during the pandemic emerges.

The analysis by ProPublica and Outlier found that from April 2020 through December 2021, the last month for which data is available, DTE disconnected accounts 208,000 times for nonpayment. These reports contain numbers for both residential and commercial disconnections, but the preponderance are residential.

DTE Ramped Up Shut-offs Quickly After Moratorium End

Compared to the next biggest utility in the state, Consumers Energy, DTE quickly picked up its pace of monthly shut-offs for nonpayment.

(Agnel Philip/ProPublica. Source: Michigan Public Service Commission.)

Because of the way the MPSC collects its data, the analysis could calculate the total number of shut-offs, not the number of customers affected. A single customer might be disconnected more than once during a period of time. DTE, for instance, said that its 80,600 shut-offs in 2020 “represented approximately 66,000 unique customers.”

ProPublica and Outlier asked both DTE and Consumers for their company policies on what triggers a shut-off notice. Again, there was a clear difference.

DTE said it can begin the shut-off notification process after customers miss just one payment and fall more than $100 behind on a bill. State law requires a shut-off notice be sent at least 10 days before an account is disconnected. In order to avoid shut-off, customers can pay their entire past due balance, agree to a payment plan or apply for assistance, which includes a shut-off hold during the application process.

“We offer them a range of options based on their circumstances: affordable payment plans, senior protections, medical holds and low-income assistance,” DTE said in an email. It added: “DTE acts leniently wherever possible within the MPSC’s rules.”

Consumers Energy said it also can start its notification process after customers miss just one bill, but only if they have fallen at least $200 behind. If a late customer gets their balance owed below $75, Consumers said, it won’t go through with the disconnection.

Both companies require customers who get disconnected for nonpayment to provide a deposit before getting reconnected. The deposit can be significant. Under Michigan regulations, the deposit can equal up to twice a customer's average monthly bill; the fee is waived for anyone receiving utility assistance from the state to help them reconnect.

In 2020, aided by an influx of federal COVID-related assistance, the state helped more than 341,000 people across Michigan with energy costs ranging from bills to furnace repairs.

However, more than 40% of individuals who applied that year were rejected, usually because of income requirements, when they applied for that help. Some of the state’s relief programs also require a shut-off notice to qualify.

Detroit’s Heavy Burden

Cassia Haywood, who lives on Detroit’s West Side with her 11-year-old daughter, is quite familiar by now with what DTE shutoff notices look like: a letter marked by several thick red lines and plenty of bold red type.

For years, those letters have forced her to scramble to avoid losing electricity and gas-powered heat. In that very basic sense, her efforts were a success in 2021.

Thanks to payment plans with DTE and intermittent help from social service agencies, Haywood has managed to keep her electricity on. Payment plans can give people more time to pay off money owed to the company in affordable chunks, but some plans still allow the total debt to grow.

Her debt to DTE, built up over several years of gas and electric charges, now totals $8,000, part of which will be added to her bill each month until she has paid it all down. It’s a debt she fears she may never pay off.

Haywood has an auto-assembly job but is only getting sporadic hours. “I’m just not getting ahead with it,” she said.

The financial pressures bearing down on Haywood and others reflect the energy burden faced by many Detroit residents: a household’s energy costs, both electric and gas, divided by its income. Researchers and policy makers largely agree that an energy burden over 6% is unaffordable.

Haywood said she uses about $200 of energy each month, making her burden about 10%. Because she also needs to pay hundreds of dollars toward her debt with DTE each month, the actual burden of her DTE bill is about 34% of her income.

Sometimes a DTE bill for electricity and gas can rival housing costs.

“We pay so much, even on the payment plan,” said Germaine Iwu, who lives with her husband and four children on the East Side of Detroit. Their typical monthly bill this year has been $326 through their plan. “Our mortgage is only like $400,” she said.

A recent study by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, a national nonprofit, put the median energy burden in the Detroit metro area at 10% for low-income families. That’s higher than the national average and the third-highest among the metropolitan areas it studied, behind Baltimore and Birmingham.

This research found that 43% of Black and 38% of Latinx households in the Detroit metro area have an unaffordable energy burden. Researchers cite a combination of factors for these percentages, including higher energy usage because of older housing stock that is not energy-efficient.

A separate survey of more than 350 Detroit families — conducted over the winter of 2020 by Detroit nonprofit We Want Green Too and Kate Hutchens, a University of Michigan researcher— found their average energy burden was close to 16%, higher than that of the overall metro area.

Gloria Lowe in her home in Detroit. Lowe runs We Want Green Too, a nonprofit that studied the energy burden in Detroit. (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)

Addressing the problem in Detroit won’t be easy.

The National Consumer Law Center, which has extensively studied utility prices and regulation, advocates that states develop payment plans that are based on a percentage of income, eliminate deposits for reconnection and prohibit shut-offs for low-income households that include infants or people who are elderly or disabled. To get a clearer view of who is being impacted, the center also wants utility companies to provide more data about who is affected by shut-offs.

In Michigan, the MPSC has pushed utilities to experiment with percentage-of-income plans for some, but there seems to be little momentum for bigger changes. State Sen. Jeff Irwin, a Democrat from Ann Arbor, said regulators and legislators have been overly responsive to the utilities’ desires for reliable investor payouts. For instance, Democrats have pushed legislation limiting shut-offs of water but not electricity.

Irwin said the legislature is too responsive to industry and “blind to the needs of residential affordability.

“The very specific conversation about helping people who can’t pay their bills does not get a lot of play,” he said.

DTE is currently pushing a different idea: a prepaid option it said would help low-income customers. Its reference in state filings to the struggles of customers who face shut-offs came as it urged the MPSC to endorse that proposal.

Watch video ➜

Under DTE’s plan, people would prepay into an energy account, and if that account runs dry, the company would then use a “remote disconnect feature.” Customers would need to make a minimum payment of $40 to get their power restored, and the process would begin again.

“That is the thing that brings me closest to feeling like I’m living in a post-apocalyptic world,” said Margrethe Kearney, a lawyer with the Environmental Law & Policy Center, which opposes the plan and has intervened in the still-undecided MPSC case.

“DTE has lots of reasons for wanting to do this. And they say, ‘Well, you know, it’ll help people manage their energy use. It’ll keep people from racking up these $3,000 bills.’ But at the same time, it’s like, what happens when it’s the middle of a heatwave? And you don’t have any money to put in your account?”

Some activists want to fundamentally challenge the way low-income communities must rely on DTE. Advocacy from Soulardarity, an environmental justice group, has led to a pilot program, endorsed by MPSC, that will give hundreds of low-income residents in Highland Park, Detroit and River Rouge access to solar power and credits on their bills.

Shimekia Nichols, the group’s executive director, considers that a small step, if an insufficient one, toward a larger goal of independence from DTE’s monopoly.

“That is what energy democracy is about,” she said. “It’s what we have to do, because otherwise people are just going to keep needing help.”

About the Data: How We Analyzed Shut-off Rates and Service Area Demographics

Outlier Media and ProPublica collected quarterly reports from the Michigan Public Service Commission that cataloged total disconnections of electric customers for nonpayment by month since 2013. The shut-off numbers do not separate out residential and non-residential customers. The news organizations then calculated average monthly shut-off rates during the pandemic by averaging the disconnections from April 2020 through the end of 2021, which was the most recent data available, and divided that by the average number of electric customers (residential and non-residential) reported by Michigan’s investor-owned utilities to MPSC for 2020. Customer counts for 2021 were not available at the time of publication. We followed a similar method for calculating the average shut-off rate from 2013 through 2019, averaging the monthly customer count figures reported for each year as our base.

For our analysis of the customer demographics for Michigan’s largest two utilities, we re-created an MPSC map of the electric service areas for DTE and Consumers Energy at the Census tract level, using 2010 boundaries. We then matched these tracts to Census data and calculated the percent of residents in each service area who are Black and the percent who are low-income, using the 2015-2019 five-year American Community Survey. We defined low-income percentage as the number of people at or below the poverty line divided by the total population, for each service area. We excluded tracts where the utilities appeared to only serve a portion of the total area.

Comparisons of average bills and rates per kilowatt-hour were based on data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Erin Smith, Alyssa Johnson and Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

Update, March 18, 2022: This story was updated to include the name of Chris Lamphear, a DTE spokesman.

by Alyssa Johnson and Erin Smith

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

Michigan has some of the highest electricity rates in the nation. In fact, only 10 states have rates that are more expensive, based on federal data from 2021. Here’s what Michigan residents need to know if you find yourself facing a shut-off because you can’t afford your bill.

What are my rights?

• Your utility must mail a shut-off notice at least 10 days before turning off your power for nonpayment. It must also try to contact you by phone the day before the shut-off.
• You can sign up for a payment plan with your utility.
• You can delay a shut-off for up to three weeks if you or someone in your home has a serious medical condition and you submit a signed form from your doctor, like this one for DTE Energy or this one for Consumers Energy.
• If you are 65 or older, your power cannot be shut off between Nov. 1 and March 31. (DTE provides the same protections for people 62 or older.)
• Your electricity cannot be shut off when utility workers are not available to turn your power back on that day or the next.
• Your utility cannot shut off your power in extreme weather. Consumers Energy suspends or cancels shut-offs when temperatures are above 90 degrees or below 15 degrees or when the windchill is below 0 degrees. DTE will not shut off power when forecasts dip to 15 degrees, windchill is below zero for at least two days in a row or temperatures are at least 90 degrees for at least two days in a row.

I believe my utility company violated my rights. What can I do?

You can file an informal complaint online with the Michigan Public Service Commission.

• You can also call 800-292-9555 Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., except holidays.
• You can also mail your complaint to: MPSC Customer Assistance, P.O. Box 30221, Lansing, MI 48909.

Your utility company must delay any shut-offs while the MPSC investigates an informal complaint. You can expect to receive a response from the MPSC to your informal complaint within 10 business days.

You can also file a separate formal complaint and ask for an administrative law judge to hear your case. To file a formal complaint, you must submit three copies of your written complaint with a detailed description of what happened, what rules you believe the company broke, all documents and evidence you want to use at the hearing and what you are seeking from the utility. While you await your hearing, your utility must delay shut-offs.

I need help finding resources to pay my electric bill in Detroit. Whom can I contact?

Call 211 for resources to help you pay your utility bill. Or you can text DETROIT to 67485 for an automated list of current resources compiled by Outlier Media. You can also use the Outlier texting platform to talk to a reporter. (Message and data rates may apply; you will receive no more than four messages per month. Reply HELP for help or STOP to cancel at any time. Read the privacy policy and terms.)

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