ProPublica

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The impact is stark in some markets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Origins of YieldStar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A spokesperson for Thoma Bravo declined to comment.

Who Uses the Software and How It Works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RealPage, Seattle and Rising Rents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newly Rent-Burdened Workers Range From Accountants to Groundskeepers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There is no competition,” he said.

Concerns About Competition

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

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

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

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

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

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

Through a representative, Ohlhausen declined to comment on RealPage.

RealPage’s software raises multiple concerns, experts said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Higher Rents Are Burdening More Tenants

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

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

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

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

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

But his sunny view has drawn sharp rebukes.

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

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

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Maya Miller contributed reporting and Doris Burke contributed research.

by Michael Grabell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Marilyn W. Thompson and Perla Trevizo

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Others, however, backed the program.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CRDA did not respond to questions about the criticisms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mollie Simon of ProPublica contributed research.

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

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

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

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

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

NBC News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I wasn’t my best self,” she said.

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

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

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

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

More Power Than Police

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

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

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

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

This is all confusing to actual police.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Knock on the Door

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

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

Watch video ➜

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Our lives were destroyed,” Ferguson said.

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

“You Have the Right to …”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You Would Think There’d Be Some Accountability”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Mick Dumke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audrey Johnson, whose family has deep roots at Ickes, has watched those promises get broken as the land grows more valuable.

Her grandfather and his 10 children were among the first residents at Ickes in 1955, and Johnson’s family — her parents and three brothers — moved there in 1970, when she was 1. Her mother worked for a railroad and then the post office; her dad was a janitor at Ickes for 30 years. The family lived at the south end of Ickes, land where the new school would be built.

While she now lives several miles away, Johnson has worked for 20 years as a lunchroom supervisor and student aide at the National Teachers Academy, a public elementary school that was built on the Ickes site even before the public housing buildings were torn down. In recent years, two of her adult children also started working at the school.

“I’ve been here all my life,” she said.

Johnson said she’s all in favor of quality schools — that’s why she works in one. But she said Black residents are tired of seeing public facilities in their communities closed or destroyed, then replaced with new infrastructure when the neighborhoods begin to gentrify.

“I think they’re trying to push us out,” Johnson said. “They’re trying to push the Black and the brown to the suburbs. And eventually they will if we allow them to.”

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

by Karim Doumar and Cynthia Gordy Giwa

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

Here’s a refresher how the lawmakers we elect are supposed to make laws.

1. A senator or representative introduces a bill.
2. The bill goes to a committee for hearings and approval.
3. It is debated and voted on from the House and Senate floors.
4. Often, a compromise version is worked out.
5. The resulting bill is voted on.
6. If it passes and the president signs it, it becomes a law.

Ta-da!

But most of the time — as Derek Willis, former ProPublica reporter and current professor at University of Maryland’s journalism school (who’s been helping on this project), has taught me — that’s not how it works at all.

Here’s a more realistic look at lawmaking:

Congress does pass a lot of bills through the legislative process. But these are mostly noncontroversial bills that do things like bestow honors, rename a post office or erect statues. There’s no debate and no deliberative, committee-driven process required.

When it comes to the legislation you do hear about — big, politically contentious things like the Inflation Reduction Act or the American Rescue Plan, both of which passed, or the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which did not — the process doesn’t always work as planned.

OK, How Does Congress Really Work?

One reason for the gridlock is that, these days, bills addressing big, national issues are written under the supervision of the Senate majority leader and the House speaker. (Currently, that’s Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, respectively.) They often receive guidance from only a small group of other congressional power brokers rather than the rank-and-file lawmakers who used to contribute to the process by working on legislation in committees.

For example: The recent Inflation Reduction Act was mostly hammered out in secret by Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin. After it became public, lawmakers made just a couple of changes to get other senators on board, and it passed.

This has been slowly changing since the mid-2000s and has intensified during the past decade, according to a 2018 deep dive from ProPublica and The Washington Post. But the current Congress has been one of the most productive in years.

How Do I Know if My Representative Is Doing Their Job?

To evaluate your lawmakers in this new reality, you can look at what they are doing and which issues they’re spending their time on, either through lawmaking (on those topics that don’t necessarily grab headlines) or in public position statements.

1: Lawmaking: Is Your Rep Getting Things Done?

One of the ways you can find out what representatives are up to is by checking out what bills they have sponsored. This is all public information, and ProPublica’s Represent app can help you navigate to the parts that matter to you.

To understand your representative through their bills, you want to look for three things:

1. What the bill is about.
2. How far it got.
3. Who else is supporting the bill.

What the bill is about: Think about the things that matter to you and your community, and ask yourself:

• Is your representative sponsoring bills on those topics?
• If your lawmaker seems to be ignoring your issues, why is that?

How far it got: Every bill that gets introduced is automatically referred to a committee. Many measures never get past this stage and were never intended to — because they are mostly meant to let lawmakers go to town halls and say, “I introduced an important bill.” But this type of posturing is not enough for those of us who want to see things get done. That’s why our site lets you focus on recent bills that made it beyond the introduction stage.

Who else is supporting the bill: Pay attention to who co-sponsored the bill — does it have bipartisan support? Maybe you want a lawmaker who’s willing to compromise, or maybe you see compromise as giving in, but either way, bipartisan support can mean that your representative has done some work to shop the bill around and help get it passed.

2: What They Say: Is Your Rep Speaking Out on Issues You Care About?

Legislation isn’t the only way to compare representatives' concerns against your own. There’s also the stuff they talk about. On Represent, you can see what your representative focuses on in their press releases, as well as what topics they discuss more than other members of Congress.

Since your representative is the person in the federal government who’s closest to you, the more specific issues they’re discussing should, ideally, sound familiar to you. Do they?

Now that you’re familiar with the basics of using ProPublica’s Represent database, take some time to look up the legislative work of your lawmakers in the Senate, too. What does it tell you about what they’re doing in your name?

by Mike Hixenbaugh and Suzy Khimm, NBC News, and Agnel Philip, ProPublica, photography by Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica and NBC News

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

More than a decade before the Penn State University child sex abuse scandal broke, an assistant football coach told his supervisors that he had seen Jerry Sandusky molesting a young boy in the shower. When this was revealed during Sandusky’s criminal trial in 2012, it prompted public outcry: Why hadn’t anyone reported the abuse sooner?

In response, Pennsylvania lawmakers enacted sweeping reforms to prevent anything like it from ever happening again.

Most notably, they expanded the list of professionals required to report it when they suspect a child might be in danger, broadened the definition for what constitutes abuse and increased the criminal penalties for those who fail to report.

“Today, Pennsylvania says ‘No more’ to child abuse,” then-Gov. Tom Corbett declared as he signed the legislation into law in 2014.

A flood of unfounded reports followed, overwhelming state and local child protection agencies. The vast expansion of the child protection dragnet ensnared tens of thousands of innocent parents, disproportionately affecting families of color living in poverty. While the unintended and costly consequences are clear, there’s no proof that the reforms have prevented the most serious abuse cases, an NBC News and ProPublica investigation found.

Instead, data and child welfare experts suggest the changes may have done the opposite.

The number of Pennsylvania children found to have been abused so severely that they died or were nearly killed has gone up almost every year since — from 96 in 2014 to 194 in 2021, according to state data. State child welfare officials say more vigilance in documenting severe cases of abuse likely contributed to the increase. But child safety advocates and researchers raised concerns that the surge of unfounded reports has overburdened the system, making it harder to identify and protect children who are truly in danger.

In the five years after the reforms took effect, the state’s child abuse hotline was inundated with more than 1 million reports of child maltreatment, state data shows. More than 800,000 of these calls were related not to abuse or serious neglect, but to lower-level neglect allegations often stemming from poverty, most of which were later dismissed as invalid by caseworkers.

The number of children reported as possible victims of abuse or serious neglect increased by 72% compared to the five years prior, triggering Child Protective Services investigations into the well-being of nearly 200,000 children from 2015 to 2019, according to a ProPublica and NBC News analysis of federal Department of Health and Human Services data. From this pool of reports, child welfare workers identified 6,000 more children who might have been harmed than in the five previous years. But for the vast majority of the 200,000 alleged victims — roughly 9 in 10 — county agencies dismissed the allegations as unfounded after inspecting families’ homes and subjecting parents and children to questioning.

The expanded reporting requirements were even less effective at detecting additional cases of sexual abuse. Some 42,000 children were investigated as possible sex abuse victims from 2015 to 2019 — an increase of 42% from the five years prior — but there was no increase in the number of substantiated allegations, the analysis of federal data showed. In other words, reforms enacted in response to a major sex abuse scandal led to thousands more investigations, but no increase in the number of children identified as likely victims.

More Families Were Investigated for Sexual Abuse After Pennsylvania Expanded Mandatory Reporting Policies, but the Investigations Didn't Uncover More Victims Source: National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System Child Files 2010-2020. (Lucas Waldron, ProPublica)

Child welfare experts say these findings cast doubt on the effectiveness of the primary tool that states rely on to protect children: mandatory child abuse reporting. These policies, the bedrock of America’s child welfare system, were first implemented more than half a century ago in response to growing national awareness of child maltreatment. The thinking was simple: By making it a crime for certain professionals to withhold information about suspected abuse, the government could prevent vulnerable children from falling through the cracks.

Over the past decade, at least 36 states have enacted laws to expand the list of professionals required by law to report suspicions of child abuse or imposed new reporting requirements and penalties for failing to report, according to data compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures, a group representing state governments.

Some legal experts and child welfare reform activists argue these laws have created a vast family surveillance apparatus, turning educators, health care workers, therapists and social services providers into the eyes and ears of a system that has the power to take children from their parents.

“I don't think we have evidence that mandated reporting makes children safer,” said Kathleen Creamer, an attorney with Community Legal Services, a Philadelphia nonprofit that provides free representation to parents accused of abuse and neglect. “I actually think we have strong evidence that it puts child safety at risk because it makes parents afraid to seek help, and because it floods hotlines with frivolous calls, making it harder for caseworkers to identify families who really do need services.”

In a yearlong investigation, ProPublica and NBC News are examining the extraordinary reach of America’s child welfare system and its disproportionate impact on the lives of low-income families of color. The stream of reports generated by mandatory reporting is so vast, and so unevenly applied, public health and social work researchers estimate that more than half of all Black children nationally will have been the subject of a child protective services investigation by the time they turn 18 — nearly double the rate of white children.

After a hotline report comes in, it’s the job of child welfare investigators to determine whether a child is truly in danger. These caseworkers aren’t held to the same legal or training standards as law enforcement, but they can wield significant power, ProPublica and NBC News found, sometimes pressuring their way into homes without court orders to comb through closets and pantries, looking for signs of what’s lacking.

Under this system, child welfare agencies investigate the families of 3.5 million children each year and take about 250,000 kids into protective custody, according to federal data. Fewer than 1 in 5 of these family separations are related to allegations of physical or sexual abuse, the original impetus behind mandatory reporting. Instead, the vast majority of removals are based on reports of child neglect, a broad range of allegations often tied to inadequate housing or a parent’s drug addiction.

In response, a growing movement of family lawyers, researchers and child welfare reform advocates have called for a radical change in the approach to child protection in America, starting with the abolition of mandatory reporting. This idea has grown in popularity among both progressive activists and conservatives who oppose what they call excessive government intrusion in the lives of families. Other critics support less dramatic reforms, such as limiting which professionals are required to report and providing better training for mandated reporters.

A playground in Philadelphia, where nearly a quarter of residents live in poverty. The deluge of new reports stemming from the state’s child welfare reform disproportionately involved Black families in the city and led to a sharp increase in the number of children being taken from their parents.

The fallout from Pennsylvania’s expansion of mandatory reporting has become something of a cautionary tale among those calling for a system overhaul. Even some proponents of the changes have begun to question their impact.

State Rep. Todd Stephens, a Republican who helped spearhead the post-Sandusky reforms, said the impact of the changes warranted closer examination. In response to NBC News and ProPublica’s findings, he said he would lead a legislative effort to take a “deep dive in the data” to ensure the laws are protecting children as intended.

But Stephens said he believes the legislation is working, citing the massive increase in hotline reports and the 6,000 additional children with substantiated findings of abuse or serious neglect over five years.

“The goal was, if people thought children were in trouble or in danger, we wanted the cavalry to come running,” Stephens said. “That’s 6,000 kids who are getting help who might not have otherwise.”

Child welfare experts, however, cautioned against drawing conclusions based on the increase in substantiated abuse cases because those are subjective determinations made by caseworkers that children were more likely than not to be at risk of being abused and do not indicate whether the findings were ultimately dismissed by a judge.

Dr. Rachel Berger, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh who served on a task force that paved the way for the 2014 reforms, said the state has not produced evidence to show the changes have made children safer.

In 2020, while testifying before the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Berger warned lawmakers that the reforms “may have inadvertently made children less safe” by straining the system and siphoning resources away from genuine cases of abuse.

“We are continuing to tell mandated reporters, ‘Report, report, report,’ and nobody can handle it,” Berger said in an interview.

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Jon Rubin, deputy secretary at the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services’ Office of Children, Youth and Families, which oversees the state’s ChildLine call center, said it’s “really hard to evaluate” whether the 2014 reforms succeeded in making children safer overall. Rubin said he’s aware of the concern that the changes overwhelmed the system and may have contributed to the increase in child abuse deaths. But he cautioned against drawing conclusions without considering other factors, such as the strain on the system caused by the fentanyl epidemic beginning in 2017.

Rubin said his agency is studying ways to reduce the number of hotline reports related to poverty and housing issues, in part by encouraging mandatory reporters to instead connect families directly with resources. The state has also made it a priority to keep struggling families together by providing access to services such as mental health counseling and parental support groups, Rubin said. He worries about the potential impact of more dramatic changes.

“How many children’s lives are we willing to risk to, as you said, abolish the system, to reduce the overreporting risk?” Rubin said. Would preventing unnecessary reports, he asked, be worth “one more child hurt or killed, five more children hurt or killed, 100 more children hurt or killed?”

But Richard Wexler, the executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, a Virginia-based advocacy group, said that this logic ignores the harm that comes with unnecessary government intrusion in the lives of innocent families. Simply having an investigation opened can be traumatic, experts say, and numerous studies show that separating young children from their parents leads to increased risk of depression, developmental delays, attachment issues and post-traumatic stress disorder.

It isn’t necessary to threaten educators, social workers, doctors and other professionals with criminal charges in order to protect children, Wexler argued.

“Abolishing mandatory reporting does not mean abolishing reporting,” he said. “Anybody can still call ChildLine. What it does, however, is put the decision back in the hands of professionals to exercise their judgment concerning when to pick up the phone.”

The Cost of Seeking Help

Lee on her porch in Philadelphia. Numerous studies show separating young children from their parents leads to increased risk of depression, attachment issues and post-traumatic stress disorder.

April Lee, a Black mother of three in Philadelphia, said she has seen and experienced firsthand the way mandatory reporting and the prospect of child removals create a culture of fear in low-income communities.

In Philadelphia, the state’s most populous city, Black children were the focus of about 66% of reports to the city’s Department of Human Services, its child welfare agency, even though they make up about 42% of the child population, according to a 2020 report commissioned by the department.

Over time, Lee said, moms in neighborhoods like hers get used to having child welfare agents show up on their steps.

“It’s a shame,” she said. “You get to the point where it’s almost normalized that you’re going to have that knock on your door.”

Lee estimates that she’s personally had about 20 such reports filed against her in the two decades since she gave birth to her first child at the age of 15. In most instances, she said, the caseworkers didn’t leave her with paperwork, but she said the accusations ranged from inadequate housing to concerns over her son’s scraped knee after a tumble on the front porch.

The agency never discloses who files the reports, but Lee believes it was a call from a mandatory reporter that triggered the investigation that resulted in her children being taken away. In 2013, a year after the birth of her third child, Lee said, she was drugged at a bar and raped. In her struggle to cope with the trauma, she said, she confided in a doctor.

“I was honest,” Lee said. “Like ‘I'm fucking struggling. I’m struggling emotionally.’”

She suspects someone at the clinic where she sought mental health care made the hotline call, most likely, she said, believing that the city’s child welfare agency would be able to help.

The agency opened an investigation and determined that Lee — who at one point had left her three children with a friend for several days — was not adequately caring for her children. The agency took them into protective custody, according to court records reviewed by NBC News and ProPublica. Afterward, Lee said, she spiraled into drug addiction and homelessness.

Lee holds a journal she wrote in during the time she was separated from her kids.

At her lowest point, Lee slept on a piece of cardboard in the Kensington neighborhood, the epicenter of Philadelphia’s opioid crisis. It took two years to get clean, she said, and another three before she regained custody of all of her children.

Lee said people like to tell her she’s proof that the system works, but she disagrees.

“My children still have deficits to this day due to that separation,” she said. “I still have deficits to this day due to that separation. I still hold my breath at certain door knocks. That separation anxiety is still alive and well in my family.”

Now Lee works as a client liaison at Community Legal Services, guiding parents through the system. The job is funded by a grant from the city agency that took her children. Virtually all of the mothers she works with have one thing in common, she said: They’re struggling to make ends meet.

“We see that in a lot of our cases,” Lee said. “You have someone that went to their doctor to say, ‘Hey, I relapsed.’ That's a call to the ChildLine. Or you have a family that might go into a resource center saying, ‘Hey, we’re homeless.’ That’s a call to the ChildLine. You have children that show up to school without proper clothing. That’s a call to the ChildLine.”

But mandatory reporting, and the fear that it provokes, makes it harder for them to get the help they need.

“The solution to poverty,” Lee said, “should not be the removal of your children.”

Family photographs hang on the wall at Lee’s home. Policies Driven by Outrage

In 1962, a pediatrician named C. Henry Kempe published a seminal paper identifying a new medical condition that he called “the battered-child syndrome.” Drawing on a survey of hospital reports nationwide and a review of medical records, Kempe warned that physical abuse had become a “significant cause of childhood disability and death” in America and that this violence often went unreported.

The paper led to widespread media attention and calls to address what some experts began calling the nation’s hidden child abuse epidemic. In the rush to take action, one solution emerged above all else: mandatory reporting.

Within four years of Kempe’s paper, every state had passed some form of mandatory child abuse reporting. In 1974, despite a lack of research into the effects of these new policies, the approach was codified into federal law when Congress enacted the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which requires states to have mandatory reporting provisions in order to receive federal grants for preventing child abuse.

It became conventional wisdom among child welfare policymakers that more reporting and investigations would make children safer. States gradually expanded reporting requirements in the decades that followed, adding ever more professionals — including animal control officers, computer technicians and dentists — to the list. They also expanded the definition of child maltreatment to include emotional abuse and neglect.

But critics say these policy decisions too often have been guided by public outrage and politics, not by data and research.

“Reporting has been our one response to concerns about child abuse,” said Dr. Mical Raz, a physician and professor of history at the University of Rochester who has studied the impact of mandatory child abuse reporting. “Now we have quite a bit of data that shows that more reporting doesn’t result in better identification of children at risk and is not associated with better outcomes for children, and in some cases may cause harm to families and communities.”

The Sandusky scandal, Raz said, demonstrates how a high-profile atrocity and public outcry can drive policy decisions.

The longtime Penn State assistant football coach was convicted in 2012 on 45 counts of child sexual abuse tied to the repeated rape and molestation of boys over a 15-year period. An investigation commissioned by the Penn State Board of Trustees found that several university officials, including legendary Nittany Lions football coach Joe Paterno, had known about allegations of sex abuse against Sandusky as early as 1998, but had shown a “total and consistent disregard” for “the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims.”

In response, Pennsylvania passed a raft of reforms. It clarified and expanded the definition of abuse and added tens of thousands of additional people to the state’s roster of mandated reporters — which now includes virtually any adult who works or volunteers with children. It also increased the criminal consequences for failing to report child abuse, with penalties ranging from a misdemeanor to a second-degree felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Although such prosecutions are rare, child welfare officials said the threat is effective in driving more professionals to report.

But the state failed to include additional funding to handle the anticipated increase in hotline calls and investigations, despite warnings from county officials that the reforms “were going to put a massive strain on their workers and would require additional resources,” according to a 2017 report from the state auditor general.

Those warnings proved prescient. In early 2015, after the changes went into effect and thousands of additional reports flooded Pennsylvania’s child abuse hotline, state officials estimated 4 in 10 callers were placed on hold for so long that they hung up before getting a caseworker on the line.

Some ChildLine workers reported an uptick in calls from mandated reporters who openly acknowledged they did not really believe that a child was in danger. Haven Evans, now the director of programs at Pennsylvania Family Support Alliance, which trains mandatory reporters across the state, was working at the state’s hotline center that year.

“There were a lot of mandatory reporters who would even admit on the phone call that they were making this report because they were concerned with the changes in the law and the penalties being increased,” Evans said. “They just wanted to, for lack of a better word, cover their butt.”

In the months and years that followed, the state added funding and workers and upgraded call center technology to keep up with the deluge. But taking a report is just the first step of the process — what some refer to as the child welfare system’s “front door” — and not enough attention has been paid to studying whether the system as a whole leads to better outcomes, said Cathleen Palm, founder of the Center for Children’s Justice, a nonprofit in Bernville, Pennsylvania, that advocates for government interventions to protect children.

Philadelphia rowhouses. Pennsylvania’s Office of Children, Youth and Families, which oversees the state’s ChildLine call center, has said the agency is studying ways to reduce hotline reports related to poverty and housing issues.

In 2018, Palm came out against proposed legislation to further expand mandatory reporting that had been introduced in the wake of the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal and grand jury investigation. Even though Palm is herself a survivor of child sexual abuse, her calls for a formal study before passing more reforms made her a target of attacks, she said.

“I literally got called by a senior official at the attorney general’s office, who called me screaming at me, equating me to a friend of the pedophile,” Palm said. “I was floored. Do you have any sense of who you’re talking to?”

The following year, state lawmakers acted anyway, passing a law that expanded when failure to report is a felony.

The same dynamic has played out across the country: High-profile media coverage of child abuse deaths and child sexual abuse have created overwhelming political pressure to ramp up mandatory reporting, in red and blue states alike.

Eighteen states have gone so far as to implement universal child abuse reporting requirements, deputizing every adult in the state as a mandatory reporter. But a 2017 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that universal reporting requirements led to more unfounded reports while failing to detect additional confirmed cases of child maltreatment.

Kelley Fong, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, has done extensive research into the impacts of mandatory reporting policies. When Fong interviewed dozens of impoverished mothers in Rhode Island and later Connecticut, they described how mandated reporters are “omnipresent” and how the fear of a call to Child Protective Services leads some to avoid seeking public assistance.

But when she spoke to professionals who had filed reports against parents, Fong found a disconnect.

“Almost to a person, every single mandated reporter said, ‘I reported because I wanted to help the family,’” Fong said. “For the most part, these mandated reporters are in their jobs because they want to help people, they want to improve conditions for children and families. And so here is this agency that offers them this possibility of getting help to parents and children.”

Fong compared this approach to sending armed police officers to assist people struggling with homelessness, mental illness and addiction — a practice that’s drawn increased scrutiny since 2020’s nationwide demonstrations for racial justice and police reform. But while there’s growing awareness of the consequences of what activists view as the overpolicing of Black communities, Fong said fewer people have applied that same critical lens to child welfare.

That’s starting to change.

In 2019, in response to concerns that Massachusetts wasn’t doing enough to protect children, the state legislature voted to create a special commission to study how best to expand mandatory reporting requirements. For two years, the commission was progressing toward that goal — until they agreed to hear public comments on their plans.

During four hours of virtual testimony in April 2021, the commission heard from dozens of parents, social workers, legal experts and reform activists, most of whom expressed deep concerns about the potential harms of expanded reporting requirements. Raz was among those who testified, citing as a warning the dysfunction that followed the Pennsylvania reforms.

Afterward, members of the commission said they were “shocked” and “taken aback” to learn about potential problems associated with expanding the child welfare system. As a result, when the commission delivered its final report to lawmakers in June 2021, it made no formal policy recommendations.

Instead, it called for further study of the unintended impacts of mandatory reporting.

The Strain on Philadelphia’s System

Philadelphia Family Court in downtown Philadelphia. The new laws led to a surge in the number of parents brought before judges on allegations of child neglect.

Few places were harder hit by Pennsylvania’s surge of new child abuse reports after 2015 than Philadelphia.

Kimberly Ali, commissioner of the Philadelphia Department of Human Services, the city’s child welfare agency, acknowledged in an interview with NBC News that the change in the state’s mandatory reporting policies put a strain on Philadelphia’s system. She said the local hotline managed by her department “imploded” after the Sandusky reforms. It took the agency years to recover.

“That was a difficult time at the Department of Human Services, just trying to manage the number of calls and the number of investigations,” Ali said.

In a city where nearly a quarter of residents live in poverty, the deluge of new reports disproportionately involved Black families and led to a sharp increase in the number of Philadelphia children being taken from their parents. In 2017, the city’s child welfare agency removed the most children per capita among the 10 largest cities in the U.S. — at three times the rate of New York and four times that of Chicago, according to data compiled by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.

Five of those children belonged to Lisa Mothee.

On Aug. 21, 2017, a mandatory reporter employed by the Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia called in a hotline report flagging that Mothee’s newborn baby had tested positive for opioids. The hospital later reported that Mothee had also failed to provide her baby with proper medical care, because she declined vaccinations and other medical screenings typically provided to newborns, according to court records.

At a court hearing a month later, Mothee, who is Black, told a judge that she had taken a Percocet to cope with pain late in her pregnancy. She explained that she’d stopped consenting to vaccines after one of her children had an adverse reaction several years earlier, which she believed was her right as a parent. After a lawyer for the city’s child welfare agency acknowledged in court that they didn’t have reason to believe Mothee’s children were in danger, she figured the case would be dismissed.

Instead, the judge ordered Mothee and the father of four of her children to be handcuffed and held in court for several hours while child protection agents picked up all five of her kids from school and a babysitter.

“What? No!” Mothee called out, according to a court transcript. “You can’t take my kids! You can’t take my kids!”

Eight months would pass before a different judge ordered her children to be returned. Years later, Mothee said she’s still struggling with the trauma of the ordeal. “It’s like a death,” she said. “You never get over that feeling.”

Mothee’s case was part of a statewide trend post-Sandusky.

The number of Pennsylvania children reported as possible victims of serious medical neglect — a blanket term describing a parent’s failure to provide adequate medical care — nearly quadrupled after the reforms went into effect in 2015, triggering Child Protective Services investigations into the well-being of about 9,600 children over a five-year span, according to the ProPublica and NBC News analysis of federal data.

This surge followed a change in how the state defined when neglect, including medical neglect, can be considered a form of child abuse. Lawmakers lowered the threshold from any failure to care for a child that endangers their “life or development,” to any failure that “threatens a child’s well-being.” Critics say the change has usurped parents’ right to make medical decisions for their children and has punished people who lack easy and affordable access to health care.

Mothee’s case was among several cited in a scathing report issued in April by a special committee of the Philadelphia City Council that detailed the unintended consequences of mandatory child abuse reporting and alleged failures at Philadelphia’s child welfare agency.

City Councilmember David Oh pushed for the creation of the special committee after his own brush with a mandatory reporter in 2018. A hospital worker at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia had phoned in a hotline report after Oh, a Republican and the city’s first Asian-American councilmember, brought his son to the emergency room with a broken collarbone. Oh explained that his boy had been injured while practicing martial arts, but the hospital social worker said she had no choice but to notify the city, triggering what Oh viewed as a senseless investigation into a report that was ultimately deemed unfounded.

City Councilmember David Oh at Philadelphia City Hall. Oh pushed to create a special committee that has called for the state to abolish mandatory reporting.

Afterward, Oh said, he heard from dozens of Philadelphia parents, including Mothee, who’d gone through similar ordeals.

Ali, the DHS commissioner, said her agency has reduced the city’s foster care rolls by about 29% since 2017, with an increased focus on providing families with services rather than removing children. But Oh said not enough has been done to mitigate the fear created by mandatory reporting, especially in poorer Black communities.

“In those neighborhoods, everyone knows about mandated reporters,” Oh said during an interview at his office. “So when your child falls off a bike, you’ve got to think, ‘Do we take him to the hospital or not?’”

Oh’s committee made several recommendations for reforms — including a call for the state to abolish mandatory reporting.

“They have a system where everyone pulls a fire alarm anytime they feel like there’s a potential for fire, and theoretically it’s great because we’re going to catch every fire before it begins,” Oh said. “But how it’s worked out is all our firefighters are running around to false alarms, and now buildings are burning and people are dying. It’s a bad system.”

“Mandatory Reporters Into Mandatory Supporters”

Some experts argue that the best way to reduce unfounded reports of child abuse and neglect is not by abolishing mandatory reporting, but by doing a better job of training professionals on when to report — and when it’s better to provide help to a family in need instead.

In Pennsylvania, medical professionals are required to complete a two-hour mandatory reporter training course every two years; other professionals must take a three-hour training every five years.

But Dr. Benjamin Levi, a pediatrician and former director of the Center for the Protection of Children, a research and policy group at Penn State Children’s Hospital, said such training programs typically lack a clear explanation of the “reasonable suspicion” of abuse that should trigger a report.

“‘Reasonable suspicion’ is a feeling — they don’t even define it,” said Levi, who developed an alternative training for mandatory reporters to help fill in the gaps.

“If you increase mandated reporting, and you don’t make sure that mandated reporters know what to report and what not to report, you’ve just made the problem worse.”

Educators, the largest source of child abuse reports nationally, in particular have struggled to correctly identify children in need of help. From 2015 to 2019 in Pennsylvania, 24 out of 25 children referred to Child Protective Services by education professionals had their cases dismissed by case workers as unsubstantiated — but only after children and parents had been subjected to questioning and home searches.

Ali, the head of the Philadelphia child welfare agency, said her department has heard from educators who felt unable to help struggling families because they feared potential criminal charges for not reporting to the abuse hotline. With the support of a federal grant, her department plans to create an alternative hotline that mandatory reporters can call when they believe a family is in need but don’t suspect children are in danger.

Adopting the language of reform activists, Ali said the goal is “turning mandatory reporters into mandatory supporters.”

Children wait at an ice cream truck on a street corner in Philadelphia. Child welfare reform advocates have argued for providing parents with more resources to care for their families.

But Benita Williams, former operations director of Philadelphia’s child welfare agency, warned against more radical change, stressing that mandatory reporters should never hesitate to make a report in cases of suspected child abuse.

“Just report,” said Williams, now executive director of the Philadelphia Children’s Alliance, which supports victims of child sexual abuse. “If you are not sure, report and let the professional screen that out. Don’t try to become a social worker.”

Phoebe Jones, who helps lead DHS-Give Us Back Our Children, a group that advocates on behalf of Philadelphia mothers and grandmothers who’ve had children taken from them for issues related to poverty and domestic violence, argues that the real solution is to address the issues underlying most ChildLine reports, by providing parents and caregivers with a universal basic income to ensure they have what they need to care for children.

“Rather than taking children from their mothers and paying foster parents to care for them,” Jones said, “why don’t we invest that money in families?”

by Vernal Coleman, ProPublica, with additional reporting by Nick Blumberg, WTTW/Chicago PBS

This story was co-published with WTTW/Chicago PBS. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

For years, Roseland Community Hospital has been buffeted by complaints about the quality of its medical care and the competence of its management, all while periodically at risk of shutting down. And for years, leaders at the nonprofit facility have defended it, arguing the safety net hospital is essential to the health of residents on Chicago’s South Side.

The hospital’s website is loaded with pithy phrases to reassure patients: Trust us. People come first. We provide best quality care. Always on time.

But federal inspection reports, medical malpractice lawsuits and a whistleblower complaint to the state paint the hospital as putting patients at risk of harm or death, an investigation by ProPublica and WTTW News has found.

Since Jan. 1, 2020, errors or neglect have contributed to the deaths of at least seven Roseland patients, including one who was pregnant, according to federal inspection reports. At least four more deaths during that period have prompted lawsuits against the hospital, with families of patients alleging that their loved ones would be alive if not for the staff’s medical missteps.

Two other deaths are highlighted in a whistleblower complaint that a former Roseland physician filed with the Illinois Department of Public Health. In the complaint, the physician alleges that another doctor who used to practice at the hospital was slow to respond to patients’ medical needs, contributing to their deaths.

The deaths of those 13 patients suggest that conditions at Roseland had become dire — so much so that illnesses that should have been treatable had become potentially fatal and a hospital long dedicated to treating its South Side neighbors safely did not always manage to do so.

Federal regulators have cited Roseland at least 72 times since Jan. 1, 2017, more than any other Illinois hospital that’s monitored by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The lapses touched different departments, different employees, different leaders. Nurses and others neglected to consistently monitor patients’ vital signs as they lay slowly dying. Doctors failed to give patients required medical assessments. The pharmacy took hours to fill potentially life-saving prescriptions. In other cases, the hospital failed to maintain equipment and follow infection prevention protocols.

Some of the lapses were serious enough to warrant what federal regulators call an “immediate jeopardy” citation, which flags problems that, if left uncorrected, put patients at risk of harm or death. Since 2017, Roseland has received eight immediate jeopardy citations.

For a hospital to receive even just one immediate jeopardy warning is a “shock,” said Dr. Jose Figueroa, an assistant professor of health policy and management at Harvard University who has researched hospital quality. Getting such a large number in a relatively short period of time “seems really bad,” he said.

Timothy Egan, Roseland’s president and chief executive, declined requests for an interview. But a spokesperson and a top hospital official defended Roseland’s record, saying that it has faced significant challenges over the past several years that were made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Like other safety net hospitals, which treat all patients regardless of their ability to pay, Roseland depends financially on reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid, which pay for treatments for its low-income, senior and disabled patients.

The spokesperson, Dennis Culloton, and the hospital’s new chief quality officer, Sharon DeVita, declined to comment on particular deaths or about lawsuits brought in connection with those deaths. Court records in Cook County show Roseland denied the allegations in one lawsuit and that another lawsuit was dismissed. Court records do not show any response to a third lawsuit, while in another the hospital has said that under an executive order signed by Gov. JB Pritzker, Roseland should not face litigation stemming from incidents that occurred during parts of the pandemic.

“The entire staff of Roseland Hospital served the disinvested community of the far South Side of Chicago through the global pandemic, the challenges of which the hospital and the community continue to face to this day,” Culloton said in an email. “Severely ill patients from our community presented in our safety net hospital’s Emergency Department and sadly some did not survive.”

DeVita said Roseland’s staff “grieves for the loss of any patient.” But she said the circumstances of the deaths flagged by investigators are less similar than their reports suggest and involve patients with unique health conditions.

Roseland, like hospitals across Illinois, at the time was barred by the state from closing its emergency room since the beginning of the pandemic; that, hospital officials said, contributed to overcrowding and stress on the staff.

“The pandemic,” DeVita said, “strained staffing throughout all healthcare systems, especially urban and safety-net hospitals.” She said some nurses who were contracted by the state to help shore up Roseland’s staff during the pandemic “required significant training.”

Both Culloton and DeVita emphasized that since 2021, Roseland has embarked on a campaign to examine and enhance safety practices across the facility. They said the hospital has also addressed the specific deficiencies cited by regulators.

DeVita said Roseland has “redoubled its commitment to the process of continued improvement.”

A spokesperson for the state public health department said that corrective actions taken by the hospital in the wake of the 2021 immediate jeopardy warnings were “sufficient,” and that all of the warnings have been lifted. Roseland is now in good standing with the state.

But while Roseland’s deficiencies have been addressed, there’s no guarantee that the underlying conditions that caused them have been resolved, according to Lisa McGiffert, a co-founder of the Patient Safety Action Network.

“Not sure there’s anyone looking at these hospitals holistically,” McGiffert said of hospitals in general. “[Regulators] will say, ‘We found infection control breaches in a particular room. … You have to clean up the sinks.’ But if there’s a more systemic problem, just cleaning up the sink isn’t going to fix the issue.”

The last time Melichsia Boss spoke to her father, Wilford, in June 2021, an ambulance was speeding him to Roseland. The 70-year-old former property manager had been picked up at his South Side nursing home after he complained of trouble breathing. Medical records provided by his daughter show that Wilford Boss, who underwent regular dialysis treatments, was found breathing rapidly and somewhat confused.

Still, Boss said, her father was lucid enough to reassure her when she reached him on the phone. It was just some shortness of breath, he told her. She asked the ambulance driver not to take her father to Roseland. His primary care physician practiced at the University of Chicago Medical Center, and as a native Chicagoan, she was aware of Roseland’s reputation.

Melichsia Boss, holding a photograph of her father, Wilford. (Akilah Townsend for ProPublica)

“They have history,” she said in an interview.

But protocol required that medics take Wilford Boss to the nearest hospital. By the time the ambulance arrived at Roseland’s emergency room, his breathing had worsened and his heart rate had become erratic. Doctors ran tests to find the cause. The attending physician later wrote that, as Boss began to decline, he might need a breathing tube.

But the treating physician delayed inserting a breathing tube as Boss’ lungs failed, despite several pleas by duty nurses to do so, a Roseland physician wrote in a complaint to the Illinois Department of Public Health. Less than eight hours after the ambulance dropped Boss at Roseland, he was dead. The official cause of death was respiratory failure.

The doctor who submitted the complaint, obtained by ProPublica and WTTW News, was named in the records but declined to comment for this story. The news organizations are not naming the whistleblower.

The doctor who treated Boss no longer works at Roseland and declined to comment.

Spokespersons for the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the state public health department declined to discuss complaints regarding Boss’ death or other deaths, but it appears Roseland was never cited for its treatment of Boss.

Boss’ daughter was unaware of the complaint over her father’s medical treatment, and she began to cry when reporters showed it to her. A year after her father’s death, she said she regrets not involving herself more in his care.

“I wish I’d never let them take him to Roseland,” she said.

Wilford Boss (Akilah Townsend for ProPublica)

Roseland opened in 1924, one of several hospitals established to serve growing populations of immigrants settling on Chicago’s South Side. The area was once solidly middle class. But as factories shuttered, companies disinvested and crime increased, a number of the communities surrounding Roseland slid into poverty. Over time, the hospital increasingly struggled financially. Today its service area spans 12 predominantly Black neighborhoods and six ZIP codes.

The hospital and its advocates have often complained that reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid are slow to arrive, forcing Roseland — as well as other safety net facilities — to operate on slim financial margins.

Nearly 92% of patients admitted to Roseland in 2020 received Medicare or Medicaid, according to state reports. That’s a far larger percentage than the statewide number, which shows that 66% of all Illinois hospital inpatients relied on those benefits. Regardless of their method of payment, for many South Side residents, Roseland is the only option. The next nearest hospital is several miles away.

In 2013, budget woes forced Roseland to the brink of closure. That year, the hospital laid off nearly 70 employees amid a messy fight with then-Gov. Pat Quinn over millions of dollars in allegedly unpaid reimbursements, with accusations of mismanagement lobbed back and forth between the two sides.

A $350,000 grant from the state helped the hospital avert closure. Then-president and chief executive Dian Powell stepped down that June after less than two years on the job amid accusations of mismanagement and after stating incorrectly that the state owed Roseland $6 million. Powell denied any mismanagement but said she was mistaken about the amount the state owed Roseland.

Egan was made Roseland’s chief executive in 2014 after initially being brought on to stabilize hospital finances. But Roseland continued to struggle. In January 2018, Roseland officials announced another round of layoffs. This time, 35 workers, about 7% of the hospital’s 500 employees, were terminated in an effort to cut costs, officials said at the time. Dozens of employees, including some executives, saw their salaries temporarily reduced.

Federal tax documents filed in February 2018 show that the hospital’s operating deficit reached $7.5 million. Four years later, Roseland reported just over $11 million in surplus, the records show.

Federal investigative reports make it clear that the pandemic further stretched an already-thin medical staff.

Regulators have cited Roseland three times since 2017 — including twice since 2020 — for failing to ensure an “adequate” number of nurses were assigned to its emergency and intensive care units.

Starting in January 2022, as the omicron variant of COVID-19 surged, Roseland was frequently understaffed. Federal regulators identified five days between January and March on which the number of nurses working in the hospital’s emergency department fell below set minimums. The manager of the emergency department at the time acknowledged the staffing problems, saying they were especially “difficult.”

Alderman Anthony Beale, whose 9th Ward borders the 34th Ward that’s home to the hospital, said that on balance, the hospital is doing a “phenomenal” job. Most of its problems, Beale added, can be traced to a lack of resources.

Beale has backed recent efforts to establish a new medical district in Roseland that he said would help enhance the medical services available to residents who depend on it.

“If we had the same resources that a University of Chicago or a Northwestern or a Rush has, then we would be talking about a different type of hospital right now,” Beale said.

Carrie Austin, the 34th Ward’s alderman, did not respond to requests for comment.

While the hospital’s circumstances, including the pressures the pandemic forced on it, cannot be ignored, they do not fully explain the hospital’s recent performance, according to Dr. Robert Wachter, the chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

“What strikes me here is that this was true for every hospital in the country,” he said. “It was true for every safety net hospital in the country. It was true for every hospital that was struggling financially, and there are hundreds of them. ... But not every hospital, even while being stressed by the pandemic, had that many citations.”

Watch the WTTW/Chicago PBS Report (Video by Nick Blumberg, WTTW/Chicago PBS)

When a patient showed up at Roseland’s emergency department one evening in July 2021, the events that followed at first seemed routine. The patient, who is not identified in federal records, complained of worsening abdominal pain. A doctor diagnosed them with sepsis and dangerously high blood sugar. The doctor then ordered hourly checks of their blood sugar level, and the patient was later transferred to the intensive care unit.

The next morning, the patient coded and doctors placed them on a mechanical ventilator to help them breathe. Around noon, they “coded” for a second time. A short time later, a doctor pronounced the patient dead.

A review by inspectors found that as the patient’s condition deteriorated, nurses failed to regularly check their blood sugar levels as the doctor had ordered. A Roseland official told inspectors that on the morning of the patient’s death, ICU nurses also failed to conduct a “head-to-toe” assessment, which is required by hospital protocol, to gauge how the patient was responding to treatment.

That July death was preceded by two others, with all three patients dying after periods where checks of their vital signs were inconsistent, according to federal reports.

One arrived on July 4 and was diagnosed with sepsis. Inspectors later found that the medical staff failed to consistently check their vital signs for more than 13 hours. They died just after midnight on July 6. The third patient, who had paralysis after a stroke and low blood pressure, was treated at Roseland for more than a month before their death in early July. Inspectors determined that the medical staff failed to consistently monitor their vital signs, records show.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services hit Roseland with an immediate jeopardy warning for the treatment provided to the three patients who died. It was the second the hospital received that year. Before the year was over, the agency would issue a third.

Egan and Roseland’s senior medical team tried to correct the problems cataloged by inspectors, with Egan signing off on a package of reforms. They included hiring a consultant to oversee a suite of new programs — daily audits of nursing care among them — retraining sessions on how frequently patients should be assessed, and seminars on the proper use of blood sugar meters.

That winter, Egan also hired DeVita as Roseland’s new chief quality officer. Her assignment, she said, was to focus on ensuring that patient safety protocols were followed throughout the hospital.

But before long, inspectors returned to the hospital to investigate additional deaths.

“Meaningful progress takes time,” she said.

A second wave of patient deaths came in January 2022. An ambulance brought a patient to Roseland on a frigid January evening. A doctor would later tell inspectors that, on this night, COVID-19 had stretched the hospital’s staff and resources thin, leaving patients in beds that lined along the hallways of the emergency department.

The patient had a history of diabetes and had missed several scheduled doses of medication before coming to the hospital. Paramedics noted that the effects had begun to alter their mental state and had severely elevated their heart rate, according to a federal report.

The doctor who initially examined the patient prescribed an insulin drip, then ordered them moved to Roseland’s intensive care unit. Seven hours passed before they received the medicine.

The patient continued to decline, reports show. Their blood pressure dropped, and they became unresponsive to verbal commands, nurses noted. On the afternoon of their second day at the hospital, nurses found they had no pulse. A doctor, according to the reports, pronounced them dead just after 4 p.m.

Federal inspectors made note of the delayed insulin treatment. In interviews, a nurse told the inspectors that they’d waited “a long time” for the pharmacy to prepare the insulin before the nurse finally prepared it themselves. The inspectors did not determine a reason for the delay, according to reports.

Inspectors also found gaps in the patient’s medical records where nurses had failed to document that their blood sugar levels were checked or whether a doctor was informed that their health was worsening. Nurses told the inspectors they had done the checks but acknowledged failing to document them.

Over the next two weeks, two other patients died following monitoring and assessment lapses. The hospital was cited for understaffing and for failing to ensure proper patient care. The latter would earn Roseland another immediate jeopardy warning.

The hospital, inspectors wrote, should have flagged two of those deaths for additional review. Failing to do so violated federal regulations requiring hospitals to track unusual events and unexpected patient deaths, according to the inspection reports. A hospital official, who is not named in the reports, later told inspectors that they had reviewed the cases and determined they didn’t meet the criteria for further investigation.

The official said that the hospital’s staff was under severe strain at the time, with as many as 70 patients filling the emergency department, according to inspection reports. And the hospital was not redirecting patients coming to Roseland in ambulances to other facilities to relieve the overcrowding.

“Patients,” the official said, “were being monitored as best as possible, not as they should have been.”

by Joshua Kaplan

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was incensed. Late last year, the state’s Republican legislature had drawn congressional maps that largely kept districts intact, leaving the GOP with only a modest electoral advantage.

DeSantis threw out the legislature’s work and redrew Florida’s congressional districts, making them far more favorable to Republicans. The plan was so aggressive that the Republican-controlled legislature balked and fought DeSantis for months. The governor overruled lawmakers and pushed his map through.

DeSantis' office has publicly stressed that partisan considerations played no role and that partisan operatives were not involved in the new map.

A ProPublica examination of how that map was drawn — and who helped decide its new boundaries — reveals a much different origin story. The new details show that the governor’s office appears to have misled the public and the state legislature and may also have violated Florida law.

DeSantis aides worked behind the scenes with an attorney who serves as the national GOP’s top redistricting lawyer and other consultants tied to the national party apparatus, according to records and interviews.

Florida’s constitution was amended in 2010 to prohibit partisan-driven redistricting, a landmark effort in the growing movement to end gerrymandering as an inescapable feature of American politics.

Barbara Pariente, a former chief justice of the state Supreme Court who retired in 2019, told ProPublica that DeSantis’ collaboration with people connected to the national GOP would constitute “significant evidence of a violation of the constitutional amendment.”

“If that evidence was offered in a trial, the fact that DeSantis was getting input from someone working with the Republican Party and who’s also working in other states — that would be very powerful,” said Pariente, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Democrat Lawton Chiles.

A meeting invite obtained by ProPublica shows that on Jan. 5, top DeSantis aides had a “Florida Redistricting Kick-off Call” with out-of-state operatives. Those outsiders had also been working with states across the country to help the Republican Party create a favorable election map. In the days after the call, the key GOP law firm working for DeSantis logged dozens of hours on the effort, invoices show. The firm has since billed the state more than $450,000 for its work on redistricting.

A week and a half after the call, DeSantis unveiled his new map. No Florida governor had ever pushed their own district lines before. His plan wiped away half of the state’s Black-dominated congressional districts, dramatically curtailing Black voting power in America’s largest swing state.

One of the districts, held by Democrat Al Lawson, had been created by the Florida Supreme Court just seven years before. Stretching along a swath of north Florida once dominated by tobacco and cotton plantations, it had drawn together Black communities largely populated by the descendants of sharecroppers and slaves. DeSantis shattered it, breaking the district into four pieces. He then tucked each fragment away in a majority-white, heavily Republican district.

DeSantis Broke Up Black-Dominated District and Put Its Pieces Into 4 Majority-White Districts (Source: Redistricting Data Hub, IPUMS NHGIS)

DeSantis’ strong-arming of his Republican allies was covered extensively by the Florida press. But until now, little has emerged about how the governor crafted his bold move and who his office worked with. To reconstruct DeSantis’ groundbreaking undertaking, ProPublica interviewed dozens of consultants, legislators and political operatives and reviewed thousands of pages of documents obtained through public records requests and from the nonpartisan watchdog group American Oversight.

DeSantis’ office did not respond to detailed questions for this story.

“Florida’s Governor fought for a legal map — unlike the gerrymandered plan the Governor rightly vetoed,” Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, whose top lawyer was hired by DeSantis’ office, said in an email to ProPublica. “If Governor DeSantis retained some of the best redistricting lawyers and experts in the country to advise him then that speaks to the good judgment of the Governor, not some alleged partisan motive.”

In four years as governor, DeSantis has championed an array of controversial policies and repeatedly used his power to punish his political opponents. A presumptive candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, he has often made moves that seemed tailored to attract headlines, such as his recent stunt sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. But it’s the governor’s less flashy commandeering of the redistricting process that may ultimately have the most long-lasting consequences.

Analysts predict that DeSantis’ map will give the GOP four more members of Congress from Florida, the largest gain by either party in any state. If the forecasts hold, Republicans will win 20 of Florida’s 28 seats in the upcoming midterms — meaning that Republicans would control more than 70% of the House delegation in a state where Trump won just over half of the vote.

The reverberations of DeSantis’ effort could go beyond Florida in another way. His erasure of Lawson’s seat broke long-held norms and invited racial discrimination lawsuits, experts said. Six political scientists and law professors who study voting rights told ProPublica it’s the first instance they’re aware of where a state so thoroughly dismantled a Black-dominated district. If the governor prevails against suits challenging his map, he will have forged a path for Republicans all over the country to take aim at Black-held districts.

“To the extent that this is successful, it’s going to be replicated in other states. There’s no question,” said Michael Latner, a political science professor at California Polytechnic State University who studies redistricting. “The repercussions are so broad that it’s kind of terrifying.”

Rep. Al Lawson had his district broken into four pieces by DeSantis, reducing the share of the Black population in each. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/AP Images)

Al Lawson’s district, now wiped away by DeSantis, had been created in response to an earlier episode of surreptitious gerrymandering in Florida.

Twelve years ago, Florida became one of the first states to outlaw partisan gerrymandering. Through a ballot initiative that passed with 63% of the vote, Florida citizens enshrined the so-called Fair Districts amendment in the state constitution. The amendment prohibited drawing maps with “the intent to favor or disfavor a political party.” It also created new protections for minority communities, in a state that’s 17% Black, forming a backstop as the U.S. Supreme Court chipped away at the federal Voting Rights Act.

Florida elected its first Black member of Congress, a former slave named Josiah Walls, in 1870, shortly after the end of the Civil War. But Florida rapidly enacted new voter suppression laws, and Walls soon lost his office as Reconstruction gave way to the era of Jim Crow.

Josiah Walls was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida in 1870. (Buyenlarge/Getty Images)

Thanks to distorted maps, Florida did not elect a second Black representative to Congress until 1992. That year, a federal court created three plurality-Black districts in Florida — and then three Black politicians won seats in the U.S. House.

After the Fair Districts amendment became law in 2010, state legislators promised to conduct what one called “the most transparent, open, and interactive redistricting process in America.” Policymakers went on tour across the state, hosting public hearings where their constituents could learn about the legislature’s decision-making and voice their concerns.

The hearings also served a more nefarious purpose, a judge would later rule. They were instrumental in what state circuit judge Terry Lewis described as “a conspiracy to influence and manipulate the Legislature into a violation of its constitutional duty.”

For months, a team of state-level Republican operatives worked in secret to craft maps that favored the GOP, coordinating with both statehouse leadership and the Republican National Committee. Then they recruited civilians to attend the hearings and submit the maps as their own.

An email detailed the advice the operatives gave their recruits. “Do NOT identify oneself orally or in writing,” it read, “as a part of the Republican party. It is more than OK to represent oneself as just a citizen.”

It took years of litigation for the details of the scheme to come to light. But in 2015, the Florida Supreme Court responded with force. In a series of rulings that ultimately rejected the Republicans’ efforts, the court laid out the stringent new requirements under Fair Districts, making clear that partisan “practices that have been acceptable in the past” were now illegal in the state of Florida.

After ruling that the legislature’s process was unconstitutional, the court threw out the Republicans’ congressional district lines and imposed a map of their own. That is how Lawson’s district came to be.

“It was important,” Pariente, who authored the key opinions, told ProPublica, “to make sure the amendment had teeth and was enforceable.”

Former Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Barbara Pariente, right, said DeSantis’ collaboration with people connected to the national GOP would constitute “significant evidence of a violation” of Florida’s constitution. (Phil Coale/AP)

The amendment took on even greater significance in 2019, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling on redistricting.

The court’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause barred federal court challenges to partisan gerrymanders. Writing for the 5-4 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said it was not an issue for the federal judiciary to decide, but emphasized the ruling did not “condemn complaints about districting to echo into a void.”

In fact, the issue was being actively addressed at the state level, Roberts wrote. He cited Florida’s amendment and one of Pariente’s opinions. Responding to liberal justices who wanted to reject Rucho’s map as an unconstitutional gerrymander, Roberts wrote they could not because “there is no ‘Fair Districts Amendment’ to the Federal Constitution.”

In 2021, state legislative leaders were more careful.

The senate instructed its members to “insulate themselves from partisan-funded organizations” and others who might harbor partisan motivations, reminding legislators that a court could see conversations with outsiders as evidence of unconstitutional intent. The legislature imposed stringent transparency requirements, like publishing emails that it received from constituents. And they ordered their staff to base their decisions exclusively on the criteria “adopted by the citizens of Florida.”

The Senate leadership “explained to us at the beginning of the session that because of what happened last cycle, everything had to go through the process,” Sen. Joe Gruters, who is also chairman of the Florida Republican Party, told ProPublica.

In November, the state senate proposed maps that largely stuck to the status quo. Analysts predicted they would give Republicans 16 seats in Congress and Democrats 12.

“Were they the fairest maps you could draw? No,” said Ellen Freidin, leader of the anti-gerrymandering advocacy group FairDistricts Now. “But they weren’t bad Republican gerrymanders.”

DeSantis was incensed after the Republican-controlled legislature put forward its redistricting proposal. (Scott McIntyre/The New York Times/Redux)

DeSantis wasn’t satisfied. “The governor’s office was very pissed off about the map. They thought it was weak,” said a well-connected Florida Republican, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so he could be candid. “They thought it was ridiculous to not even try to make it as advantageous as possible.”

In early January, DeSantis’ deputy chief of staff, Alex Kelly, was quietly assigned to oversee a small team that would devise an alternative proposal, according to Kelly’s later testimony.

State employees often spend years preparing for the redistricting process — time that DeSantis did not have. As Kelly and his colleagues set to work, they brought in critical help from the D.C. suburbs: Jason Torchinsky, a Republican election attorney and one of the leading GOP strategists for redistricting nationwide.

On Jan. 5, Kelly and two other top DeSantis aides had the redistricting “kick-off call,” according to the meeting invite, which was provided to ProPublica by American Oversight. The invitation included Torchinsky and another guest from out of state: Thomas Bryan, a redistricting specialist.

In an interview with ProPublica, Bryan explained the connection between the national Republican Party and his work with DeSantis. “There’s a core group of attorneys that works with the party and then they work with specific states,” he said. “It’s not a coincidence that I worked on Texas, Florida, Virginia, Kansas, Michigan, Alabama.”

He added that the main lawyer he works with is Torchinsky: “Jason will say, ‘I want you to work on this state.’”

Jason Torchinsky, center, logged more than 100 hours working on the redistricting for DeSantis. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

A top partner at a conservative law firm, Torchinsky has represented the RNC, the Republican Party of Florida and many of America’s most influential right-wing groups, such as the Koch network’s Americans for Prosperity.

He also occupies a central role in the Republican Party’s efforts to swing Congress in its favor in 2022. Torchinsky is the general counsel and senior advisor to the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the entity the Republican National Committee helped set up to manage the party’s redistricting operations.

The NRRT boasts millions of dollars in funding and a roster of prominent advisors that includes Mike Pompeo and Karl Rove. Earlier this year, Kincaid, the trust’s executive director, summarized its objective bluntly: “Take vulnerable incumbents off the board, go on offense and create an opportunity to take and hold the House for the decade.”

In a statement to ProPublica, Kincaid said that the trust is one of Torchinsky’s many clients and that the lawyer’s work in Florida was separate: “When I would ask Jason what was happening in Florida, he would tell me his conversations were privileged.” Kincaid added that he personally did not speak with anyone in the DeSantis administration “during this redistricting cycle.”

Torchinsky’s involvement in the creation of DeSantis’ map has not been previously reported. His role in the process appears to have been intimate and extensive, though the specifics of his contributions are largely unclear. He spent more than 100 hours working for the DeSantis administration on redistricting, according to invoices sent to the Florida Department of State.

Redacted invoice from Jason Torchinsky's firm for its work on Florida redistricting (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Torchinsky held repeated meetings with DeSantis’ team as the group crafted maps and navigated the ensuing political battles, according to documents obtained by ProPublica. And he brought in other operatives who’d worked around the country in priority states for the national GOP.

A week after the kickoff meeting, Torchinsky scheduled a Zoom call between Kelly, Bryan and a second consultant, Adam Foltz.

Foltz and Bryan arrived in Florida just as they were becoming go-to mapmakers for the GOP. They appeared together in multiple states where the NRRT was directly involved last year, generating controversy in their wake.

In Texas, Foltz, Bryan and the NRRT’s leader, Kincaid, all worked behind the scenes helping draw maps, court records show. After they finished, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the state of Texas, contending that the map violated the Voting Rights Act and illegally diluted Black and Latino votes. The case is still pending.

Last fall in Virginia, each party submitted three candidates to the state supreme court to guide the state’s redistricting process. The Democrats put forward three professors. Republicans submitted Bryan, Foltz and Kincaid. The court’s conservative majority rejected all three Republican nominees, citing conflicts of interest and “concerns about the ability” of the men to carry out the job neutrally.

Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, whose top lawyer helped DeSantis with his congressional maps. (T.J. Kirkpatrick/The New York Times/Redux)

In a statement, Kincaid said Foltz and Bryan are not partisan operatives and “the Virginia Supreme Court erred” in rejecting them. He also downplayed his own relationship to the consultants, saying they are not “employees or retained consultants” for his group.

“Adam and Tom are two of the best political demographers in the country,” Kincaid wrote. “It would only make sense that states looking for redistricting experts would retain them.”

Until last year, Foltz had spent his entire career working in Wisconsin politics, on state GOP campaigns and for Republican state legislators, according to court records. He was introduced to redistricting a decade ago when he spent months helping craft maps that became notoriously effective Republican gerrymanders. When he testified under oath that partisanship played no role in the Wisconsin process, a three-judge panel dismissed his claim as “almost laughable.”

Bryan was also a new figure on the national stage. Before 2020, he was a “bit player” in the redistricting industry, he said, running a small consulting company based in Virginia. He’d drawn maps for school districts and for local elections, but never for Congress, and he held a second job in consumer analytics at a large tobacco conglomerate.

“In 2020, my phone started going off the hook, with states either asking to retain me as an expert or to actually draw the lines,” Bryan told ProPublica. “I get phone calls from random places, and I’m on the phone with a governor.” While he mostly worked with Republicans, he was also retained by Illinois Democrats this cycle, according to court records.

Foltz and Bryan’s rapid ascension culminated in Florida. On Jan. 14, Torchinsky set up a third call with Foltz and Kelly. Then two days later, DeSantis released his map.

At left, Alex Kelly, deputy chief of staff for Gov. DeSantis, answers questions about the new district lines his office developed, during a Committee on Reapportionment meeting in April at the state capitol in Tallahassee. (Phil Sears/AP)

According to Kelly’s subsequent testimony, Foltz drew the map himself.

“I was completely blindsided,” said Rep. Geraldine Thompson, a Democrat on the House redistricting committee. “That is the purview of the legislature.”

Foltz declined an interview when reached by phone and did not respond to subsequent requests for comment. Kelly and Torchinsky, who went on to defend DeSantis in a lawsuit against the redistricting, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The House redistricting subcommittee later brought Kelly in to answer questions about DeSantis’ proposals. Before the deputy chief of staff testified, the Democrats’ ranking member moved to place him under oath. Republican legislators blocked the committee from swearing Kelly in.

In his opening statement, Kelly took pains to emphasize that the governor’s office colored within the lines of the Florida constitution.

“I can confirm that I've had no discussions with any political consultant,” he testified. “No partisan operative. No political party official.”

This appears to have been misleading. By the time he testified, Kelly had been personally invited to at least five calls to discuss redistricting with Torchinsky, Bryan or Foltz, records show.

Kelly mentioned Foltz only briefly in his testimony. Torchinsky and Bryan’s names didn’t come up.

DeSantis holds as much sway in Tallahassee as any governor in recent memory. But even after he publicly weighed in with a map of his own, Republicans in the legislature didn’t bow down. The state Senate refused to even consider the governor’s version. In late January, they passed their original plan.

DeSantis’ aides argued that Lawson’s district was an “unconstitutional gerrymander,” extending recent precedent that limits states’ ability to deliberately protect Black voting power.

Florida Republicans were skeptical. House Speaker Chris Sprowls told reporters that DeSantis was relying on a “novel legal argument” that lawmakers were unlikely to adopt.

“In the absence of legal precedent,” Sprowls said, “we are going to follow the law.”

Florida House Speaker Chris Sprowls and fellow Republicans initially objected to DeSantis’ aggressive redistricting plan. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

On Feb. 11, DeSantis ratcheted up the pressure. He held a press conference reiterating his opposition to Lawson’s district. He vowed to veto any map that left it intact. But he still needed to win over Republican policymakers. Again, DeSantis’ top aides turned to Torchinsky.

In February, Torchinsky helped DeSantis’ staff pick out an expert witness to sell the governor’s vision to the legislature, according to emails provided to ProPublica by American Oversight. Once the group chose an expert, Torchinsky had a call with him in advance of his appearance.

With a deadline to prepare for the November midterms looming, the legislature moved toward compromise. In early March, it passed a new bill that was much closer to DeSantis’ version — but still kept a Democrat-leaning district with a large Black population in North Florida.

The governor’s attempts at persuasion were over.

On Mar. 28, Foltz and Kelly had another call, along with a partner at Torchinsky’s law firm. The next day, DeSantis vetoed the compromise plan.

Democrats were outraged; many Republicans were shocked. “A veto of a bill as significant as that was definitely surprising,” Gruters, the state senator and chair of the Florida GOP, told ProPublica.

Kelly soon submitted a slightly modified version of Foltz’s map to the legislature. This time, the legislature took DeSantis’ proposal and ran with it.

On Apr. 20, Rep. Thomas Leek, the Republican chair of the House redistricting committee, formally presented DeSantis’ plan before the general assembly. When his colleagues asked him who the governor’s staff consulted while drawing the map, Leek told them that he didn’t know.

“I can’t speak to the governor's entire process,” Leek said. “I can only tell you what Mr. Kelly said.”

Florida Rep. Thomas Leek during a Florida House of Representatives Redistricting Committee hearing on Jan. 13. (Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP)

The legislature had required everyone submitting a map to file a disclosure form listing the “name of every person(s), group(s), or organization(s) you collaborated with.” Kelly left the form blank.

The legislature voted on party lines and passed DeSantis’ proposal the next day. Anticipating litigation, they also allocated $1 million to defend the map in court.

Before DeSantis even signed the bill into law, a coalition of advocacy groups filed a lawsuit challenging the map in state court.

They soon scored a major victory. Circuit Court Judge J. Layne Smith, a DeSantis appointee, imposed a temporary injunction that would keep Lawson’s district intact through the midterm elections.

“This case is one of fundamental public importance, involving fundamental constitutional rights,” Smith wrote. His ruling cited the lengthy history of Black voter suppression in North Florida and across the state.

That victory was short-lived. Torchinsky’s firm quickly filed an appeal on DeSantis’ behalf. Then, in a unanimous decision in late May, the appellate court allowed DeSantis’ map to move ahead.

The higher court’s opinion was authored by Adam Tanenbaum, a familiar face in Tallahassee. Until DeSantis appointed him to the court in 2019, Tanenbaum was the Florida House’s general counsel, and before that he was general counsel to the Florida Department of State — both of which were parties to the case.

The very day Tanenbaum issued the opinion, he completed an application to fill a vacancy on the Florida Supreme Court, records show. In Florida, Supreme Court justices are appointed by the governor, in this case DeSantis.

Tanenbaum was not chosen for the position. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The broader case is still pending and is expected to eventually be decided by the state supreme court. Every justice on Florida’s supreme court was appointed by Republicans. The majority of them were chosen by DeSantis.

The deeply conservative body has already demonstrated its willingness to overturn precedent that’s only a few years old. DeSantis’ senior aides have indicated they hope it will do so here.

During his public testimony, Kelly was asked how Lawson’s district could be unconstitutional when it was recently created by Florida’s highest court.

Kelly responded tersely: “The court got it wrong.”

Help ProPublica Investigate Threats to U.S. Democracy

Do you know about how the redistricting industry is evolving nationwide or about partisan efforts to influence the process? Contact Josh Kaplan by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org or securely on Signal at 734-834-9383.

by Sebastian Rotella and Kirsten Berg

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

This is part two of an investigation into a revolutionary money laundering system involving Chinese organized crime, Latin American drug cartels and Chinese officials, and how a major figure in the scheme managed to meet former President Donald Trump. Read part one: "How a Chinese American Gangster Transformed Money Laundering for Drug Cartels.”

In July 2018, President Donald Trump met at his New Jersey golf club with a Chinese businessman who should have never gotten anywhere near the most powerful man in the world.

Tao Liu had recently rented a luxurious apartment in Trump Tower in New York and boasted of joining the exclusive Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

But Liu was also a fugitive from Chinese justice. Media reports published overseas three years before the meeting had described him as the mastermind of a conspiracy that defrauded thousands of investors. He had ties to Chinese and Latin American organized crime. Perhaps most worrisome, the FBI was monitoring him because of suspicions that he was working with Chinese spies on a covert operation to buy access to U.S. political figures.

Yet there he sat with Trump at a table covered with sandwiches and soft drinks, the tall windows behind them looking onto a green landscape.

A longtime Trump associate who accompanied Liu was vague about what was discussed, telling ProPublica that they talked about the golf club, among other things.

“He was a climber,” said the associate, Joseph Cinque. “He wanted to meet Trump. He wanted to meet high rollers, people of importance.”

Documented by photos and interviews, the previously unreported sit-down reveals the workings of a Chinese underworld where crime, business, politics and espionage blur together. It also raises new questions about whether the Trump administration weakened the government’s system for protecting the president against national security risks.

For years, Liu had caromed around the globe a step ahead of the law. He changed names, homes and scams the way most people change shoes. In Mexico, he befriended a Chinese American gangster named Xizhi Li, aiding Li’s rise as a top cartel money launderer, according to prosecution documents and interviews with former national security officials.

“I’ve been doing illegal business for over 10 years,” Liu said in a conversation recorded by the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2020. “Which country haven’t I done it in?”

Liu surfaced in the U.S. political scene after Trump took office. In early 2018, he launched a high-rolling quest for influence in New York. He courted political figures at gatherings fueled by Taittinger champagne and Macanudo cigars, at meals in Michelin-starred restaurants and in offices in Rockefeller Center. He may have made at least one illegal donation to the GOP, according to interviews.

By the summer, Liu had achieved his fervent goal of meeting Trump. Two months later, he met the president again at Bedminster.

On both occasions, Liu apparently found a loophole in a phalanx of defenses designed to protect the president. The Secret Service screens all presidential visitors on official business, subjecting foreigners to intense scrutiny. In addition to their top priority of detecting physical threats, agents check databases for people with ties to espionage or crime who could pose a risk to national security or a president’s reputation.

Asked about Liu’s encounters with the president, the Secret Service’s chief of communications, Anthony Guglielmi, said, “There were no protective or safety concerns associated with these dates. The Bedminster Club is a private facility, and you will have to refer to organizers when it comes to who may have been allowed access to their facilities.”

The Secret Service does not have a record of Liu meeting Trump on the president’s official schedule, a Secret Service official said. Instead, the encounters apparently occurred during periods when the president did not have official business, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. While staying at his clubs at Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster as president, Trump often left his living quarters to mingle with members and their guests in public areas. The Secret Service screened those people for weapons, but did not do background checks on them, current and former officials said.

“Did the Secret Service know every name involved?” the Secret Service official said. “No. Those are called ‘off-the-record movements,’ and we are worried about physical safety in those situations. We don’t have the time to do workups on everybody in that environment.”

As a member or a member’s guest, Liu could have entered the club without showing identification to the Secret Service and met with Trump, the official said. It appears, in short, that Liu avoided Secret Service background screening.

During both visits, Liu accompanied Cinque, with whom he had cultivated a friendship and explored business ventures. Cinque said that he and his guests had easy access to the president at Bedminster.

“I just go in every time I want,” Cinque said in an interview with ProPublica. “I’m with Donald 44 years. … The Secret Service, they trust me. Because I got a great relation with the Secret Service and I’m not gonna bring anybody bad next to Trump.”

But Cinque now regrets ever having met Liu.

“He’s a professional con man,” Cinque said. “There was a lot of flimflam with him. He conned me pretty good.”

Cinque has given conflicting accounts about the July 2018 meeting. In an interview with a Chinese media outlet that year, he said Liu had spent three hours with the president. Last week, though, he told ProPublica that he had exaggerated the length of the conversation and Liu’s role in it.

A spokesperson for Trump and officials at the Trump Organization and Bedminster club did not respond to requests for comment. The Chinese embassy also did not respond to a request for comment.

Liu’s case is one of several incidents in which Chinese nationals sought access to Trump in murky circumstances, raising concerns in Congress, law enforcement and the media about espionage and illegal campaign financing.

Liu did catch the attention of other federal agencies. His political activity in New York caused FBI counterintelligence agents to begin monitoring him in 2018, ProPublica has learned, before his encounters with Trump at Bedminster. His meetings with the president only heightened their interest, national security sources said.

Then, in early 2020, DEA agents came across Liu as they dismantled the global money laundering network of his friend Li. Reconstructing Liu’s trail, the DEA grew to suspect he was a kind of spy: an ostentatious criminal who made himself useful to Chinese intelligence agencies in exchange for protection.

The DEA agents thought Liu could answer big questions: What was he doing with the president? Was he conducting an operation on behalf of Chinese intelligence? And what did he know about the murky alliance between Chinese organized crime and the Chinese state?

But the DEA clashed with the FBI over strategy. And by the time DEA agents zeroed in on Liu, he had holed up in Hong Kong. The pandemic had shut down travel.

If the agents wanted to solve the walking mystery that was Tao Liu, they would have to figure out a way to go get him.

This account is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former national security officials based in the U.S. and overseas, as well as lawyers, associates of Liu and others. ProPublica also reviewed court documents, social media, press accounts and other sources. ProPublica granted anonymity to some sources because they did not have authorization to speak to the press or because of concerns about their safety and the sensitivity of the topic.

(For ProPublica) Prowling the World

Liu grew up in comfort and privilege.

Born in 1975 in Zhejiang province, he studied business in Shanghai and began prowling the world. He accumulated wealth and left behind a trail of dubious ventures, failed romances and children, according to court documents, associates and former national security officials. He lived in Poland and Hong Kong before moving in 2011 to Mexico City, where he dabbled in the gambling and entertainment fields.

Soon he met Li, the Chinese American money launderer, who also sold fraudulent identity documents. Liu bought fraudulent Guatemalan and Surinamese documents from Li and acquired a Mexican passport, according to prosecution documents and interviews. He played a crucial early role helping Li build his criminal empire, according to former investigators.

Both men had links to the 14K triad, a powerful Chinese criminal syndicate, according to former investigators and law enforcement documents. Moving between Mexico and Guatemala, they were on the vanguard of the Chinese takeover of the underworld that launders money for the cartels.

But in 2014, Liu embarked on a caper in China. He touted a cryptocurrency with an ex-convict, Du Ling, known as the “queen of underground banking,” according to interviews, media reports and Chinese court documents.

It was all a fraud, authorities said. Chinese courts convicted the banking queen and others on charges of swindling more than 34,000 investors from whom they raised over $200 million.

Stills from a promotional clip posted to the video-sharing site Tencent Video show Liu at his company’s lavish launch event in Hong Kong. There, Liu told investors about planned resorts in Fiji and the Americas, where guests would soon be able to spend cryptocurrency like “actual money.”

Although accused of being the mastermind, Liu eluded arrest, according to court documents, associates and other sources. He popped up in Fiji as a private company executive promising infrastructure projects inspired by President Xi Jinping’s visit months earlier to promote China’s development initiative, according to news reports and interviews. Liu even hosted a reception for the Chinese ambassador, according to news reports.

Liu’s activities in Fiji fit a pattern of Chinese criminals aligning themselves with China’s foreign development efforts for mutual benefit, national security veterans say. Liu claims corrupt Chinese officials were his partners in Fiji, “but then they threw him under the bus,” said his lawyer, Jonathan Simms.

Liu discussed development and tourism projects with Solomon Islands officials, including Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare (second from right). Those deals fell through after an alleged victim of Liu’s Chinese cryptocurrency scam sent emails to local embassies and media organizations calling for Liu’s arrest. (Solomon Islands Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet)

After allegations surfaced about his role in the cryptocurrency scandal in China, Liu fled to Australia. Airport police there downloaded his phone and found discussions about fraudulent passports from countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, according to Simms and other sources.

In 2016, Liu returned to Mexico. He soon obtained a U.S. business/tourist visa by making false statements to U.S. authorities about whether he was involved in crime, prosecution documents say.

Now known as Antony Liu, he was ready to make a name for himself.

Money and Politics

Yuxiang Min is an entrepreneur in Manhattan’s Chinatown. For years, he has nurtured a “Chinese American dream”: to prosper in the herbal medicine industry by planting 16,000 acres of licorice in a desert in China’s Gansu province.

After meeting Min in early 2018, Liu promised to make the dream a reality, Min said.

“He made me believe he was very well-connected in China,” Min said. “And I think he was. He showed me photos of himself with top Chinese officials.”

Min said one photo appeared to show Liu with Xi, China’s president, before he took office. Between 2002 and 2007, Xi served in senior government positions in two places where Liu had lived, Zhejiang and Shanghai. But Min said he did not have the photo, and ProPublica has not confirmed its existence.

Liu rented Chinatown offices from Min, who said he helped the wealthy newcomer buy a top-of-the-line BMW and find a translator. Despite his weak English, Liu was charismatic and persuasive, associates said. He bankrolled dinners, a concert, an outing on a yacht; he flaunted the flashy details on his social media. He founded Blue Ocean Capital, an investment firm that did little actual business, according to associates, former national security officials and court documents.

Liu posted dozens of images of his high-rolling lifestyle to social media, including these from Manhattan’s Club Macanudo (first image) and a gala at Oheka Castle, a mansion-turned-hotel on Long Island. The second image is a still from a video in which an unseen man calls Liu “China’s organized crime boss.” In response, Liu laughs.

He even gained access to the United Nations diplomatic community, sharing his office suite in Rockefeller Center with the Foundation for the Support of the United Nations. The foundation’s website says it is a nongovernmental organization founded in 1988 and that it is affiliated with the UN. A UN spokesperson confirmed that the foundation had “consultative status,” which gave its representatives entry to UN premises and activities.

Liu became a financial benefactor of the foundation and was named its “honorary vice chairman.” Through the foundation, he was able to organize a conference at UN headquarters with speakers including publishing executive Steve Forbes and former Mexican President Felipe Calderón, according to interviews, photos and media accounts.

(Photos of Liu with Steve Forbes (first image) and Felipe Calderón at the UN that Liu posted to Facebook)

The Bulgarian mission to the UN helped secure the venue for the event, and ambassadors from seven countries attended, according to online posts and interviews. The mission did not respond to a request for comment.

Although it is startling that someone with Liu’s background could play a role in hosting an event at the UN, it is not unprecedented. In past cases, wealthy Chinese nationals suspected of links to crime and Chinese intelligence have infiltrated UN-affiliated organizations as part of alleged bribery and influence operations.

Janet Salazar, the president of the foundation, did not respond to phone calls, texts or emails. Efforts to reach foundation board members were unsuccessful. Emails to Salazar and the foundation in New York bounced back.

UN officials did not respond to queries from ProPublica about what vetting Liu received, if any.

“We are not aware of the story of Mr. Tao Liu,” the UN spokesperson said.

Calderón said in an email that he was invited through a speakers bureau to give a talk on sustainable development. The event included Asian participants who did not appear to speak English, Calderón said, and he had little interaction with them other than posing for photos.

Forbes’ staff did not respond to requests for comment.

Liu also met U.S. political figures through his latest romantic partner: a Chinese immigrant with contacts of her own. She introduced him to Félix W. Ortiz, then the assistant speaker of the New York State Assembly, who socialized with the couple on several occasions.

Ortiz, a Democrat who formerly represented Brooklyn, did not respond to requests for comment.

Because Liu was not a legal resident, U.S. law barred him from contributing to political campaigns. But he attended political events, according to photos, social media and associates. He also met with two veteran GOP fundraisers in the Asian community, Daniel Lou and Jimmy Chue.

Photos Liu posted to social media show him spending time with Daniel Lou and Jimmy Chue. Both were with him at a diner after a Trump rally they all attended in fall 2018 (first image; Lou is on the far left, Chue is second from right next to Liu). Liu also shared a picture (second image) with Chue and Lt. Steven Rogers (center), then a Trump campaign advisory board member, at a Manhattan restaurant in spring 2019. Rogers did not respond to requests for comment.

“He was interested in political donations and fundraising,” Lou said in an interview. “He wanted to participate. He was willing to help politicians here. That’s for sure.”

Lou said he did not engage in fundraising with Liu. In an email, Chue said he knew of “no illegal activities” related to Liu. He declined to comment further.

On April 27, 2018, Liu’s friend Min contributed $5,000 to the New York Republican Federal Campaign Committee, campaign records show. In reality, Liu told Min to make the donation and paid him back, Min said in an interview.

Min said he received the money in cash and did not have evidence of the alleged reimbursement. But if his account is true, it appears that Liu funneled a political donation illegally through Min, a U.S. citizen.

Photos on Liu’s social media show him rubbing elbows with political figures. Among them (clockwise from top left): U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao; Assistant Speaker of the New York State Assembly Félix W. Ortiz; New York Mayor Bill de Blasio; and Chair of the New York Republican Party Edward F. Cox and Lara Trump. Ortiz gave Liu an award at Blue Ocean’s launch ceremony.

The New York GOP did not respond to emails, phone calls, or a fax seeking comment.

A Sit-Down With the President

As he built his profile in Manhattan, Liu made it clear to associates that he was eager to meet Trump. For help, he turned to Cinque, the longtime Trump associate, according to interviews, photos and social media posts.

Cinque, 86, heads the American Academy of Hospitality Sciences, which gives international awards to hotels, restaurants and other entities. It has given at least 22 awards to Trump ventures, including the Bedminster club, and it once billed Trump as its Ambassador Extraordinaire.

Cinque has a colorful past. In 1990, he pleaded guilty to receiving stolen property, a valuable art collection, according to press reports. A profile in New York Magazine in 1995 quoted him discussing his interactions with “wiseguys” and a shooting that left him with three bullet wounds.

In 2016, Trump told the Associated Press that he didn’t know Cinque well and was unaware of his criminal record. In an article in Buzzfeed, Cinque’s lawyer said his client had no connection to the mob.

Liu dined with Cinque in May 2018 and they hit it off, according to photos and Liu’s associates. Cinque said he could make an introduction to the president, a close associate of Liu said.

Cinque told ProPublica that people in the Chinese American community introduced him to Liu, describing him as a wealthy entrepreneur and a “good person.” Liu impressed Cinque with his luxury car and entrepreneurial energy. He said they could make a lot of money by pursuing a lucrative cryptocurrency venture, Cinque said.

Liu and Cinque got together more than a dozen times, according to social media photos and interviews. At a June gala at the Harvard Club to launch Liu’s company, Cinque gave him a Six Star Diamond Award for lifetime achievement — an award he had previously bestowed on Trump.

“He was gonna pay me big money for giving him the award,” Cinque said. “So I did an award. I didn’t check his background, I’m not gonna lie to you.”

Liu indicated he would pay as much as $50,000 for the honor, but he never actually paid up, Cinque said.

Liu with Cinque at a United Nations conference (first image) and at the Bedminster golf club.

Liu followed a familiar playbook for well-heeled foreigners seeking access to Trump, according to national security officials: pour money into his properties.

In July, Cinque helped Liu rent a one-bedroom apartment above the 50th floor in Trump Tower by providing a credit report to the landlord as a guarantor, according to Cinque, a person involved in the rental and documents viewed by ProPublica. Liu paid a year’s worth of the $6,000 monthly rent upfront. Cinque believes Liu chose Trump Tower in an effort to gain favor with the president.

Liu also told friends he joined the Bedminster golf club, three associates said. Liu told Min he paid $190,000 for a VIP membership, Min said.

But Cinque doesn’t think Liu genuinely became a member. In fact, he said he brought Liu to Bedminster partly because Cinque hoped to impress Trump by persuading his well-heeled new friend to join the club.

“I was trying to get him to join, where I look good in Trump’s eyes if he joined,” Cinque said. But he said Liu “never gave 5 cents. He was a deadbeat.”

On July 20, CNBC aired an interview with Trump in which he complained about the trade deficit with China.

“We have been ripped off by China for a long time,” Trump said.

By the next day, Liu’s efforts to gain access to the president had paid off. He met Trump at Bedminster, according to interviews and photos obtained by ProPublica.

Liu posted a video on Facebook of Trump arriving by helicopter at Bedminster (first image). The second image is a photo obtained by ProPublica of Liu and Cinque meeting with Trump.

The images show the president with Liu and Cinque at a table covered with food, drinks and papers. Three other men are at the table. Trump also posed for photos with Liu and Cinque.

Liu was discreet about the conversation, according to Min. Cinque did most of the talking because of Liu’s limited English, Liu’s close associate said.

ProPublica found a few details in an interview of Cinque by SINA Finance, a Chinese media outlet. In the video posted that September, Cinque and a manager of his company announced a business partnership with Liu involving blockchain technology and the hospitality industry. And then Cinque said he had introduced Liu to the president at Bedminster.

“Antony Liu played a big role,” Cinque told the SINA interviewer. “Donald met him, and he wound up staying with him for three hours, just enjoying every moment.”

The video displayed a photo of the president with Liu and Cinque during the visit.

Cinque and Liu’s companies posted a shorter version of the interview on their social media pages. That video omitted the reference to Liu meeting Trump and the photo of the three of them.

In the interview with ProPublica, Cinque gave a distinctly different version than the one he gave to the Chinese outlet. He said he brought Liu along because Liu implored him for the opportunity of a meeting and photo with Trump. Cinque also said he “exaggerated the truth” when he said Liu spent three hours with the president.

The meeting lasted “maybe twenty minutes, a half hour,” Cinque said.

Cinque was vague about the topic of the conversation with the president, indicating it had to do with the golf club and the awards he gives.

Changing his account once again, he insisted that Liu did not say much.

“He just sat there,” said Cinque, who also denied discussing Liu’s business deals with Trump. “How I could tell anything good to Donald about him where he’s gonna do a deal? First I wanted to see if I could earn anything with him.”

A still from Cinque’s interview with SINA Finance in which he says the two of them spent three hours with Trump at Bedminster. (SINA)

Liu and Cinque met the president again that Sept. 22 during an event at Bedminster, according to interviews and photos. One photo shows Trump smiling with Liu, Cinque and three men who, according to a close associate, were visiting Liu from China for the occasion.

The photos appeared on the Chinese website of the Long Innovations International Group, also known as the Longchuang International Group. The consulting firm owned by Lou, the GOP fundraiser, has organized events allowing Chinese elites to meet U.S. leaders. A caption with the photos said: “Longchuang Group and Blue Ocean expert consultant team Trump luncheon.”

But Lou insists he didn’t know anything about such an event. He said colleagues in China controlled his company’s Chinese website.

“I categorically deny I was involved in this,” Lou said. “I was not there. I did not know about it. Tao Liu did offer to me at one point: You are the pro-Trump leader in the community. How about organizing an event at Bedminster? ... But I did not.”

Cinque, meanwhile, said he brought Liu and his visitors to the club. He disagreed with the company website’s description of an event with the president.

“There’s no political — it’s a golf situation there,” he said. “And people love being in [Trump’s] company.”

Although Cinque denied receiving money from Liu for himself or the president, he said he didn’t know if other visitors paid Liu for the chance to meet Trump, or if Liu made campaign donations through others.

Liu met Trump again at Bedminster in September 2018. The photos appeared on the Chinese-language website of the Longchuang International Group.

Much about the two Bedminster meetings remains unclear. Did Liu arrange a political event for Trump in September? Or did he bring a group of visitors to the club and manage to encounter the president? Either scenario raises once again the question of vetting.

The Secret Service screens all official presidential visitors for weapons and, along with White House staff, checks them in law enforcement and intelligence databases. Foreign nationals require added scrutiny that can include reviewing raw intelligence from overseas. If questions arise, the Secret Service can consult with the FBI and other agencies, said a former acting undersecretary for intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security, John Cohen, who worked on presidential protection issues.

It is not clear if databases available to the Secret Service held information about the charges against Liu in China and his other alleged illicit activities. But by 2018, Chinese media reports and court documents had described the fraud case complete with photos of Liu. English-language press had also detailed his troubles in the South Pacific and China. Despite Liu’s use of different first names, a diligent web search could have found some of that information.

But Liu apparently avoided background screening altogether, according to Secret Service officials, Cinque and other sources. Although visitors cannot schedule an official meeting with the president without being vetted, it is possible that they could communicate through the private club to set up an informal meeting, Secret Service officials said. Cinque said he took Liu to Bedminster on days he knew Trump would be there.

The case is another example, national security veterans said, of unique vulnerabilities caused by the freewheeling atmosphere at Trump’s clubs.

“Trump has chosen to reside in places that are open to the public,” Cohen said. “He has provided an opportunity to people who join these clubs to get access to him. We have seen that the president enjoys making himself available to people in these settings. A top priority for foreign intelligence is that kind of setting: infiltrating, gaining access. If the former president decides to allow access to criminals and spies, there is not much the Secret Service can do.”

A week after the Bedminster visit, Liu accompanied the Chinese American GOP fundraisers to West Virginia to see Trump speak at a rally. Liu sat in the VIP section.

Liu attended a Trump rally and posted photos of it on Facebook. In the Fall

A year later, Liu’s American spree was in shambles.

His romantic partner had a child, but they broke up. Liu accumulated angry business associates, including Min, who says Liu owes him $83,000. Liu owed another $2 million in a legal settlement with an investor who sued him for fraud in New York over a cryptocurrency deal, according to court documents.

In the fall of 2019, Liu stopped paying rent at Trump Tower, according to associates and other sources. His family left behind a crib and a bronze statuette of Trump. Liu went to California and departed the country on foot via Tijuana, later saying he “snuck out” to travel with his Mexican passport, according to his associates, national security officials and court documents.

By early 2020, Liu was back in Hong Kong. He set himself up in a high-rise hotel with a waterfront view. Then the pandemic shut down the world.

Liu’s Instagram documented his life in Hong Kong in the summer of 2020.

Meanwhile, the DEA had filed charges against his friend Li. Agents scouring a trove of communications, photos and other data realized that Liu had been an important figure in Li’s criminal activity.

The agents believed that Liu could tell them more about the money laundering for Latin American drug cartels and the alleged alliance between Chinese organized crime and the Chinese state. And his U.S. political activity intrigued and baffled them. They suspected that he had been operating in a gray area where crime and espionage mix.

“The theory is he was gathering information and feeding it back to Chinese intelligence in order to keep him in good graces to allow him to do his criminality,” a former national security official said. “His currency was influence. And the Chinese would use him as necessary based on his influence. And he was a willing participant in that. The DEA thought it could use him to get at targets in mainland China.”

But the pandemic had prompted Hong Kong to close its borders, and the authorities there were generally obedient allies of Beijing.

The Special Operations Division of the DEA often goes overseas to capture desperados with elaborate undercover stings. In that tradition, the agents came up with a plan.

In April 2020, Liu received a phone call. The caller spoke Chinese. He said he was a money launderer in New York. He said he had gotten the number from Li, their mutual friend in Mexico, court documents say.

The name apparently did the trick.

“Tao is in his apartment on lockdown,” Simms said. “He can’t go anywhere. He’s bored, talkative. He just talks and talks.”

Liu talked about teaching Li the tricks of the money laundering trade, according to Simms and court documents. He reminisced about Li’s casino in Guatemala. He boasted about using five different passports to slip across borders.

Soon, his new phone friend made a proposal, court documents say. He knew a crooked State Department official with a precious commodity to sell: bona fide U.S. passports.

Agreeing to a price of $150,000 each, Liu requested passports for himself and associates, according to prosecution documents and former national security officials. One of the associates was linked to the 14K triad, the former national security officials said.

By July, Liu had wired a total of $10,000 in advance payments. He received a realistic mock-up of his passport. He showed it off during a video call to Min.

“I’ll be back in America soon,” Liu exulted, according to Min.

In reality, the phone friend was an undercover DEA agent. Liu had taken the bait. DEA agents recorded their phone conversations over six months, court documents say.

(For ProPublica)

But a complication arose. The DEA learned that the FBI was conducting a separate investigation of Liu, national security sources told ProPublica.

FBI counterintelligence agents in New York became aware of him soon after he began spreading money around and cultivating political contacts in early 2018, national security sources said. Then his contact with Trump spurred an investigation to determine if Chinese intelligence was working with Liu to gain political access, the sources said.

His years as a fugitive gave credence to that idea. Although Chinese authorities had been pursuing him in relation to the cryptocurrency scandal since 2015, China did not issue an Interpol notice for him until 2020. Chinese authorities apparently made little effort to arrest him while he sheltered in Hong Kong for nearly a year.

The DEA and the FBI clashed over the imperatives of counterintelligence and law enforcement. FBI agents wanted to keep monitoring Liu to trace his contacts; DEA agents favored capturing him.

The DEA prevailed. That October, the undercover agent told Liu he had arranged for a private jet to pick him up in Hong Kong, according to court documents and former national security officials. It would take him to Australia, where they would seal the passport deal in person. Agents sent Liu a menu for the flight complete with a choice of cocktail. He thought that was “very high class,” his close associate said.

The stakes were high too. If Chinese authorities learned of the clandestine foray, a diplomatic uproar was likely.

On Oct. 13, the weather was warm and rainy. The DEA’s private jet landed in Hong Kong. Liu came aboard without hesitation, according to an associate and former national security officials.

Hours later, the plane touched down in Guam, which is a U.S. territory. DEA agents arrested Liu.

“He was surprised,” the close associate said. “So many police cars. He said it was like a 007 movie.”

Epilogue

On April 14 of last year, Liu pleaded guilty in a federal courtroom in Virginia to conspiracy to bribe a U.S. official in the passport sting and to conspiracy to commit money laundering. A judge sentenced him to seven years in prison.

Tao Liu (Alexandria (Virginia) Sheriff’s Office)

But two explosive questions remain unanswered: why he had contact with Trump and other politicians, and whether he worked with Chinese spy agencies.

The government has kept most of the story secret. Liu’s public court file does not mention his political activity. The DEA and Justice Department declined to discuss Liu with ProPublica. An FBI spokesperson said the agency could not confirm or deny conducting specific investigations.

Liu, meanwhile, accepted an interview request. But the Bureau of Prisons refused to allow ProPublica to talk to him in person or by phone, citing “safety and security reasons.”

The FBI investigation of Liu apparently focused on political and counterintelligence matters. Last year, agents questioned Min and at least two other associates of Liu. The agents asked Min about Liu’s interactions with Cinque and former Assemblyman Ortiz, and if Liu gave them money. Min said he told the agents he did not know.

In an interview with the close associate of Liu, FBI agents asked about Liu’s contact with Trump, whether he raised money for Trump and Ortiz, his relationship with Cinque, and his contacts with politicians in China. They also asked about money laundering in Mexico, the close associate said.

“I think the FBI thought he was a spy,” the close associate said. “I don’t think he’s a spy. His English is very bad. He just wanted to show off to Chinese people. This is the way a lot of Chinese business guys operate. A lot of American business guys, too. Getting close to politicians, taking photos with them.”

Cinque said federal agents have not questioned him about Liu.

“I just think he was a fraudulent hustler,” Cinque said. “I don’t think he would do anything against the country, but then I could be wrong. Look, he did a lot of things.”

As often happens in counterintelligence cases, Liu remains an ambiguous figure: a con man, or a spy, or possibly both. People familiar with the case are suspicious about his ability to roam the world for years and his success at infiltrating high-level U.S. politics.

“Guys like this never do this kind of thing on their own,” a national security source said. “They always do it for someone else.”

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

Jeff Kao and Cezary Podkul contributed reporting.

by Sebastian Rotella and Kirsten Berg

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

This is part one of an investigation into a revolutionary money laundering system involving Chinese organized crime, Latin American drug cartels and Chinese officials, and how one major figure in the scheme managed to meet former President Donald Trump. Read part two: “The Globetrotting Con Man and Suspected Spy Who Met With President Trump.”

In 2017, Drug Enforcement Administration agents following the money from cocaine deals in Memphis, Tennessee, identified a mysterious figure in Mexico entrusted by drug lords with their millions: a Chinese American gangster named Xizhi Li.

As the agents tracked Li’s activity across the Americas and Asia, they realized he wasn’t just another money launderer. He was a pioneer. Operating with the acumen of a financier and the tradecraft of a spy, he had helped devise an innovative system that revolutionized the drug underworld and fortified the cartels.

Li hit on a better way to address a problem that has long bedeviled the world’s drug lords: how to turn the mountains of grimy twenties and hundreds amassed on U.S. streets into legitimate fortunes they can spend on yachts, mansions, weapons, technology and bribes to police and politicians.

For years, the Mexican cartels that supply the U.S. market with cocaine, heroin and fentanyl smuggled truckloads of bulk cash to Mexico, where they used banks and exchange houses to move the money into the financial system. And they also hired middlemen — often Colombian or Lebanese specialists who charged as much as 18 cents on the dollar — to launder their billions.

Those methods were costly, took weeks or even months to complete and exposed the stockpiled cash to risks — damage, robbery, confiscation.

Enter Li. About six years ago, federal antidrug agents in Chicago saw early signs of what would become a tectonic change. They trailed cartel operatives transporting drug cash to a new destination: Chinatown, an immigrant enclave in the flatlands about 2 miles south of the city’s rampart of lakefront skyscrapers.

Agents on stakeout watched as cartel operatives delivered suitcases full of cash to Chinese couriers directed by Li. Furtive exchanges took place in motels and parking lots. The couriers didn’t have criminal records or carry guns; they were students, waiters, drivers. Neither side spoke much English, so they used a prearranged signal: a photo of a serial number on a dollar bill.

After the handoff, the couriers alerted their Chinese bosses in Mexico, who quickly sent pesos to the bank accounts or safe houses of Mexican drug lords. Li then executed a chain of transactions through China, the United States and Latin America to launder the dollars. His powerful international connections made his service cheap, fast and efficient; he even guaranteed free replacement of cartel cash lost in transit. Li and his fellow Chinese money launderers married market forces: drug lords wanting to get rid of dollars and a Chinese elite desperate to acquire dollars. The new model blew away the competition.

“At no time in the history of organized crime is there an example where a revenue stream has been taken over like this, and without a shot being fired,” said retired DEA agent Thomas Cindric, a veteran of the elite Special Operations Division. “This has enriched the Mexican cartels beyond their wildest dreams.”

As they investigated Li’s tangled financial dealings, U.S. agents came across evidence indicating that his money laundering schemes involved Chinese government officials and the Communist Party elite. China’s omnipresent security forces tightly control and monitor its state-run economy. Yet Li and others moved tens of millions of dollars among Chinese banks and companies with seeming impunity, according to court documents and national security officials. The criminal rings exploited a landscape in which more than $3.8 trillion of capital has left China since 2006, making the country the world’s top “exporter of hot money,” said John Cassara, a former U.S. Treasury Department investigator, in testimony to a Canadian commission of inquiry.

Adm. Craig Faller, a senior U.S. military leader, told Congress last year that Chinese launderers had emerged as the “No. 1 underwriter” of drug trafficking in the Western Hemisphere. The Chinese government is “at least tacitly supporting” the laundering activity, testified Faller, who led the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees military activity in Latin America.

In an interview with ProPublica, the now-retired Faller elaborated on his little-noticed testimony. He said China has “the world’s largest and most sophisticated state security apparatus. So there’s no doubt that they have the ability to stop things if they want to. They don’t have any desire to stop this. There’s a lot of theories as to why they don’t. But it is certainly aided and abetted by the attitude and way that the People’s Republic of China views the globe.”

Some U.S. officials go further, arguing that Chinese authorities have decided as a matter of policy to foster the drug trade in the Americas in order to destabilize the region and spread corruption, addiction and death here.

“We suspected a Chinese ideological and strategic motivation behind the drug and money activity,” said former senior FBI official Frank Montoya Jr., who served as a top counterintelligence official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “To fan the flames of hate and division. The Chinese have seen the advantages of the drug trade. If fentanyl helps them and hurts this country, why not?”

More than half a dozen national security veterans interviewed by ProPublica expressed similar views, most of them speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive subject. But they acknowledged that the alleged state complicity is difficult to prove.

Beijing rejects such accusations. And the question of whether China actively supports money laundering and the flow of fentanyl and other drugs to the U.S. remains a matter of debate in the U.S. national security community.

“There is so much corruption today in mainland China it becomes hard to distinguish a policy or campaign from generalized criminality,” said an Asian American former intelligence official with long experience on Chinese crime and espionage.

The Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to a detailed request for comment for this story.

The takeover of drug-related money laundering by Chinese organized crime has drawn global attention. In Australia, authorities are investigating a Chinese syndicate that allegedly moved hundreds of millions of dollars around the world for clients, including a cousin of Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to news reports. (Xi’s cousin has not been charged with a crime, and the Chinese foreign ministry has dismissed reports about inquiries into his activities as “gossip.”)

Europol has warned that Chinese money laundering groups “present a growing threat to Europe.” The U.S. State Department estimates that $154 billion in illicit funds a year passes through China, calling it “of great concern.”

“We used to have a regular dialogue with the Chinese specifically on things like money laundering, counternarcotics policies,” Assistant Secretary Todd Robinson, who leads the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, said in an interview. “And since that has stopped, it has not been clear, we’ve not really been able to get a handle on how much of this is criminal organizations and how much of it is criminal organizations connected to or suborning Chinese government officials.”

Xi has led a well-publicized crusade against corruption, but it has been mainly a purge of rivals, according to U.S. national security officials and Chinese dissidents. In fact, they said, Chinese intelligence services have quietly expanded their ties with Chinese mafias, known as triads, for mutual benefit.

“There is no question there is interconnectivity between Chinese organized crime and the Chinese state,” said Montoya. “The party operates in organized crime-type fashion. There are parallels to Russia, where organized crime has been co-opted by the Russian government and Putin’s security services.”

The Li case led federal agents in an unexpected direction: an investigation of a possible Chinese covert operation to penetrate American politics. The DEA agents stumbled across Li’s enigmatic associate, an expatriate Chinese businessman named Tao Liu. After moving from Mexico to New York, he launched a high-rolling quest for political influence that included at least two meetings with President Donald Trump.

Xizhi Li’s associate, Tao Liu (right), met twice with President Donald Trump in 2018.

Both the DEA and FBI pursued Liu, suspecting he had ties to Chinese spy agencies. They wanted to know how and why a wanted Chinese criminal had gained access to the president of the United States.

Although authorities convicted Li and Liu of money laundering and other crimes, the political and diplomatic aspects of the groundbreaking investigations of them are still largely secret. Citing open investigations, the DEA declined to discuss the case or even the general issue of how Chinese organized crime launders profits for the cartels. The Justice Department and FBI declined requests for comment. Lawyers who represented Li rejected requests for interviews with them or their client.

To explore the full dimensions of the case, ProPublica interviewed more than two dozen current and former national security officials, as well as lawyers and others involved. ProPublica granted some of them anonymity, either because they were not authorized to talk publicly or because of concerns about their security. ProPublica also reviewed court files, social media, governmental reports and other material. Many details — about the suspected role of Chinese officials, the hunt across the globe, the links to U.S. politics — are being reported for the first time.

The Aura of Juan Lee

In 2008, Rigo Polanco met a cocaine trafficker who called himself Juan Lee. It was one of 17 aliases that Xizhi Li accumulated in a criminal career that was just getting started.

Polanco, a California anti-drug agent, had spent weeks undercover stalking Li, who was looking for a high-volume supplier. But the guy was a ghost. He used multiple phones. He hid behind intermediaries. Finally, he agreed to meet Polanco at a Denny’s by the Pomona Freeway in the suburban sprawl of the San Gabriel Valley.

(For ProPublica)

On June 24, Polanco’s Los Angeles County task force deployed surveillance around the diner. Polanco introduced himself as Alfredo, a corrupt Customs and Border Protection officer with access to cocaine. He sat down with Li, Li’s 25-year-old Mexican American wife and her brother.

At 35, Li stood 5-foot-7 and weighed about 135 pounds. But he was imposing. He spoke fluent, Mexican-accented Spanish, wore a Rolex and emanated menace.

“The aura of Juan Lee among the people around him was, ‘Don’t cross this guy,’” Polanco recalled in an interview. “There was some sense of fear of him among his associates.”

Li grew up in a unique subculture where crime spoke many languages and crossed borders with ease. The experience served him well.

He was born in a rural area of Guangdong province in 1973. About 10 years later, the family migrated to Mexicali, a Mexican city on the California border that is home to a large Chinese community. Chinese restaurants fill La Chinesca, the Chinatown. In the early 20th century, an underground tunnel complex was a refuge from the desert heat — and a site for gambling and cross-border crime schemes.

Li attended school and worked long shifts in a family restaurant. But one of his close relatives smuggled migrants and contraband into the United States, former investigators say. When Li was about 16, his family migrated to Southern California. He slid into crime in the 1990s and with help from relatives became an associate of the 14K triad, a Chinese criminal organization, according to law enforcement documents and former investigators.

Li obtained U.S. citizenship and had four children with a Chinese-born woman. In 2005, he opened the Lucky City Restaurant in the suburb of Monterey Park in Los Angeles County. The restaurant quickly became a den of drug trafficking and human smuggling, according to an affidavit written by a DEA investigator and sources familiar with the case.

By then, Li’s triad and family connections had helped him cultivate relationships with Chinese officials with diplomatic status in the United States, according to former investigators. He also recruited a corrupt U.S. border inspector to help with smuggling, according to law enforcement documents and former investigators.

Li’s hectic life bridged the Latino and Asian communities. He had two children with his Mexican American wife, whose family had useful cartel connections, according to interviews and court documents.

At the same time, Li maintained ties to his birthplace. Around 2007, he took Chinese relatives to Guangdong for the Qingming Festival, when families clean the tombs of their ancestors. Basking in the role of benevolent immigrant, he “funded the renovation of our village, transforming the muddy land into streets,” his sister wrote to a federal judge years later.

Back in the smoggy San Gabriel Valley, his prolific criminal activity drew investigations by the DEA and FBI. But Polanco’s team of Los Angeles County officers didn’t know about those open cases when they went after him in 2008.

During a second meeting at a seafood restaurant, Li told Polanco that he was smuggling 30-kilogram loads of cocaine through Mexico to Hong Kong, making $60,000 a kilogram. He also sent cocaine to Canada. And he had a sideline smuggling Chinese migrants through Cuba.

(For ProPublica)

This is no run-of-the-mill thug, Polanco thought. Mexico was violent. Cuba was a police state. Canada and Hong Kong were hotbeds of Chinese organized crime. You needed well-placed allies to navigate among those cultures and countries.

“It all added up to this picture of a very shrewd and cautious and sophisticated operator,” Polanco said. “There was a lot of sophistication in what he was doing, even then.”

After negotiations with the undercover agent, Li agreed to buy an initial 20 kilograms of cocaine. On July 14, he sent a young Asian man in a Mercedes to a supermarket parking lot to deliver $200,000. Polanco’s team captured the bagman and other accomplices. The bagman and Li’s brother-in-law pleaded guilty to drug trafficking offenses, while charges against the wife were dropped.

But Li fled south across the border. He soon proved Polanco’s instincts correct.

Chinaloa

In Mexico City, Li rebounded fast.

Qiyun Chen was from his hometown and worked in her family’s retail business. Only in her early 20s, she became his romantic and criminal partner, according to court documents and former investigators. Her charm and intelligence impressed gangsters and cops alike. (Chen could not be reached for comment.)

Chen introduced Li to her own network in the Chinese Mexican community, including a formidable trafficker known as the Iron Lady. In her online communications, Chen called herself Chinaloa. The alias fused the words China and Sinaloa, the state that has spawned many drug lords. It baptized her as a player in a multilingual subculture that she and Li created. Their text messages combined Chinese and Spanish. Li used the online handles JL 007 and Organización Diplomática (Diplomatic Organization).

The couple divided their time among luxurious homes in Mexico City, Cancun and Guatemala, making good money smuggling drugs and migrants. But they saw a new opportunity in money laundering.

(For ProPublica)

In 2011, Li went to Guatemala City to buy a casino. Located in a Holiday Inn, it had a ’90s-era decor that didn’t exactly conjure images of James Bond in Monte Carlo.

Nonetheless, Li struck an all-inclusive deal with the owner. He bought his casino, his casino license — and his identity. The U.S. fugitive became a Guatemalan gambling entrepreneur, according to court documents.

Along the way, Li had developed a complementary racket: selling fraudulent documents. Li himself had five passports from three countries. The fake papers were professionally done. Li infiltrated corrupt Latin American bureaucracies that sell real passports, identity cards, even birth certificates. He also had a government-connected source for passports in Hong Kong. Li charged about $15,000 per document, according to interviews and court files.

The same year Li bought the casino, a cafe owner in Mexico City introduced him to a wealthy Chinese expatriate who wanted a Guatemalan passport. The new arrival was a portly, baggy-faced 35-year-old named Tao Liu. It proved a providential encounter.

Li took his client in a private helicopter to the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas. They landed in the jungle and trudged across the border into Guatemala.

(For ProPublica)

“Bodyguards with weapons and vehicles were waiting on the other side,” said Liu’s lawyer, Jonathan Simms. “They take them to Li’s mansion in Guatemala. Li leaves him there and goes to get the passports. Tao spent time in that mansion waiting with other Chinese clients for Li to bring back the documents. He got to know the other people there pretty well.”

While at the safe house, Liu met a senior Chinese military officer who also bought a fraudulent document from Li, Simms said. Years later, Liu identified the officer in a photo shown to him by U.S. agents.

Investigators say that episode contributed to evidence that Li provided fake papers, and other criminal services, to Chinese officials in Latin America, where China is an economic and diplomatic power. Foreign passports and multiple identities enable Chinese operatives overseas to engage in covert activity, launder money or take refuge from their government if accused of corruption.

The national security threat posed by Li’s passport racket later caused the DEA to bring in the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service to conduct its own investigation, which continues today.

After the Guatemala expedition, Liu and Li became friends. They gambled at the casino and took women to the Bahamas. Although Liu had access to money and power, he was also an admitted brazen lawbreaker. Sometimes his dubious immigration status forced him to enter Mexico by car or bus, and he bragged about bluffing or bribing border officers, according to court documents, his lawyer and law enforcement officials.

The two men did not seem like kindred spirits. Li was thin; Liu was obese. Li was reserved; Liu was gregarious. It is hard to find photos of Li; Liu bombarded social media with scenes of his extravagant lifestyle.

But they were both globetrotting outlaws. And Liu played a crucial early role in building Li’s empire, according to current and former law enforcement officials and other sources. A U.S. indictment later alleged: “TAO [Liu] worked with LI to begin money laundering in locations including Mexico and Guatemala.”

In later conversations recorded by the DEA, Liu described himself as an influential mentor who taught Li how to launder money, according to court documents and interviews. Liu’s lawyer argued that his client’s admissions were exaggerations. But the investigators tended to believe Liu’s account.

“The DEA thought that they were partners in the money laundering,” a former national security official said. “And they were definitely working closely together.”

Investigators believe Liu used his connections in China and the diaspora to recruit rich people who needed U.S. dollars. A sign of Liu’s access to that underworld: he had another associate in Hong Kong, known as “the queen of underground banking,” who provided black market money services to the Chinese elite, according to Chinese court documents and press reports.

Stocked with cash and guns, Li’s Guatemalan casino became a base of his emerging venture. He started bringing Chinese nationals to the casino: some of them politically connected, others corrupt officials, others expatriates, according to interviews and court documents. They mingled with Latin American drug traffickers, the second essential element in his scheme. The casino was a showcase to demonstrate to both sides that Li could deliver, court documents say.

The wealthy Chinese “had a need,” Simms said. “The cartels had a need. Li put it together.”

(For ProPublica) Mirror Transactions

Many ethnic diasporas have developed informal systems for moving money and funneling cash — earned honestly or illegally — into the legitimate international economy.

For decades, underground banking systems served the elite of the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, especially after the totalitarian regime opened its command economy to global capitalism. Starting around 2013, Xi’s anti-corruption crusade pushed the elite to spirit more money overseas. A yearly limit of $50,000 on capital flight increased a demand for U.S. dollars.

“The underground banking system in China was pretty much self-sufficient just dealing with Chinese criminal organizations and the Chinese diaspora,” said John Tobon, the Homeland Security Investigations special agent in charge in Honolulu, who has written on the topic. “And it was then when all of these restrictions came in, when the CCP members could no longer count on doing it the easy way ... that the supply of dollars became an issue.”

Li and other enterprising criminals identified a seemingly limitless source of dollars: the Latin American drug trade. To amass the cash, Li offered the cartels unheard-of money laundering deals.

“With the Colombians, it had been an 18% to 13% commission,” said Cindric, the retired DEA agent. “The Chinese are doing it for 1 to 2% on average. And the speed at which they do it is unbelievable. The Chinese absorbed the risk. You know it will get paid.”

Li deployed dozens of couriers from Los Angeles to Atlanta. Just two couriers in Chicago picked up more than $10 million from cartel operatives in a seven-month period between 2016 and 2017, according to law enforcement documents.

“We saw the Chinese enter the market,” said Daniel Morro, a former senior HSI official in Chicago. “It was super-intriguing. We had never seen it before.”

If the couriers delivered, they collected a 1% fee. If not, they were on the hook with Li.

On March 11, 2016, Nebraska state troopers stopped a rental car on a desolate highway. They confiscated $340,000 and released the two couriers, who were driving from Chicago to Los Angeles. A courier called Li, who called a cartel representative in Mexico and sent a bank transfer to replace the lost load. The courier and his relatives rapidly reimbursed Li by depositing money in U.S. bank accounts, court documents say.

“He was a hard-ass,” said Michael Ciesliga, a former DEA investigator. “No nonsense. All business. Very strict, very hard even on his family.”

Li’s system generally worked like this: Cartel operatives in the United States would arrange a “contract” with him, often to launder about $350,000, a quantity of cash that fit into a suitcase.

Cartel transporters handed over the dollar loads to Li’s couriers, who sent Li or his lieutenants a photo confirming the handoff. Li then delivered the sums in Mexican pesos to drug lords from safe houses in Mexico stocked with that currency. The first stage, providing swift service to the cartels, was complete.

Li’s profits came from other players in the scheme: rich Chinese willing to lose money in order to obtain dollars outside China and Latin American import/export firms needing Chinese currency to do business in China.

Li’s couriers often drove loads of cash to New York or Los Angeles, which have large Chinese immigrant populations. Li “sold” the currency to wealthy Chinese clients or their expatriate relatives or representatives. As part of the deal, Li himself would sometimes turn the dollars into deposits in bank accounts or use front companies to issue cashier’s checks.

But the Chinese clients often had their own options, such as small businesses that handled cash without questions. Another method was gambling at casinos, which readily turned cash into chips. Many clients bought homes or paid U.S. university tuition.

In testimony to a Canadian commission of inquiry in 2020, Cassara, the former investigator at the U.S. Treasury Department, described the frequency of laundering in the U.S. real estate sector.

“Almost 60% of purchases by international clients are made in cash,” Cassara said, citing a report by the National Association of Realtors. “Chinese buyers have been the top foreign buyers in the United States both in units and dollar volume of residential housing for six years straight. ... In the United States, there is little if any customer due diligence by real estate agents.”

The next step in Li’s system took place beyond the sight and reach of U.S. authorities. He directed his wealthy clients to transfer equivalent sums from their Chinese bank accounts to accounts he controlled in China. Known as “mirror transactions,” these transfers enabled Li to “sell” the same money again — this time, as Chinese currency to the Latin American exporters.

How Xizhi Li Used “Mirror Transactions” to Launder Millions of Dollars Across the World

The transactions allowed Li to move millions among Mexico, the United States and China while evading law enforcement and charging steep commissions.

I. The Cartel

A Mexican cartel operative hands over $350,000 in cash to a courier working for Li on the streets of a U.S. city. The exchanges often take place in parking lots, motels and shops.

Li’s organization in Mexico delivers an equivalent sum in pesos to the cartel within a day and Li takes a 2% commission. The process is much faster and cheaper than traditional money laundering methods. Now that the dollars have been converted into pesos, it’s easier for Mexican drug lords to use the cash.

II. The Wealthy Chinese

Wealthy Chinese who want to get around limits on moving money out of China “buy” the $350,000 from Li’s couriers in the U.S. They often use the U.S. dollars to buy real estate or pay for U.S. college tuition.

The wealthy Chinese complete the trade by transferring $350,000 in Chinese currency from their bank account in China to a bank account controlled by Li in China. They pay Li a commission of 10% or more.

III. The Foreign Company

Li sells the $350,000 in Chinese currency to a foreign company, often Mexican, that needs Chinese currency to buy goods in China.

The company pays Li in U.S. dollars or Mexican pesos, plus a fee. This makes it easier to evade customs duties and taxes on goods shipped to Mexico, because the company obtained the Chinese currency on the black market. Now the drug money has been introduced into the legal economy in three different countries.

(Graphic by Lucas Waldron, ProPublica)

There were variations on the system. Li sometimes washed funds through companies owned by confederates in the United States and Latin America who sold seafood and other goods to China. Taking advantage of the $80 billion in trade between Mexico and China, launderers also sent goods from China to Mexican front companies connected to drug lords. Those companies would sell the products for pesos, creating a legitimate paper trail for money initially earned from the sale of drugs.

Li’s network used Chinese banks including the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Agricultural Bank of China, court documents say. Those state institutions were among the banks that moved millions around the world with little apparent scrutiny in this case and others, according to court documents and interviews. Prosecutors did not accuse any bankers of wrongdoing. But investigators suspect that some bankers looked the other way. (The banks did not respond to requests for comment.)

“They had to know it was illegal,” Ciesliga said. “Just the sheer amount of money, and the volume and consistency and frequency, there’s no legitimate businesses that are moving that kind of money. Any alert anti-money laundering investigator would have detected this kind of activity.”

In other cases, authorities have sanctioned Chinese banks for offenses related to money laundering. In 2016, New York state regulators fined the Agricultural Bank of China $215 million for anti-money laundering violations. A Spanish court in 2020 convicted four Madrid executives of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China of a brazen setup in which they received tens of millions of euros in cash day and night, and moved the funds illegally back to China. The Bank of China has paid fines and endured criminal penalties in Italy and France for the alleged illegal repatriation of proceeds from tax evasion and customs fraud.

On the streets of the Americas, turf wars and rip-offs were rare among the money laundering crews. But for Li, reality intruded eventually.

In 2016, gunmen ambushed Li near his casino in Guatemala City, shredding his armored Range Rover with more than 20 rounds. He survived unscathed. The attackers got away. Li suspected rival Asian gangsters, according to former investigators and others familiar with the case.

He was deep in treacherous territory.

(For ProPublica) The Streets of Memphis

By 2017, Li’s empire had grown to span four continents. It operated below the radar, with startling impunity. A Memphis-based U.S. drug agent was about to change that.

Peter Maher was a sharp, voracious investigator who had only been with the DEA a few years, colleagues say. (Maher declined an interview request.) He teamed up with Ciesliga, a Tennessee state agent assigned to a federal task force. As they traced drugs on the streets of Memphis back to their source, they discovered that the Sinaloa cartel of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was supplying cocaine to a major Memphis drug crew. Markings on cocaine packets pointed at Marisela Flores-Torruco, now 52, a Mexican drug lord known as the Iron Lady.

Maher’s team learned that, because Flores had a Chinese grandparent, her organization was known as “Los Chinos,” or the Chinese. Based in Chiapas, she imported tons of cocaine from Colombia for the Sinaloa cartel, interviews and court documents say. (Flores could not be reached for comment.)

Soon, the agents identified a woman in Mexico who was one of the Iron Lady’s “principal coordinators of illicit money laundering operations,” court documents say.

It was Chen, Li’s paramour, using the handle Chinaloa. The DEA Special Operations Division, which specializes in international cases, began intercepting her communications, according to court documents and interviews. The agents figured out that Chen had introduced Li to Flores, who encouraged other traffickers to launder their money with his organization.

Chen’s communications led the DEA to Li, who was laundering for the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels. Tracking his U.S. couriers, agents picked off loads across the country.

In May 2017, agents arrested one of Li’s trusted money managers, a Brooklyn-based mail carrier and Chinese immigrant who had lived in Belize. He recorded about $2 million in illicit transactions in a ledger and sometimes received cash deliveries in his U.S. postal uniform, court documents say. The mail carrier pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder money and got a 60-month sentence.

(For ProPublica)

The Memphis agents toggled between leads in the U.S. and Mexico as the Iron Lady’s ferocity kept them on alert. When Flores ordered her enforcers to kidnap the family of a man who owed her money, the agents warned Mexican counterparts. Later, she threatened to kill rivals with a bombing at a racetrack, Ciesliga said. DEA agents hurriedly obtained an Interpol warrant, and police arrested Flores in Colombia in July 2017.

Later that month, the agents captured Chen during a visit to Los Angeles. They seized five phones from her, along with airline tickets to visit accomplices in Portland, Oregon, who oversaw more than 251 Chinese bank accounts, according to interviews and court documents.

The next morning, Maher and Ciesliga drove to the Santa Monica Pier. Sitting in their rental car by the Pacific, they scoured Chen’s phones. They hurriedly took screenshots, worried that an accomplice could remotely erase the contents at any moment.

Looking at Chen’s smartphones, the agents were able for the first time to read the suspects’ most sensitive conversations on WeChat, an application for messaging and commerce. WeChat is ubiquitous in China and the Chinese diaspora and impenetrable to U.S. law enforcement. Because it uses a form of partial encryption allowing the company access to content, WeChat is closely monitored by the Chinese state, according to U.S. national security veterans.

U.S. officials view the brazen use of WeChat for money laundering as another suggestive piece of evidence that authorities in Beijing know what is going on.

“It is all happening on WeChat,” Cindric said. “The Chinese government is clearly aware of it. The launderers are not concealing themselves on WeChat.”

Chen’s arrest was a devastating blow to Li. Agents mapped out the structure of his organization and sifted through a global labyrinth of transactions.

“It made us realize how big Li really was,” Ciesliga said. “He was definitely one of the first. We were talking to 40 different agents around the country and around the world, and for them it was a new thing what he was doing.”

The Fall of the Boss

The investigation gathered momentum as the DEA launched Project Sleeping Giant, a campaign against China-connected drug activity.

The agents dug through phone data and old cases to find Li’s ties to the 14K triad. That all-important discovery helped explain his “sprawling spider web of connections” in Asia and the Americas, Ciesliga said.

The 14K connection also pointed at the Chinese power structure. The triad’s former boss in Macao, Wan Kuok Koi, allegedly mixes crime, business and politics to advance China’s interests overseas, according to public allegations by the U.S. government. He is an influential member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference of the Communist Party, according to Treasury Department anti-corruption sanctions filed in 2020. A former senior State Department official, David Asher, described him as “an ambassador of organized crime.”

Wan and a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson have denied the U.S. allegations.

(For ProPublica)

The alleged state-underworld alliance surfaces elsewhere. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, triads attack political rivals of Beijing. Canadian national security chiefs have warned for years about an alliance of Chinese spies, triads and oligarchs. U.S. gangsters assist the Communist Party’s overseas intelligence and influence arm, the United Front, according to national security experts.

The party “uses organized crime-linked money laundering networks to get money to United Front actors and to help them fund their activities,” said Matthew Pottinger, who served as U.S. deputy national security adviser from 2019 to 2021. In return, triads gain “a sense of political security,” he said.

In the Li case, agents learned that clients for his money-moving services included powerful figures in the party, the Chinese government and the diaspora, according to Ciesliga and other former law enforcement officials and people familiar with the case. But it was hard to gather evidence because, as prosecutors said in a court filing, “United States law enforcement rarely, if ever, obtains assistance from Chinese officials in criminal investigations.”

Chinese authorities permit criminals like Li to operate because dark money benefits the elite, strengthens China’s economy and weakens the West, U.S. national security officials say.

“There is a strategy; it’s not individuals acting on their own,” Tobon, the Honolulu HSI chief, said. “The amount of money coming out of China via the underground banking system is so significant that it would be virtually impossible for a government that has as much control of their people as the government of China to not be aware of how it's happening.”

Some critics of Beijing say that analysis applies to another threat: fentanyl. China is the top producer of the lethal drug that has killed tens of thousands of Americans. Although pressure by the Trump administration caused Beijing to reduce the direct flow of the drug to the U.S. in 2019, China’s pharmaceutical sector still sells fentanyl precursors and analogues that reach Mexico, where cartels produce opioids — and work with Chinese money launderers.

In late 2019, Li finally fell. Making him think he would meet an associate, the DEA lured him to Merida, Mexico. Mexican federal police captured him and delivered him to DEA agents at the Houston airport, court documents say. He spent four and a half hours answering questions in English, admitting to “financial transactions involving ‘bad money,’” prosecution documents say.

Prosecutors charged him with leading a conspiracy that washed at least $30 million, a number backed by direct evidence. The full amount was likely in the hundreds of millions, according to law enforcement documents and interviews.

Xizhi Li (Alexandria (Virginia) Sheriff’s Office)

Li pleaded guilty and received a 15-year sentence, according to court records. Chen and half a dozen others also pleaded guilty and went to prison. Colombia extradited Flores, who pleaded guilty and got 16 years.

Li’s high-powered connections put him at risk. His old friend Liu feared for his safety, Simms said, because Li “was involved in Chinese organized crime, in Mexican money laundering, in activity in China that goes to higher levels of the power structure.”

And in this case, the fall of the boss was not the end of the story.

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

Jeff Kao and Cezary Podkul contributed reporting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Threat Caught on 911 Tape

Note: Audio includes screams from a person being restrained.

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

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

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

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

Alijah Luellen as a child (Courtesy of Benita Hunter)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elusive Justice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Code of Silence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Numbers Behind Choate’s Cover-Up Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Gabriel Sandoval contributed research.

by Will Sennott, The New Bedford Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Melissa Sanchez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a condensed, edited version of that conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are the consequences for children who accumulate SIRs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What should shelters be doing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by Ed Williams, Searchlight New Mexico

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Push to Get Kids Out of Residential Treatment Centers

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

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

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

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

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

“We Know We Can Find Them Better Beds”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bernalillo Academy (Kitra Cahana, special to ProPublica)

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

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

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

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

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

State Says It’s Working on New Programs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mollie Simon contributed research.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Child welfare advocates like Leecia Welch saw this coming.

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

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

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

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

Calling 911 as a Last Resort

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“For her?” the dispatcher asked.

“No, for us, if she gets in here.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I Needed Help”

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

So they ran away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kitra Cahana contributed reporting. Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Megan O’Matz

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

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

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

All those efforts failed, sometimes spectacularly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endless Legal Battles

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

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

Until then, municipal clerks had been able to simply fill in the information. Now, the Republican Party of Waukesha County argued that was unlawful and wanted to prohibit clerks from doing so. For some voters, that could mean having their ballots returned and figuring out how to fix them in time to have their vote counted.

A lawyer for the GOP-controlled Legislature favored a prohibition. Lawyers for government regulators, Democrats and the League of Women Voters argued against it. Ultimately, the GOP side prevailed.

In his ruling, Circuit Judge Michael J. Aprahamian added his voice to the doubts about absentee voting in Wisconsin and about the oversight provided by the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, which has seen its every move scrutinized since Trump and his allies started questioning the 2020 results in Wisconsin.

Aprahamian excoriated the commission, saying that “it is little wonder that proponents from all corners of the political spectrum are critical, cynical and suspicious of how elections are managed and overseen.”

As court scenes like these play out elsewhere in Wisconsin, a healthy slice of the litigation can be traced to one man: Erick Kaardal, a Minnesota lawyer and special counsel to the anti-abortion Thomas More Society, a nonprofit law firm.

Despite some high-profile setbacks in Wisconsin, Kaardal told ProPublica he plans to keep scrutinizing the fine points of Wisconsin election law, a subject that takes up at least 122 pages in state statute.

His ongoing targets include the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which interprets laws and gives guidance to municipal clerks around the state; the Electronic Registration Information Center, a voter roll management consortium; and the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonprofit that seeks to improve turnout.

“We’ll be litigating with the WEC and ERIC and CEIR for years to come,” Kaardal said.

A healthy slice of litigation over voting can be traced to Erick Kaardal, a Minnesota lawyer and special counsel to the anti-abortion Thomas More Society, a nonprofit law firm. (John Hart/Wisconsin State Journal)

Kaardal’s persistence is not appreciated by everyone. A federal judge admonished him for “political grandstanding” and filing bad-faith litigation against then-Vice President Mike Pence in December 2020 to prevent the counting of electoral votes. And in May, a judge in Madison said it was “ridiculous” for Kaardal to label pandemic-related grants to election offices as bribes.

In defending his tactics, Kaardal cited his years of legal experience and investigative abilities. He said he merely wants to hold government accountable and make elections fair.

Among Kaardal’s most passionate causes is his ongoing effort to document election fraud at nursing homes. During the pandemic, Kaardal alleges, an unknown number of cognitively impaired people ruled incompetent to vote under court-ordered guardianships somehow voted, perhaps with illegal assistance. He believes the voter rolls are not being updated to accurately reflect the court orders.

Kaardal brought lawsuits against 13 probate administrators across Wisconsin to force the release of confidential documents revealing the names of individuals under guardianship who have had their right to vote stripped by the court. His petition was denied in one case, but the others are ongoing.

Dane County Clerk of Court Carlo Esqueda worries that Kaardal’s quest is giving people the wrong impression. He points out that a person under guardianship can still vote. In some instances, that right is taken away because of extreme cognitive issues.

“Talk radio is saying everybody under guardianship should not be able to vote. That’s simply not true,” he said.

Election clerks, too, cite disinformation as they face mounting pressure over how they handle absentee ballots.

Celestine Jeffreys, the clerk in Green Bay, was forced to defend her integrity when a local resident represented by Kaardal filed a formal complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission this year, accusing her of “ballot harvesting” in the spring 2022 municipal elections by accepting multiple absentee ballots from an individual voter. The complaint is still pending.

Matt Roeser, the resident who filed the complaint, told ProPublica that the heavy reliance on absentee voting during the pandemic “opened up a door we’ve never had opened before. It created a lot of suspicion.”

Jeffreys said in a court filing that she had the discretion at the time to accept multiple ballots if they involved someone delivering their own ballot and a ballot for a disabled person.

Her legal brief called the complaint “another attempt by Attorney Kaardal to court scandal where there is none — intentionally undermining public confidence in legitimately-run elections in the process.”

Energized Activists

Wisconsin resident Harry Wait drew national attention in July when he announced that he’d gone on a state website and arranged for absentee ballots in the names of the Racine mayor, the state Assembly speaker and several others to be sent to his home.

The site requires only that voters enter their name and date of birth, and Wait claimed it had insufficient safeguards to prevent fraud.

The antic angered the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which held that it was a serious breach meant to undermine the state’s election system. Authorities charged Wait with election fraud, a misdemeanor, and misappropriation of ID information, a felony.

Notwithstanding the charges, Wait was treated like a hero a week later at a meeting of the right-leaning group he leads inside a Racine dive bar.

Harry Wait arrives in court for a September hearing in a criminal case against him. He said he’d gone on a state website and arranged for absentee ballots in the names of the Racine mayor, the state Assembly speaker and several others to be sent to his home. (David Kasnic for ProPublica)

Wait formed H.O.T. Government, which stands for honest, open, transparent, four years ago over perceived government misconduct in Racine. It’s now focused on rooting out what it sees as widespread election fraud throughout Wisconsin and is taking special interest in absentee ballots. The group even briefly considered a plan to steal leftover drop boxes in southeast Wisconsin to ensure they couldn’t be used after the state Supreme Court ruling.

Wait has made it clear he’s no fan of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. “I’m going to make a declaration today that WEC is our enemy,” he told the crowd inside the bar.

He was proud how, in his view, he had exposed the flaws in the state government’s MyVote website, set up to help Wisconsinites find their polling place, register to vote or order an absentee ballot. The website, he said, “really needs to be shut down.”

Supporters of Wait’s. Early on in the criminal case, the judge imposed a gag order on Wait. (David Kasnic for ProPublica)

Wait said in an interview that he plans to defend his action in court on the basis that, in his view, the MyVote system is “not a legal channel to order a ballot. It’s a rogue system.”

The administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, Meagan Wolfe, has defended the online system. It “requires a person to provide the same information or more information than he or she would have to provide if the person made the ballot request through traditional mail,” she said at a commission meeting.

Still, the commission agreed to a new safeguard: When it gets a request to send an absentee ballot to a new address, it will notify the voter via postcard. The commission also asked clerks to be on the lookout for unusual requests.

At a preliminary hearing on his case, in September, Wait was represented by Michael Gableman, a leading figure among Wisconsin election deniers.

Wait was represented by Michael Gableman, right. Gableman was a former state Supreme Court justice and a special counsel for the Wisconsin Assembly, tasked with investigating the 2020 election. (David Kasnic for ProPublica)

A former state Supreme Court justice, Gableman was special counsel for the Wisconsin Assembly, tasked with investigating the 2020 election. While spending more than $1 million in taxpayer money, he lent oxygen to election-fraud theories — including Kaardal’s accusations about nursing home irregularities — but couldn’t prove any. Attempts to reach Gableman for comment for this story were unsuccessful.

Even after being dismissed from that role by the Assembly speaker, Gableman has continued to exert influence within the state Republican Party to stoke the anger of citizens. Among hard-right activists, Gableman’s view of Wisconsin as a hotbed of election fraud is now taken for granted, as is the belief that voting options should be restricted, not opened up.

“I want it back to in-person, one day,” said Bruce L. Boll, a volunteer with We the People Waukesha, one of numerous groups supporting tighter controls. “Voting should not be a whim. It should be something you plan for and you do. Like your wedding day.”

A supporter holds up a sign for H.O.T. Government, a group formed by Wait whose name stands for honest, open, transparent. (David Kasnic for ProPublica)

Responding to this new atmosphere of distrust, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has proposed creating an Office of Inspector General to help it investigate the growing number of complaints and allegations of impropriety.

Chaos and Controversy

The chaos and controversy around voting rules has caught some Wisconsinites off guard. The drop-box ruling was especially disconcerting to people with disabilities and their relatives.

Before the August primary, Eugene Wojciechowski, of West Allis, went to City Hall to pay his water bill and drop off his ballot and his wife’s at the clerk’s office. A staffer asked him for ID and then told him he could not deliver his wife’s ballot. Not even spouses of the disabled could do so at the time, thanks to the state Supreme Court decision.

“I said: ‘What do you mean? She’s in a wheelchair,’” Wojciechowski recalled. He noted that the ballots were “all sealed and witnessed and everything.”

The voting constraints were “stupid,” he said, but ultimately he decided he would just mail his wife’s ballot for her, even though it was unclear at the time whether that was permitted.

A ballot drop box in Milwaukee in 2020. This summer, the Wisconsin Supreme Court banned most drop boxes for ballots. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

He has filed an official complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission and weeks later remains exasperated.

“I mean, what the hell is going on in this city? I’ve lived here all my life,” Wojciechowski said.

“They’re stopping people from voting, that’s all it is.”

The state Supreme Court decision came in response to a suit brought by a conservative group, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. An attorney for the group, Rick Esenberg, argued that regulators had issued unlawful guidance allowing ballots to be delivered on behalf of others, including potentially “paid activists, paid canvassers who go around and collect ballots and place them in a mailbox.” Those allegations echoed a widely circulated conspiracy theory about people, labeled mules, delivering heaps of fraudulent ballots.

Esenberg conceded in his oral arguments that he had no evidence of that type of activity in Wisconsin.

Four people with disabilities sued in federal court, including Martha Chambers, of Milwaukee, who was left paralyzed from the neck down after being thrown from a horse 27 years ago.

“Here they are making things more difficult for me, and my life is difficult enough,” she said.

Martha Chambers (Darren Hauck, special to ProPublica)

A federal judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered the state elections commission to tell local clerks that voters with disabilities must be allowed to receive help from someone of their choosing to return their absentee ballots. The clerks do not have to confirm that the voter is disabled or ask the emissary for ID.

Still, it’s not at all certain that the ruling will be followed uniformly.

The state has approximately 1,850 local clerks who administer elections in cities, towns and villages. Even before the federal ruling, practices were wildly inconsistent, said Barbara Beckert, director of external advocacy for Disability Rights Wisconsin.

“There is continuing confusion in Wisconsin as voting practices and policies continue to change in response to litigation as well as action by the Legislature,” Beckert said.

Political observers say there’s increased trepidation among all kinds of voters over whether their ballot will count and who will be watching at the polls.

“People are afraid,” said Milwaukee native Bruce Colburn, a union activist and lead organizer of Souls to the Polls, a traditional get-out-the-vote drive in Black communities. “Are they going to do something wrong? Then you have all these lawyers and people making complaints in the court system for nothing. And it makes it more difficult. It scares people. If they get something wrong or they don’t do it exactly right, something’s going to happen to them.”

Jeffreys, the clerk in Green Bay, described poll watchers on primary day this year as “aggressive and interfering.” Rather than being cordial and unobtrusive, she said, some observers were repeatedly questioning voting officials and disrupting the process.

“That, I think, is a really big change with elections in Wisconsin. There’s just a lot more of a gaze, and the gaze is not always friendly and cooperative.”

Unlike poll workers, who carry out official duties and must be local residents, poll watchers can come from anywhere. They are not required to undergo training.

“Observers are a very important part of the process,” Jeffreys said. “They lend transparency; they help educate people. They themselves become educated. But sometimes observers have anointed themselves as the people who will uncover problems. And oftentimes observers are not equipped with the information in order to do that.”

The result, she said, can be baseless allegations.

Pointing Toward 2024

If Republicans in Wisconsin want to find a way around the Democratic governor, Evers, and his veto pen, they have two choices.

They can unseat him in November or bulk up their legislative advantage to what is called a supermajority. Achieving supermajorities in both the Assembly and the Senate, which would make bills veto-proof, is considered the longer shot. Winning the governor’s race is not.

Michels, the Republican nominee, is the owner of a construction company and has never held public office. He was endorsed by Trump in the primary.

A “Meat and Greet” pep rally in September at the Republican Party of Waukesha County’s headquarters. People ate bratwurst and listened to political speeches. (David Kasnic for ProPublica)

Michels has embraced the idea that the 2020 election was not run fairly, even though a state recount showed Biden won and multiple courts agreed. Asked if the 2020 election was stolen, Michels told the “Regular Joe Show” on the radio in May: “Maybe, right. We know there was certainly a lot of bad stuff that happened. There were certainly illegal legal ballots. How many? I don’t know if Justice Gableman knows. I don’t know if anybody knows. We got to make sure. I will make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

A Michels victory would set the stage for reconsideration of a range of restrictive voting laws that were vetoed by Evers.

Among the bills passed by Republicans and blocked by Evers were proposals that would require the state to use federal databases to check citizenship status; remove voters from the rolls based on information submitted for jury selection; make it harder to request an absentee ballot; and classify it a felony to incorrectly attest that a person is “indefinitely confined” so they can vote absentee (a provision widely used during the pandemic).

The Republican Party of Waukesha County’s headquarters (David Kasnic for ProPublica)

Wisconsin already is a place that researchers have identified as difficult for voters to navigate. The Cost of Voting Index, a Northern Illinois University project that studies each state, lists it near the bottom, at 47th, because of a strict voter ID law, limits on early voting and proof of residency requirements that affect registration drives.

“Over the last several election cycles, other states have adopted policies that remove barriers to voting,” one of the researchers, Michael J. Pomante II, now with the election protection group States United Action, said in an email.

But Wisconsin, he added, “has continued to pass and implement laws that create barriers to casting a ballot.”

In 2024, all these factors — from who is able to vote to who runs the executive branch and who runs the Legislature — will play a role in determining which presidential candidate gets Wisconsin’s electoral votes.

The governor and the Wisconsin Elections Commission are part of the state’s certification process, with the secretary of state making it official by affixing the state seal. And the state Supreme Court stands ready to rule on election law disputes.

The Nov. 8 midterm election will determine which party holds the office of governor and secretary of state when voting occurs in 2024. Michels has proposed a “full reorganization” of the Wisconsin Elections Commission if he is elected.

He hasn’t explained what that would look like, other than to say in a primary debate that he envisioned replacing it with a board made up of appointees named by each of the state’s congressional districts. Wisconsin now has eight seats in the U.S. House, five held by Republicans and three by Democrats.

Evers, by contrast, backs the commission in its current form. He noted its origins in the state’s Legislature seven years ago.

“Republicans created this system, and it works,” he said in a statement released to ProPublica. “Our last election was fair and secure, as was proven by a recount, our law enforcement agencies, and the courts.”

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Correction

Oct. 7, 2022: This story originally incorrectly referred to the Center for Election Innovation & Research as a “progressive nonprofit.” It is a nonpartisan group.

by Abrahm Lustgarten

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Barbados, the Caribbean nation whose prime minister, Mia Mottley, has championed the argument that small and developing countries desperately need debt relief and funding if they are to survive climate change, has reached an agreement with the International Monetary Fund that will make it among the first recipients of money from a new $45 billion resilience trust.

Under the program, Barbados is set to receive $183 million for climate-focused spending. It’s money that Avinash Persaud, Mottley’s top economic adviser, tells ProPublica will be used to replace segments of the island’s drinking water system and to shore up its supply of fresh water in the face of climate-driven drought. Barbados’ current water infrastructure was built by the British more than a century ago and loses about half of the water it carries. “This will go a significant way towards helping us start that project,” Persaud said. “These are not sexy things, but they are very important things in a world of climate change.”

The IMF has announced a similar agreement with Costa Rica for $710 million and has told ProPublica that another agreement with Bangladesh may soon be announced.

The trust funds are technically a loan, offered at low or “concessional” interest rates, to be paid back over 20 years after a grace period of a decade. The agreement is pending approval by the IMF’s board in the coming weeks. The money for Barbados is being paired with a $110 million IMF loan to support Barbados in continuing to reduce its debt and restructure its economy.

The announcement comes three months after an investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times examined how the high debt burden carried by small island nations made it impossible for them to pay for programs to defend against climate catastrophe. The investigation found that the IMF over decades had been slow to support Barbados’ climate initiatives as well as those of neighboring countries. Instead, the powerful global institution routinely used its leverage to impose strict economic criteria for financial health that wound up forcing countries like Barbados to spend money they might have used for infrastructure and other improvements to repay foreign banks and investors instead.

The story also pointed to the role of the World Bank, which funds development projects in needy nations, but which had designated Barbados and other Caribbean countries ineligible for aid because they were not poor enough. The World Bank’s president, David Malpass, appointed by former President Donald Trump, has come under fire in recent weeks for refusing to acknowledge that fossil fuels have driven global warming, stating that “I am not a scientist.”

Barbados’ leaders have been leaning hard on the IMF and the World Bank for greater access to concessional loans so that the government could invest in advance of disasters in more sustainable systems, thereby avoiding damages in the first place. “Giving us temporary access to funding when the disaster hits is just too late,” Persaud said. “It’s like paying for the undertaker.” The sort of investment the new trust helps make possible can pay back seven-fold in avoided costs when disaster does strike, but only “if we can invest today,” he said.

When the IMF first announced its intention to establish a resiliency trust in May, the plan had been criticized as not being specifically targeted for climate threats. It was also dismissed as not being large enough to address the needs of small countries. Its total is roughly one-tenth of what the United Nations estimates developing countries will require to fund climate programs each year.

An IMF spokesperson told ProPublica that the money from the trust can never be enough to meet the urgent burden that the fund now says Barbados and countries like it face from climate change, but that the program can help and may catalyze private investment. “We’re there and engaged,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “Others will have to follow.”

Although Barbados plans to spend some of the money on its water infrastructure, the trust is not earmarked for specific projects and can aid the country’s broader climate agenda. It is different from World Bank funding, which often pays for specific projects. The push for investments in infrastructure and resilience that Mottley has argued for is distinct from the question of whether the world’s wealthiest and most developed nations that have caused climate warming will pay for the enormous losses that warming is now imposing on poor countries. That question is expected to be a focus of the upcoming COP 27 climate conference in Egypt in November and has taken on new urgency after climate-driven floods destroyed much of Pakistan last summer.

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by Anna Maria Barry-Jester, photography by Braylen Dion, special to ProPublica

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On a Monday morning in mid-July, William L. Jeffries IV decided it was time to call a colleague for help. Jeffries is a senior health scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where he researches the ways that racism and homophobia impact health in the United States. Jeffries, who describes himself as a same-gender-loving Black man, sees the work as a way to serve his people and, by extension, God.

This call, however, was a personal one. He was sitting on his bed in pain, and he was angry.

Jeffries was angry for the hundreds of people, mainly gay and bisexual men, who were infected with monkeypox. He was angry that the burden was falling particularly hard on Black and Latino communities. He was angry that the federal government had been saying for eight weeks that it had the tools necessary to deal with the growing outbreak yet people were still struggling to find care.

And he was angry because he himself now had monkeypox and couldn’t find anyone to diagnose or treat him.

Jeffries told his colleague, who was helping to lead the CDC’s monkeypox response, about his ordeal. He knew then that he was a victim of the very failures of the American public health system that he studies.

“I myself am a trained disease detective. I have led outbreak investigations for HIV and syphilis. I am a published scientist. And I know a lot about public health and infectious disease transmission,” Jeffries said. “I emphasize my training and my experience because if I had to go to three different places before I got diagnosed, imagine what the average gay man has to do?”

By the end of September, more than three-quarters of people diagnosed with monkeypox in Georgia were Black, and Georgia had the second-highest rate of cases among all U.S. states, trailing New York. As the outbreak has spread, the federal government has been forced to reckon with the disease’s disproportionate burden on Black communities around the country. Black people make up more than half of monkeypox cases nationally, even as they represent less than 14% of the U.S. population. More than 26,000 people have been infected nationwide.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky recently acknowledged that she and other top public health officials anticipated these inequities; decades of tracking HIV and other infectious diseases made them predictable. Public health officials, who lost the trust of many Americans in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, had a chance to show that they had learned from their mistakes when monkeypox hit. Yet what happened to Jeffries and others in Georgia in the early months of the outbreak shows how federal officials, who suspected that communities of color would get monkeypox at higher rates, failed to intervene in ways that could have prevented — or at least lessened — that suffering.

“A lot of people got hurt,” said Dr. David Holland, the chief clinical officer for the Board of Health in Fulton County, which covers 90% of Atlanta. He too is angry about the first months of the federal response. “You can debate what the right thing to do would have been, but doing nothing is not on that list. And that’s kind of what was done.”

A dozen infectious disease experts told ProPublica that the likely trajectory of the virus in the U.S. was obvious once reports surfaced in May saying that monkeypox had found its way into communities of gay and bisexual men in Europe. They knew then that while it would most likely spread first among wealthier, whiter communities, Black and Latino men would soon bear the brunt of the disease. They knew this because it is the path that many infectious diseases have traveled before.

The reasons why are not a mystery either. Among other things, Black people are less likely than white people to have a regular doctor, less likely to have insurance coverage and more likely to have HIV, diabetes and other diseases that generally put people at greater risk for new infections. White people are more likely to have benefits that can lessen the effects of illness, such as jobs that allow them to take paid sick leave and wealth that can buy them better care.

Federal and state officials nevertheless failed to make testing readily available, slow-walked the rollout of vaccines and didn’t make it clear during the first two months of the outbreak that people of color, like Jeffries, were at elevated risk for harm. Those missteps amplified long-standing health inequities.

“Any time you fumble the response to an epidemic it will cut through the weakest seams in your society,” said Dr. Jay Varma, a professor at Weill Cornell Medical College and former CDC official.

When Jeffries was 9 or 10 years old, his father shared with him a book from 1928 called “Leaders of the Colored Race in Alabama.” Inside was a photo of his great-grandfather and namesake, Dr. William L. Jeffries. Jeffries was blown away that in the early 20th century, a Black man could achieve the level of education — a doctorate in divinity — required to earn him the title of doctor. He said as much to his father, who responded that Jeffries could be a doctor, too. From that moment on, he knew he would follow in his great-grandfather’s footsteps. “I had to be Dr. Somebody,” Jeffries said. “That was just part of my destiny.”

He was interested in the health of communities, and so in 2004 he moved away from his home in Polk County, Florida, for the first time and entered a doctoral program in sociology at the University of Florida. In his first year, he remembers a professor explaining how the CDC responds to infectious disease outbreaks. The professor described disease investigators as the “cream of the crop.” For Jeffries, this was an epiphany: “Immediately, I just knew that was what I was supposed to be.”

Four years later, with a Ph.D. in hand and a Dr. in front of his name, Jeffries entered the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service. There, he trained to be a disease investigator like the ones his professor had told him about. It was the only job he applied for. Jeffries has been with the CDC ever since.

Now 42, Jeffries is a senior health scientist in the Office of Health Equity in the Division of HIV Prevention. He investigates the factors that place vulnerable populations at risk for HIV and other diseases. On average, gay and bisexual Black men have fewer sexual partners than their white counterparts and are more likely to use condoms, and yet Black men have six times the rate of HIV. White people get earlier and better access to new treatments and prevention. Many Southern states have not expanded Medicaid to offer insurance coverage for all impoverished adults, leaving people there less likely to have a doctor and worse off when they do get sick.

“God has had me be here to fight for the oppressed and to be a voice for those who, in many instances in our society, do not have a voice that can be heard by people in positions of power,” Jeffries said. “And my voice is what I use to serve those who Jesus called the least of these among us.”

Jeffries understands that he is in important ways one and the same with the people he researches, and he knows what that means for his vulnerability to disease. So when reports of monkeypox began surfacing, he kept an eye on it. He understood himself to be at risk and wanted to get vaccinated because he knew that, unlike with HIV, condoms do not prevent transmission of monkeypox. He also knew the vaccine wasn’t available in Atlanta yet. At the same time, the risk seemed distant. Government officials said there were only a couple dozen cases in metro Atlanta — a city of over 6 million people — and they made it sound like they had the situation under control.

Jeffries knows when he got monkeypox. It was during a sexual encounter in the early hours of Saturday, July 9. Later that same day, Fulton County Board of Health staff finally held its first monkeypox vaccine clinic.

By Sunday night, Jeffries felt some itching and irritation. A couple days after that, he had a fever, chills and sores around his anus. So on Friday, he went to an LGBTQ-friendly health clinic, told staff that he thought he might have monkeypox and asked for a test and vaccine. They had neither.

Instead, he said they tested him for a range of sexually transmitted diseases and treated him for a suspected case of chlamydia, though results later showed he didn’t have any of those diseases. Jeffries was surprised that in Atlanta, where there were already more than two dozen known monkeypox cases, the clinic couldn’t test him for it. More than eight weeks had passed since the first case was diagnosed in the U.S., and testing was supposed to be widely available.

Frustrated, he went home and isolated from other people. The pain kept growing worse, so late on a Saturday night he sought comfort in an epsom-salt bath and lingered in the warm water until just after midnight. As he was getting out, he noticed a lesion on his chest, close to his left shoulder. Confused, he reached for an itch on his back and felt another bump. He looked down and there was another lower on his torso. They were spreading so fast.

The next morning, Jeffries lay in his bed, uncomfortable and exhausted, and prayed. He knew it was time to go to the emergency room.

He thought his best bet would be a hospital attached to a university, as they tend to have more up-to-date knowledge and connections to public health departments. And he knew just the place: Emory University’s renowned teaching hospital on Clifton Road, a stone’s throw from CDC headquarters. “Atlanta is this hub for Black, gay and bisexual men, and the CDC is right here. Surely, these factors would converge to lead you to have vaccine and treatment available,” Jeffries recalled thinking.

But at Emory it was more of the same. The ER doctor, Jeffries said, knew nothing about monkeypox. Jeffries said he brought a list of the two vaccines and four possible treatments, pulled from the CDC website, but the doctor didn’t know about any of them and, regardless, said they were not available at Emory.

The ER doctor, Jeffries said, swabbed one of his lesions to test it for the monkeypox virus. Jeffries couldn’t understand why the hospital didn’t send in an infectious disease specialist. The hospital, he said, sent him home with prescriptions for ibuprofen and a steroid foam.

And so, the following morning, in severe pain, he called a trusted CDC colleague, Dr. John Brooks. Brooks usually serves as the chief medical officer for HIV prevention but is currently helping to lead the nation’s monkeypox response. Jeffries was desperate to find treatment and thought Brooks could help. He also wanted Brooks to know just how bad the situation was. “I knew that gay and bisexual men in Fulton County, irrespective of their race, were going to be placed at harm because of the overall ignorance, the blundering and the lack of resources,” Jeffries said.

When Jeffries made that call, the U.S. was nearly nine weeks into the monkeypox outbreak. Officials from the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services assured the public that they were responding in full force and had all the necessary tools — a test, a treatment and a vaccine. But they showed little urgency to use them.

Take the vaccine. Concerned that terrorists may use smallpox as a weapon to attack the U.S., federal officials invested nearly $2 billion in the development and manufacturing of the Jynneos vaccine to safeguard against that threat. In 2019, the Food and Drug Administration approved that vaccine for use against both smallpox and monkeypox, which are in the same family of viruses, and health officials keep doses in the Strategic National Stockpile.

But they had a very limited supply when cases first appeared in the U.S. in mid-May. In the preceding years, as hundreds of thousands of doses expired, they waited to order more, holding out for a different preparation of the vaccine with a longer shelf life, as The New York Times previously reported. The 372,000 doses that were ready in vials were mostly in Denmark.

In late May, officials at the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, the arm of the federal government that develops and procures drugs and vaccines to safeguard against pandemics and other hazards, placed orders for 72,000 doses. “We are prepared with both the vaccines and antivirals needed to protect the American people,” Dawn O’Connell, the HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response, wrote in a blog post on May 24.

Three weeks later, O’Connell wrote that those 72,000 vaccine doses were in the federal government’s “immediate inventory.” Two more weeks passed, and HHS announced it would make 56,000 doses “available immediately.”

By then, it was the end of June, and Atlanta hadn’t held a single vaccine drive.

That wasn’t for lack of trying. With cases climbing in June and Georgians waiting for their first allotment of vaccines, Holland, the chief clinical officer for Fulton County’s Board of Health, made an official request for ACAM2000, an older vaccine made to ward off smallpox. It’s been available by the millions since 2008, when it was added to the Strategic National Stockpile, before the newer Jynneos vaccine existed. But the older vaccine can cause side effects, making it unsafe to use for many people, including those who are pregnant, have HIV, have weakened immune systems or have various skin conditions.

Federal officials said states could order ACAM2000, but they didn’t exactly endorse it. Holland said Georgia officials turned down his request. He understands the concerns and respects the decision not to use ACAM2000. But he’s frustrated that in the first months, it felt like the answer to every effort at prevention was just “no.”

In a written statement, Nancy Nydam, a spokesperson for the Georgia Department of Public Health, referenced the many potential side effects of ACAM2000 and noted that no other jurisdiction has used that vaccine during the monkeypox outbreak.

When Fulton County finally received its long-awaited shipment of vaccines in July, it included enough for just 200 people. More dribbled in over the weeks that followed.

By comparison, Canadian officials began vaccinating at-risk people in early June. In Montreal alone, officials vaccinated more than 15,300 people through the end of July, according to data provided to ProPublica by the city’s health department. A friend of Jeffries’ was able to get vaccinated at an outdoor walk-up clinic in Montreal’s Gay Village neighborhood on Aug. 1 while he was in the city for the International AIDS Conference. The health workers didn’t care that he wasn’t Canadian.

“We know we live in a global village. We thought making no barriers was the most effective strategy,” said Dr. Genevieve Bergeron of the Montreal public health department.

Georgia currently has more than two and a half times the number of monkeypox cases per capita as Quebec, the province where Montreal is located.

“The thing that is most galling to me is that this was predictable,” said Greg Millett, a former CDC researcher and current vice president and director of public policy at amfAR, a nonprofit dedicated to AIDS research and advocacy. Around the time Jeffries was infected and Atlanta held its first vaccine clinic, there were about 700 known cases in the U.S., nearly all among gay and bisexual men, and the cases were growing exponentially. And yet, Millett said, the U.S. was dragging its feet. To Millett, it’s hard not to see homophobia and racism as an underlying reason. “If this was another population, would they have moved this slowly?”

Within an hour of calling his colleague on July 18, Jeffries got a same-day appointment with Dr. Kimberly Workowski, an infectious diseases specialist at Emory University. She also helps write the treatment guidelines for sexually transmitted diseases at the CDC. In an Emory exam room, Workowski donned protective equipment — goggles, gloves, masks and gowns — to examine Jeffries.

The lesions definitely looked like monkeypox, Workowski told him. She gave him an hourlong work-up, checking his body and talking through his symptoms. He’d had bad experiences with the medical system before, like the time he went in for routine testing and a doctor told him he shouldn’t have sex with other men because that’s how you get sexually transmitted diseases. So he didn’t take it for granted that she was treating him with dignity.

Jeffries said she told him that in the ER, they only swabbed one lesion when they were supposed to swab two or three and that regardless, the sample could not be located. Jeffries was aghast. Workowski counted his lesions and swabbed several of them for a new test, which would ultimately come back as positive.

A spokesperson for Emory Healthcare did not answer questions about Jeffries’ care. (Jeffries signed a privacy waiver to allow Emory to discuss the care he received in the emergency room on July 17.) In a written statement, the spokesperson said Emory Healthcare remains “steadfast in providing excellent and equitable health care to all of our patients.” Emory’s emergency departments follow a standard protocol for suspected monkeypox infections that “includes triage, testing and if necessary, referral to a specialist,” she wrote. “If needed, patients will be admitted to the hospital.”

The day after Jeffries saw Workowski, her office called to tell him that an experimental antiviral drug known as TPOXX was ready for him to pick up.

Once he started on the medicine, the lesions quickly stopped growing and spreading. But the sores and inflammation in the lining of his rectum were causing the worst pain he’s ever experienced, so bad that he couldn’t sleep. Five days after his first trip to the emergency room, he drove himself to a different Emory ER, this one in Midtown, which quickly admitted him. He spent the next four days in the hospital on a cocktail of medications that finally dulled his pain.

He was in isolation but felt less alone than he had in days. The doctor leading his care put her hand on him while they talked and asked how he was doing. Staff chatted with him about his life outside of monkeypox. He knew the hospital was busy, but no one ever seemed rushed. “They took the time to talk to me and make me feel OK,” he said.

At that point, physicians wishing to give TPOXX to patients had to fill out over 100 pages of paperwork. The medication was initially developed by the federal government, and the U.S. holds more than 1.7 million doses in its stockpile. The treatment has been approved for monkeypox in Europe, but it is available only as an experimental drug in the U.S. In August, the CDC slimmed down its paperwork, but even today, it can take more than an hour to fill it out and TPOXX has been hard to get.

Through the end of June, HHS officials had sent out enough medicine to treat 300 people nationally. From around the time of Jeffries’ hospitalization in late July through the end of August, physicians in Georgia handed out just over 600 courses of the treatment, according to data provided to ProPublica by the Georgia Department of Public Health. That would have been enough to cover just half of the people diagnosed during that time.

The Georgia Department of Public Health did not provide data on the race and ethnicity of TPOXX recipients. But nationally, as of Sept. 28, white people make up 28% of cases and have received 34% of the courses of treatment, according to preliminary data released by the CDC. The share that went to white people during the early months of the outbreak was even higher, according to CDC research.

Jeffries feels certain he could have avoided the worst of his pain and his time in the hospital if he had received treatment sooner.

When Jeffries got out of the hospital, he called friends and colleagues. Georgia — especially its Black and queer communities — needed more resources. He wanted people to know how bad it was and that things shouldn’t be this way.

He phoned Justin Smith, his friend who was able to get vaccinated at the AIDS conference in Montreal. The director of the Campaign to End AIDS at a group of HIV clinics in the Atlanta area, Smith had helped organize a virtual town hall with other activists.

There, Joshua O’Neal, the sexual health program director for the Fulton County Board of Health, told attendees that it was OK to be angry about the government’s response so far, that he sure was. O’Neal shared alarming statistics: Cases of monkeypox in Fulton County had nearly doubled in the three days before the event, and more than half of the people there with monkeypox also had HIV. Of the people with both viruses, 80% were Black. “It is our responsibility to ensure that those folks are the ones we’re reaching out to,” he told the group.

O’Neal acknowledged that the scant appointments for the first two vaccine clinics were gone within minutes and that most who got them were white. Going forward, he vowed to partner with community organizations to get them out more equitably.

On Aug. 4, 10 days after Jeffries got out of the hospital, the Biden administration declared a public health emergency. When that happened, as Margo Snipe reported for Capital B, a nonprofit news site for Black communities, officials made no mention of the growing racial and ethnic disparities.

Jeffries was encouraged, though, that the White House appointed Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the head of the CDC HIV division where Jeffries works, to a top position on its monkeypox response team. Jeffries knows him and says he strongly believes that Daskalakis is committed to getting the disparities in check. The White House declined to make Daskalakis available for an interview and suggested ProPublica contact the CDC instead.

The CDC declined to make Walensky, its director, available for an interview. Walensky’s deputy press secretary referred a reporter to Walensky’s comments at a White House briefing on Sept. 15. “It is critical that education, vaccinations, testing and treatment are equally accessible to all populations, but especially those most affected” by the monkeypox outbreak, Walensky said. “CDC remains committed to collaborating with jurisdictions to reduce health disparities.”

A different CDC spokesperson, Kevin Griffis, followed up and said that the agency appointed an equity officer to its response team in May and did outreach to LGBTQ groups in the weeks that followed. On its website in early June, the CDC first published guidance for ways to avoid getting monkeypox and has been updating it ever since. “This was an issue that Dr. Walensky and Dr. Daskalakis both talked about really as part of essentially every discussion that would be had about the outbreak: ensuring that we were doing everything we can to reach diverse populations,” Griffis said.

By early September, the spread of new cases began slowing in much of the U.S. Experts largely credit that decline to behavior change among queer men. In an August survey, gay and bisexual men reported changing their sexual practices to protect themselves. It’s too soon to say whether vaccine drives, which were ramped up at the end of August, are playing a role, experts say. In an effort to understand potential treatments, federal officials began recruiting monkeypox patients for a clinical trial of TPOXX. And O’Connell, of HHS, told a Senate committee on Sept. 14 that she had made more than 1.1 million vials of Jynneos vaccine available to health departments.

The Fulton County Board of Health made good on its promise and partnered with various community organizations to get the word out to the Black community. As of Sept. 15, more than half of the first doses of the vaccine have gone to Black people, according to a county report. Nydam, the Georgia Department of Public Health spokesperson, wrote that the state worked with federal officials to give out more than 4,000 doses at Atlanta’s Black Pride festival on Labor Day weekend.

“High demand and limited vaccine supply created access challenges for vaccines in general during the early weeks of the response, but the partnerships with community-based organizations greatly helped us with addressing health disparities in our vaccine roll out,” Nydam wrote.

Still, Congress has not designated any money for the monkeypox response. The vaccine and TPOXX are provided for free, but Fulton County has had to use its STD budget to run its vaccine clinics. “We’re spending our entire STD budget for the year and hoping that at some point the federal government will reimburse us,” Holland said. That’s money that also needs to be used for the simultaneous epidemics of HIV and syphilis, both of which disproportionately harm Black men and women.

While the spread of monkeypox is slowing, Black Americans represent a growing share of the overall cases — from 37% on Aug. 28 to 51% of all cases just three weeks later, according to the most recent data available.

Jeffries is still dealing with complications from monkeypox. But his bigger concern, one he shares with many in the HIV prevention community, is that Black LGBTQ people will be left dealing with monkeypox infections even if it largely disappears from the rest of the population. That’s another pattern they have seen many times before.

Thinking about what should have been done differently in those early months, it’s clear to Jeffries that everything the federal government has done since August should have happened much sooner. That could have prevented a lot of harm.

But his work also tells him that stopping these predictable patterns altogether will require dealing with the racism, homophobia and economic inequality at the root of so many health disparities. Lately he’s been thinking about a lesson his grandfather taught him when he was young.

Jeffries’ grandfather worked 12 hours a day, six days a week in Florida’s citrus groves, and he was still poor. He kept a garden to feed the family, and he sometimes took Jeffries with him to teach him how to farm. One day Jeffries was pulling at the weeds, snapping them off at the top. His grandfather stopped him.

“That ain’t how you do it, baby,” his grandfather told him. “You’ve got to get it by the root. Because if you don’t get it by the root, it’ll grow back.”

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