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Officials Move to Address Problems Facing Immigrant Workers on Wisconsin Dairy Farms

2 years 7 months ago

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Learn how to help us investigate the dairy industry. Haz click aquí para aprender cómo ayudarnos a investigar la industria lechera.

State and local officials in Wisconsin said they were horrified to learn of the conditions leading up to the 2019 death of an 8-year-old Nicaraguan boy on a dairy farm, as well as the flawed law enforcement investigation that followed. Now they say they want to address some of the issues highlighted by a ProPublica investigation, published last month, into Jefferson Rodríguez’s death.

“What happened should never have happened,” said state Rep. Sylvia Ortiz-Velez, a Milwaukee Democrat whose mother’s family worked as migrant farm laborers in Wisconsin in the 1960s.

Jefferson was run over late one summer night in 2019 by a worker operating a skid steer on a farm in rural Dane County, about a half-hour north of Madison, the state capital. It was the worker’s first day on the job, and he told us that he had received only a few hours of training. Our investigation showed how the authorities who investigated Jefferson’s death wrongly concluded that his father had run him over.

The failure was due in large part to a language barrier between the boy’s father, José María Rodríguez Uriarte, and the Dane County sheriff’s deputy who interviewed him. Rodríguez does not speak English; the deputy considered herself proficient in Spanish, but not fluent. When we interviewed the deputy, we learned that when she questioned Rodríguez in Spanish about what happened, her words didn’t mean what she thought and would likely be confusing to a Spanish speaker.

Jefferson’s death was ruled an accident. Nobody was charged criminally.

“Proficiency in a crisis isn’t good enough,” said Dana Pellebon, who sits on the Dane County Board of Supervisors. “Unfortunately, until a situation like this happens, sometimes we don’t see the gaps in service.”

Pellebon and several other supervisors told ProPublica they were looking into measures that could improve language access for non-English speakers who interact with the sheriff’s office. According to estimates from the U.S. census, more than 10% of Dane County residents speak a language other than English at home.

“This theme of language barriers for people to exercise and enforce their rights — from law enforcement to human services to our court system — it is widespread,” said county Supervisor Heidi Wegleitner. “There really needs to be a thorough examination countywide into these barriers, because it’s not fair.”

The Board of Supervisors sets the budget for and can make recommendations to the sheriff’s office. But it is limited in its ability to set policy.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office said the agency has a skilled and diverse staff that’s equipped with the tools it needs, including “unfettered access” to language translation services. The department “is always looking for ways to improve the services provided to the community which include the evaluation of current practices and consideration [of] received recommendations,” the spokesperson said.

At the state level, Ortiz-Velez pointed to a bill that would allow DACA recipients to become police officers or sheriff’s deputies. (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals is a federal program that gives some undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children temporary protections from deportation.) Currently, only U.S. citizens can work as police officers or sheriff’s deputies in Wisconsin. “For us to have officers that are fluent, that were born in other countries and can speak the language, I think that could be a great help,” Ortiz-Velez said.

Our story on Jefferson’s death is the first in our series, America’s Dairyland, that intends to explore work, housing and other conditions for immigrant dairy workers in Wisconsin and across the Midwest. Here are three takeaways from our reporting efforts so far:

1. Across Wisconsin, law enforcement officials face language barriers when responding to incidents on dairy farms.

Under the Civil Rights Act, agencies that receive federal funding are required to ensure that their services are accessible to people who speak limited English. The Department of Justice, which drafted guidelines for law enforcement agencies on this issue nearly two decades ago, occasionally investigates departments that fail to meet this requirement.

Last year, we began requesting records of law enforcement agencies’ responses to incidents ranging from work-related injuries to assaults on dairy farms across Wisconsin. What those records show us is that officials routinely encounter language barriers when interacting with dairy workers. Frequently they rely on farm supervisors or employees to serve as interpreters; sometimes they turn to Google Translate or to children.

The Dane County Sheriff’s Office has no written policy about how deputies should respond to incidents involving people who do not speak English, or on when to bring in an interpreter. The department does not assess the language skills of employees, who instead self-report their proficiency. But as a general practice, department officials have said, when deputies need to communicate with residents who speak a language other than English, they are supposed to put out a call to ask if any of their colleagues speak that language and, if none are available, ask for help from other nearby agencies.

2. It is an open secret that Wisconsin’s dairy industry relies on undocumented immigrant labor.

Because workers are undocumented, they often have a harder time speaking up about unfair or unsafe conditions.

Rodríguez and his son immigrated to the U.S. from Nicaragua in early 2019 in search of economic opportunity. As an asylum-seeker, Rodríguez did not have a work permit. He used fake papers to get a job at D&K Dairy. (In a deposition, the farm’s owner said he was not aware of Rodríguez’s citizenship status.)

Rodríguez earned $9.50 an hour and, like other workers, routinely worked 70 to 80 hours a week. Agricultural work is excluded from many of America’s labor protections, so there was no overtime pay for working more than 40 hours. Like many Wisconsin dairy farms, D&K Dairy provided free housing. But the housing Rodríguez and his son used was not in a house; they lived in an apartment above the milking parlor, the barn where hundreds of cows were brought day and night to be milked by heavy, loud machinery.

For years the dairy industry, complaining of labor shortages, has lobbied unsuccessfully to access the federal H-2A guest worker program, which allows employers to temporarily bring in foreign employees when they can’t find local workers. Currently, the program is limited to seasonal agricultural work; dairy is a year-round job.

Critics say the guest-worker program lends itself to abuse and exploitation, as immigrants’ ability to remain in the U.S. is tied to a single employer, which has led to several high-profile cases of forced labor, wage theft, substandard housing and high recruitment fees, among other problems.

3. Small farms don’t always get a safety inspection after a death or injury.

When Jefferson died, an investigator with the Dane County Medical Examiner’s Office alerted the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is responsible for workplace safety. But OSHA did not investigate because the boy was not a farm employee.

Even when workers die or are injured on small farms, OSHA is limited in its ability to respond. Farms with fewer than 11 workers are often exempt from oversight. (Some states with their own OSHA plans do more, but Wisconsin isn’t one of them.) And the federal agency has few safety standards for agricultural work sites.

In recent years, OSHA has attempted to inspect fewer than a dozen of the thousands of dairy farms in Wisconsin each year. The year Jefferson died, six of the nine inspections that OSHA initiated ultimately were not done because the farms were too small to fall under the agency’s jurisdiction; three of those six involved fatalities.

“Dairy operations these days are big factories, basically,” said Michael Engelberger, a Dane County supervisor. “They should not be exempt from any OSHA regulations or special agriculture labor laws. To me that’s just wrong.”

Wegleitner said she hopes to convene a group of supervisors, community advocates, county staff and others to talk about next steps in the coming weeks.

“Language access is one piece,” she said. “We have unsafe housing, lack of inspections and oversight, and all those things may not be things the county can legislate. But if we are talking to and advocating with state and federal policymakers and groups and working in coalition, I think this needs to be addressed on multiple levels.”

We plan to keep reporting on issues affecting immigrant dairy workers across the Midwest. Among those issues: traffic stops of undocumented immigrants who drive without a license; access to medical care or workers’ compensation after injuries on the job; and employer-provided housing.

Do you have ideas or tips for us to look into? Please reach out using this form.

And if you know a Spanish speaker who might be interested in this topic, please share with them a translated version of the story about Jefferson’s death — which also includes an audio version — or this note about how to get in touch with us.

Aquí está nuestra investigación — y una versión en audio — en español, así como una carta explicando cómo usted se puede comunicar con nosotros si quiere compartir información sobre la industria lechera de Wisconsin y estados cercanos.

Help ProPublica Journalists Investigate the Dairy Industry

by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel

How to Track Your Tax Refund in 2023

2 years 7 months ago

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You’ve figured out your deductions or credits, calculated how much you owed in taxes and successfully filed your return. If you’re sitting around wondering where your money is, you’re not alone. Lucky for you, the IRS offers several ways to track your tax return.

How Do I Track My Tax Return?

Once you have filed your tax return, there are three options for tracking your refund:

What information do I need to track my tax return?

To track your tax return, there are three things you need:

  1. Your Social Security number or Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN).
  2. Your filing status: single filer, married filing jointly, married filing separately, head of household or qualifying widow or widower. Find out what these mean here.
  3. Your exact refund amount.

When Can I Check on My Tax Refund?

If you e-filed: You can check on your refund after 24 hours, unless you applied for the earned income tax credit before mid-February. The IRS recommends getting in touch if you haven’t received your tax refund after 21 days.

If you filed by mail: You usually aren’t able to check your status for four weeks if you mailed in your taxes, but you may have already received your refund by that time. The IRS is warning of weekslong and even monthslong delays in 2023 for mailed-in taxes. If you mailed in your taxes and are waiting for your refund, the IRS says not to file a second time and not to call.

What is the tax refund schedule?

The IRS refuses to guarantee a day you’ll get your refund. Timing also depends on how you file and whether you get your return via direct deposit or check. For most people who file electronically though, the IRS issues refunds within 21 days of filing.

What are the tax return statuses?

When you check on your return, there are three statuses you might get:

  • Your return has been received.
  • Your refund has been approved.
  • Your refund has been sent.
Why Am I Not Getting My Tax Refund?

There are a number of reasons why your refund may be held up. There might be a delay if:

  • You filed by snail mail. Due to the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the IRS has a severe paperwork backlog.
  • Your return includes any errors or is incomplete.
  • You filed for the earned income tax credit or the additional child tax credit. By law, the IRS cannot issue your refund before mid-February.
  • You’ve been the victim of identity theft, fraud or a scam.
  • You’ve been audited.
  • You owe back taxes, state taxes, student loan payments or child support. In some cases, the Treasury Department will put your refund toward the money you owe. You will receive a letter from the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service explaining if your refund was used to pay another debt you owe.
  • Your return includes Form 8379, Injured Spouse Allocation, which can take as many as 14 weeks to process.

Can I Get My Tax Refund Early?

Short answer: No.

No one can give you immediate access to your tax refund — not the IRS, a bank or anyone else. That said, some tax-preparation companies do offer options to effectively give you access to money sooner, either through a refund anticipation check or a refund advance loan.

I need money now. What are refund advance loans and refund anticipation checks?

Some tax preparation services offer ways to get you money before your refund is issued.

With a refund advance loan — also referred to as a refund anticipation loan or RAL — your tax preparer will give you a loan that will be repaid with your tax refund. The loan amount is usually a portion of your estimated tax refund minus tax preparation service charges and other fees. Sometimes, the money will be deposited on a prepaid card that comes with additional fees. When the IRS issues your refund, your tax preparer will take money out of your tax refund as repayment for the loan.

These days, there are two types of RALs:

  • “No Fee” or “Advance” RALs are often called a “refund advance” and claim to have “no fees.” However, in order to apply for and receive the loan, you have to use the company's tax-prep service, which may have significant costs. This can route eligible people away from free tax filing alternatives with no guarantee that a loan of any amount will be approved by the bank. There may also be hidden fees for these loans.

  • Interest-bearing RALs are another option where lenders offer much larger loans. The catch? You pay more in interest and fees.

A refund anticipation check, or RAC, lets you put off paying for the tax-preparation service you use to file your taxes. Typically, you’ll agree to pay an additional fee to have the cost of tax preparation deducted from your refund amount. Once the IRS issues your refund, the preparer deducts this fee and the cost of preparing your taxes and then gives the rest of the money to you.

Keep in mind that if you don’t have the money to use a paid tax service, you may be able to file completely for free without worrying about any of these fees.

It’s not always clearly explained, but both refund advance loans and refund anticipation checks usually involve a temporary bank account being set up in your name, which is how the preparer takes out their portion of your refund.

Before agreeing to use a tax-preparation service in exchange for an advance, read the terms carefully and make sure you understand the total cost to you.

About this guide: ProPublica has reported on the IRS, the Free File program and other tax topics for years. ProPublica’s tax guide is not personalized tax advice. Speak to a tax professional about your specific tax situation.

Kristen Doerer is a reporter in Washington, D.C. Her writing has appeared in PBS NewsHour, The Guardian and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. Follow her on Twitter at @k2doe.

by Kristen Doerer for ProPublica

Inside the “Private and Confidential” Conservative Group That Promises to “Crush Liberal Dominance”

2 years 7 months ago

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A few months ago, Leonard Leo laid out his next audacious project.

Ever since the longtime Federalist Society leader helped create a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, and then received more than a billion dollars from a wealthy Chicago business owner to disburse to conservative causes, Leo’s next moves had been the subject of speculation.

Now, Leo declared in a slick but private video to potential donors, he planned to “crush liberal dominance” across American life. The country was plagued by “woke-ism” in corporations and education, “one-sided journalism” and “entertainment that’s really corrupting our youth,” said Leo amid snippets of cheery music and shots of sunsets and American flags.

Sitting tucked into a couch, with wire-rimmed glasses and hair gone to gray, Leo conveyed his inspiration and intentions: “I just said to myself, ‘Well, if this can work for law, why can’t it work for lots of other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now?’”

Leo revealed his latest battle plan in the previously unreported video for the Teneo Network, a little-known group he called “a tremendously important resource for the future of our country.”

Teneo is building what Leo called in the video “networks of conservatives that can roll back” liberal influence in Wall Street and Silicon Valley, among authors and academics, with pro athletes and Hollywood producers. A Federalist Society for everything.

Despite its linchpin role in Leo’s plans, Teneo (which is not the similarly named consulting firm associated with former officials in the Bill Clinton administration) has kept a low public profile. Its one-page website includes bland slogans — “Timeless ideas. Fresh approach” — and scant details. Its co-founder described Teneo as “private and confidential” in one presentation, and the group doesn’t disclose the vast majority of its members or its funders.

But ProPublica and Documented have obtained more than 50 hours of internal Teneo videos and hundreds of pages of documents that reveal the organization’s ambitious agenda, influential membership and burgeoning clout. We have also interviewed Teneo members and people familiar with the group’s activities. The videos, documents and interviews provide an unfiltered look at the lens through which the group views the power of the left — and how it plans to combat it.

In response to questions for this story, Leo said in a statement: “Teneo’s young membership proves that the conservative movement is poised to be even more talented, driven, and successful in the future. This is a group that knows how to build winning teams.”

The records show Teneo’s members have included a host of prominent names from the conservative vanguard, including such elected officials as U.S. Sens. J.D. Vance of Ohio and Missouri’s Josh Hawley, a co-founder of the group. Other members have included Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, now the fourth-ranking House Republican, as well as Nebraska’s attorney general and Virginia’s solicitor general. Three senior aides to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, are members. Another is the federal judge who struck down a Biden administration mask mandate. The heads of the Republican Attorneys General Association, Republican State Leadership Committee and Turning Point USA — all key cogs in the world of national conservative politics — have been listed as Teneo members.

Conservative media figures like Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire, several pro athletes and dozens of executives and senior figures in the worlds of finance, energy and beyond have also been members.

Leo joined Teneo’s board of directors as chairman in 2021 and has since become a driving force.

Watch Leonard Leo Talk About Teneo (Teneo)

Watch video ➜

Teneo co-founder Evan Baehr, a tech entrepreneur and veteran of conservative activism, said in a 2019 video for new members that Teneo had “many, many, many dozens” of members working in the Trump administration, including in the White House, State Department, Justice Department and Pentagon. “They’re everywhere.”

The goal, Baehr said in another video, was “a world in which Teneans serve in the House and the Senate, as governors — one might be elected president.”

Teneo Has Ambitious Plans (Teneo)

Watch video ➜

Here’s how “the Left” works in America, according to Baehr.

“Imagine a group of four people sitting at the Harvard Club for lunch in midtown Manhattan,” he said in a 2020 Teneo video: “a billionaire hedge funder,” “a film producer,” “a Harvard professor” and “a New York Times writer.”

“The billionaire says: ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if middle school kids had free access to sex-change therapy paid for by the federal government?’” Baehr continued. “Well, the filmmaker says, ‘I’d love to do a documentary on that; it will be a major motion film.’ The Harvard professor says, ‘We can do studies on that to say that’s absolutely biologically sound and safe.’ And the New York Times person says, ‘I’ll profile people who feel trapped in the wrong gender.’ ”

After a single lunch, Baehr concluded, elite liberals can “put different kinds of capital together” and “go out into the world” and “basically wreck shop."

In a recorded video “town hall” held for incoming members, Baehr, a graduate of three Ivy League universities and a serial entrepreneur fluent in tech startup lingo, recalled the moment when he had the epiphany to create a conservative counter-effort.

It happened a decade earlier when he was eating lunch at a “fairly uninviting” Baja Fresh in Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., with his then-boss Peter Thiel, the iconoclastic venture capitalist.

Baehr explained in the video that he had become frustrated as he kicked around right-of-center politics and activism for a few years, working on Capitol Hill, in the George W. Bush White House and for right-of-center groups including the American Enterprise Institute and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

Evan Baehr Explains Teneo’s Origin (Teneo)

Watch video ➜

Baehr and Thiel lamented what they saw as the fragmented state of conservative networks, with their hidebound think tanks and intellectual centers that hold sway over right-of-center politics. A rare bright spot on their side, Baehr and Thiel agreed, was the Federalist Society. Thiel had, in fact, served as president of the Stanford Federalist Society. What if there were a group similar to the Federalist Society for venture capitalists or corporate CEOs or members of the media? (Thiel did not respond to a request for comment.)

In 2008, Baehr, Hawley and others launched Teneo — Latin for “I grasp" or “I endure.” Hawley, then an associate lawyer in private practice, authored Teneo’s founding principles, according to the new member talk hosted by Baehr, and served on the group’s board. Its core beliefs align with the broader conservative establishment’s: limited government, individual liberty, free enterprise, strong national defense and civil society and belief in a “transcendent order” that is “founded in tradition, philosophy, or theology.”

For a long time, the group didn’t live up to expectations. In its first year, Teneo raised a paltry $77,000, according to its tax filing. From 2009 to 2017, the group, based first in Washington, D.C., and later in Austin, Texas, never raised more than $750,000 in a single year, tax records show. One member described in an interview Teneo’s early days as little more than a run-of-the-mill dinner club with partisan overtones: “Instead of being an organization about ideas, it was all about being a Republican.”

Enter Leo. In the early years of the Trump administration, he and the Federalist Society had remarkable influence within the new government. The Federalist Society had brought the legal doctrines of originalism and textualism — close readings of laws and the Constitution to adhere to the intent and words of the authors — into the mainstream. Leo had taken a leave of absence from the group to advise President Trump on judicial appointments, helping shepherd the appointments of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court and helping to fill more than 200 other positions in federal district and appellate courts. By the time Trump left office, he had put on the bench 28% of all federal judges in America.

In the town hall video, Baehr explained how he modeled Teneo on the Federalist Society. Leo’s “secret sauce,” he said, was to identify an “inner core” group of people within the Federalist Society’s 60,000 members. Leo was “identifying them and recruiting them for either specific roles to serve as judges or to spin up and launch critical projects often which you would have no idea about.”

Soon after Leo took an interest in Teneo, the group’s finances soared. Annual revenue reached $2.3 million in 2020 and nearly $5 million in 2021, according to tax records. In 2021, the bulk of Teneo’s income — more than $3 million — came from one source: DonorsTrust, a clearinghouse for conservative, libertarian and other charitable gifts that masks the original source of the money. In 2020, the Leo-run group that received the Chicago business owner’s $1.6 billion donation gave $41 million to DonorsTrust, which had $1.5 billion in assets as of 2021.

Teneo’s other funders have included marquee conservative donors: hedge fund investor Paul Singer, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the DeVos family, according to Baehr.

As the group’s finances improved, its videos became much more professionally produced, and its website underwent a dramatic upgrade from previous iterations. All of this was part of what Baehr called “Teneo 2.0,” a major leap forward for the group, driven in part by Leo’s guidance and involvement.

Baehr declined an interview request. He said in a statement: “Since Teneo began, I've been building hundreds of friendships among diverse leaders who have a deep love for this country and are working on innovative solutions to drive human flourishing for all. Teneo has made me a better husband, father, and leader.”

Teneo aims to help members find jobs, write books, meet spouses, secure start-up financing or nonprofit donors and learn about public service. As described in a “Community Vision” report from 2019, Teneo seeks to distinguish itself by acting as “the Silicon Valley of Conservatism — a powerful network of communities where the most influential young leaders, the biggest ideas, and the most leveraged resources come together to launch key projects that advance our shared belief that the conservative worldview drives human flourishing.”

Many of the connections happen at Teneo’s annual retreat, which brings together hundreds of members and their spouses, plus allies including politicians like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and DeSantis as well as business leaders and prominent academics. Speakers at past Teneo retreats have included luminaries spanning politics, culture, business and the law: New York Times columnist David Brooks, federal judge Trevor McFadden, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, “Woke, Inc.” author and 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, former Trump cabinet official and 2024 presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, ultrawealthy donors and activists Dick and Betsy DeVos, and Chick-fil-A board chair Dan Cathy.

But the group’s internal documents and videos also show the widening sprawl of its other activities. Teneo currently has 20 regional chapters nationwide, plus industry working groups focused, most recently, on media, corporate America, finance and law. In April, the group is hosting a “finance summit” in South Beach that its invitation says will “convene rising conservative talent from major financial institutions, funds, and family offices to connect and discuss key industry issues fundamental to the future of our country.”

Teneo members represent different facets of the conservative movement writ large. Some Teneo members were “very strong Trump defenders,” Baehr said in the 2019 town hall video, while others have opposed Trump vehemently. Baehr said there were clear divisions within the group’s members about immigration and trade policy. “Hopefully other ones, maybe Green New Deal, I hope that’s more like 99 to 1” in opposition, he said.

It’s in the town hall video that Baehr assured new members that Teneo “is private and confidential.” He said the group will never reveal the names of its members without their permission, though they are free to disclose their membership if they want to. Members must be in their 40s or younger to join.

Baehr said Teneo’s website is crafted so as not to pique the interest of Senate staffers who might look up the group if one of its members mentions Teneo during a confirmation process for a judgeship or a cabinet position. “We think a lot about that to protect your current and future leadership opportunities,” Baehr explained.

This strategy appears to have worked. A spokesperson for Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a critic of Leo’s who has spoken extensively about dark money and the courts, said the senator’s staff was “not familiar with Teneo.” During the confirmation process of Ryan Holte, a Trump appointee to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, Holte was asked several written questions by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Cal., about his membership in Teneo, but Feinstein spelled the group’s name wrong each time. (Asked what the mission of the group was, Holte responded that Teneo was a “nonpartisan, and nonprofit, organization that gathers members from a variety of professional backgrounds for dinners and social activities to discuss current events.”)

A recent Teneo fundraising email laid out how the group can bring its members' influence together in service of a cause.

To “confront” what he dubbed “woke capitalism,” Jonathan Bunch, a longtime Leo deputy and now Teneo board member, wrote that the group had brought together a coalition of Teneans “working with (or serving as) state attorneys general, state financial officers, state legislators, journalists, media executives and best-in-class public affairs professionals” to launch investigations, hold hearings, pull state investment funds and publish op-eds and news stories in response to so-called environmental, social and governance, or ESG, policies at the corporate level.

“Our members were in the rooms where it happened,” Bunch wrote.

Another project underway, Baehr explained in a 2020 presentation, was a “surreptitious and exciting” effort to map key institutions in major cities — private schools, country clubs, newspapers, Rotary and so on — and find ways to get Teneo members inside those institutions and help members connect with each other. The initiative has begun by mapping Atlanta and several cities in Texas.

For those Teneo members who run for elected office, the network offers easy access to a large pool of donors and allies. A Leo acolyte and member of Teneo’s Midwest membership committee, Will Scharf, is now running for Missouri attorney general. Campaign finance records show that dozens of Teneo members made substantial early contributions to Scharf’s campaign, including Leo, Baehr and other members of Teneo’s leadership, who last year each gave the maximum allowable donation of $2,650.

In an email, Scharf said many of his “dearest friends are members of Teneo, and it has been a privilege to be involved with such an extraordinarily talented and committed group of young conservatives.”

Leo’s own statements about Teneo suggest that his plan for the group extends well beyond achieving near-term political victories.

“When you’re fighting a battle for the heart and soul of our culture, you want to know you’re in the trenches with someone you can trust, someone you know, and someone who will have your back,” Teneo’s “Community Vision” report quotes Leo as saying. “We don’t win unless we build friendship and fellowship with other people — and that’s what you’re doing here with Teneo.”

Help ProPublica Investigate Threats to U.S. Democracy

Do you have information about Leonard Leo or the Teneo Network that we should know? Reporter Andy Kroll can be reached via email at andy.kroll@propublica.org or via Signal at 202-215-6203.

Clarification, March 9, 2023: The subheadline with this story was updated to clarify that Leonard Leo is now the chairman of Teneo Network.

by Andy Kroll and Andrea Bernstein, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented

How Obamacare Enabled a Multibillion-Dollar Christian Health Care Cash Grab

2 years 7 months ago

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Joe Guarino rescued an entire industry with help from what some called “divine” intervention.

A little-known lobbyist from Virginia, Guarino was hired in 2007 by the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries, the trade association for nonprofit alternatives to medical insurance founded on Christian principles. Health care sharing ministries take fees from members, which are then used to pay other members’ health bills.

At the time, the industry had been tainted by a scandal involving one of the largest ministries in the country, the Christian Brotherhood Newsletter, based outside Canton, Ohio. State authorities won $14 million in civil judgments against two of its top leaders for enriching themselves instead of paying the medical bills of its members. A ProPublica investigation last month revealed that many of the Brotherhood’s executives, including Daniel J. Beers, were involved years later in the launch of a second scandal-plagued ministry, Liberty HealthShare.

The Washington-based alliance was looking to Guarino to repair the industry’s reputation and pass laws to fend off a looming movement to regulate the business. The lobbying effort is an example of how the ministries have quietly worked over the years to shield themselves from consumer protection laws and preempt government oversight.

Guarino decided to launch a state-by-state campaign to pass so-called safe harbor laws that exempt health care sharing ministries from insurance regulation. The carve-outs were justified, the alliance argued, because ministries don’t set prices and coverage based on risk calculations or pool people’s money, as insurance companies do. In the United States, many of the rules for health insurance are set by the states in which companies operate.

Guarino met with lawmakers in Virginia, Arkansas and Idaho. “Most of the time I was hiring local lobbyists, training them, and then they got the bill passed for us,” Guarino explained.

Although it did not attract much attention, the campaign was a remarkable success. By 2008, 15 states had passed safe harbor laws. Then, a new threat emerged. In 2009, President Barack Obama proposed his sweeping reform of the health care system. Central to the law was a provision referred to as the “individual mandate,” which required that every American obtain health insurance or face a fine. The mandate presented a direct threat to health care sharing ministries: If members were forced to buy insurance, they would likely leave en masse.

Although Guarino was embarrassingly outgunned by the health insurance lobby, he was determined to slip some version of a safe harbor carve-out into whatever the Democratic-controlled Congress handed the president. “I went and saw 150 congressional staffers during that time,” Guarino said.

The turning point came when Guarino reached out to a GOP state legislator he knew in Iowa and asked if she could put him in touch with Republican Chuck Grassley, the state’s longtime senator who wielded power as a member of the Senate Finance Committee. The lawmaker had known Grassley’s family since childhood and agreed to set up a meeting. “Lo and behold, that happened,” Guarino said. “As a Christian, I look at this and say, ‘Oh, this is God’s way of orchestrating things.’”

Guarino told ProPublica that he and his clients got on the phone with Grassley. Together they crafted an amendment to Obamacare that exempted members of sharing ministries from having to obtain health insurance on religious grounds. Behind the scenes, Grassley got that carve-out into the Senate version of the bill, Guarino said. (Grassley did not return a request for comment.)

The passage of the Affordable Care Act was chaotic and, for ministries, that was fortuitous. The House version, which many Democrats preferred, didn’t include Guarino’s exemption. If the House bill prevailed in negotiations between the two chambers, ministries would be extinct.

But with the sudden death of Sen. Ted Kennedy, Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and could not pass the House version. They were forced to go with the Senate bill that included the carve-out.

The exemption — just 200 words in a 900-page bill — survived tense negotiations between the chambers, going virtually unnoticed. Obama signed the ACA into law in March 2010.

“That’s our language right in the bill,” Guarino told ProPublica.

One friend told him that he’d just saved an entire industry. The larger Christian health share community hailed it as a miracle. “If you’re a person of faith, some of us might say it was kind of divine,” said Tony Meggs, then CEO of Medi-Share, one of the groups that formed the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries.

Meggs estimates membership grew tenfold after 2014, when the individual mandate went into effect. Four years later, the alliance announced that about a million Americans belonged to its member ministries. Some bought into the ministries because they disliked Obama and associated him with the law. Others did it for economic reasons. The ministries offered cheaper plans than insurance sold on the ACA marketplace, which were expensive for anyone who did not qualify for subsidies or Medicaid. Many self-employed people and small business owners fell into this category.

“All of a sudden people started getting religion because they could save $700, $800 a month,” Meggs said.

Both Meggs and Guarino say they believe that most health care sharing ministries do right by their members and the insurance alternative can work when it’s under ethical management. But both acknowledge the industry has been vulnerable to abuse. “Obviously, that kind of growth is going to attract bad actors and people who look for opportunity to enrich themselves,” Meggs said.

One of the people who took advantage of the opportunity is Beers, the patriarch of the family that started Liberty HealthShare just as Obamacare’s individual mandate drove thousands of people to health care sharing ministries. The ProPublica investigation found that Beers acts as a shadow lord over an empire built with money from Liberty HealthShare. Some of the family grew rich while Liberty’s members were left with tens of millions of dollars in unpaid health bills.

Beers’ name does not appear on any official documents related to Liberty, and he denied involvement in family businesses that profited from the ministry. Attorneys representing Beers and members of his family also disputed ProPublica’s finding that they controlled or influenced the sharing ministry or did anything wrong. Liberty is now under new management that does not include Beers or his relatives.

For those in the ministry industry, however, Beers’ involvement has been an open secret for years.

Meggs told of a surprise encounter he had around 2014 with Liberty’s then-CEO, its vice president and Beers, all key figures in the Brotherhood. The group wanted to propose a partnership between Meggs’ ministry and Liberty, which was experiencing explosive growth

At the meeting, Beers was clearly in charge, Meggs remembers, so no matter what they were selling, he wasn’t buying.

Liberty, he said, looked too much like the Brotherhood.

by J. David McSwane and Ryan Gabrielson

Some Election Officials Refused to Certify Results. Few Were Held Accountable.

2 years 7 months ago

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A week and a half after last November’s vote, members of the Board of Elections in Surry County, North Carolina, gathered in a windowless room to certify the results. It was supposed to be a routine task, marking the end of a controversial season during which election deniers harassed and retaliated against the county’s elections director. Not long into the meeting, however, a staffer distributed a letter from two board members stating that they were refusing to certify.

According to the letter, the two members had decided — “with regard for the sacred blood shed of both my Redeemer and His servants” and “past Patriots who made the ultimate sacrifice”— that they “must not call these election results credible and bow to the perversion of truth.”

In their view, a federal judge who’d struck down a North Carolina voter ID law for discriminating against minorities had transformed the state’s election laws into “a grotesque and perverse sham.” Tim DeHaan, one of the two board members who signed the letter, explained at the meeting, “We feel the election was held according to the law that we have, but that the law is not right.”

This argument failed to win over the three Democratic board members, according to a recording of the meeting. DeHaan eventually agreed to join the three on a technicality, and the board certified the election with a 4-1 vote. Jerry Forestieri, the Republican board secretary who also signed the letter, held out.

DeHaan and Forestieri declined to comment and did not respond to written questions.

Before 2020, local election officials seldom voted against certifying results. But in 2022, conservative officials in North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and New Mexico refused to do so. Some admitted to refusing to certify for political reasons. In all the 2022 cases, the election results eventually were certified, sometimes under a court order.

Election law experts say that these disruptions reveal a weakness in the American electoral system, which relies on thousands of local officials to certify the totals in their counties and municipalities before their results can be aggregated and tallied for state and federal elections.

Local elections officials “could create chaos” all the way up the chain by refusing to certify, said Alice Clapman, a senior counsel in election law at the Brennan Center for Justice. “And in that chaos you have more room for political interference.” Five legal experts described to ProPublica scenarios in which legislatures, courts, secretaries of state or governors could use a failure to certify at the local level to exert partisan influence.

Clapman said that even if refusals to certify don’t affect election outcomes, they can violate state laws and can amplify and validate harmful misinformation that feeds election denialism because of the imprimatur of the officials’ offices.

A ProPublica review of 10 instances of local officials refusing to certify 2022 results in four states found that, for the majority of them, the state election authority did not ultimately pursue official consequences. Two of them have been referred for criminal prosecution, but the attorney general in that state would not comment on whether there is an open investigation. And two — the ones in Surry County — are facing potential removal from their posts by the State Board of Elections.

“There needs to be some sanction when there is lawlessness,” said Richard L. Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. “If you allow these things to take place without any sanction, then you invite more serious rule-breaking in the future.”

After the DeHaan and Forestieri letter, Bob Hall, the former executive director of the watchdog group Democracy North Carolina, submitted a complaint to the State Board of Elections to start a disciplinary process, as permitted by North Carolina law if board members commit an alleged breach of duty. An attorney for Hall argued in a subsequent document that “if left unchecked, Forestieri and DeHaan may be the first of many board members throughout the state and across the political spectrum who cannot be trusted to faithfully certify election results.”

That led the state board to summon Forestieri and DeHaan to its headquarters in the capital, a roughly three-hour drive from their rural home, for a hearing last month.

At the beginning of the proceeding, DeHaan argued that the hearing itself was “illegal” because it was supposed to be held in the county the board members are from. The Democratic board chairman agreed and voted with a Republican colleague to move the hearing to Surry County. A date has not yet been set. “The relocation to Surry County shows that this isn’t normal,” said Christopher A. Cooper, a professor specializing in North Carolina politics at Western Carolina University. “There isn’t a long history of examples of this sort of thing to lean on.”

A replica sheriff’s car from “The Andy Griffith Show” drives through downtown Mount Airy, North Carolina, in Surry County. (Cornell Watson for ProPublica)

Experts point out that efforts to hold local officials accountable for not certifying their elections have been of a patchwork nature across the nation. “I think states are trying to figure out what to do and are approaching it differently, like a prosecutor making a judgment on a case-by-case basis whether to bring a case or not,” said Derek T. Muller, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law who has researched legal options for ensuring that local officials certify elections. “States need to figure out how to bring these cases in a fair, consistent and lawful way.”

In Cochise County, a rural part of Arizona on the Mexican border, a pair of county supervisors refused to certify their November 2022 results despite state officials warning them multiple times that doing so would be illegal under state law. In early December, a court ordered them to certify, but one supervisor, Tom Crosby, still skipped the vote.

The next day, the state elections director, at the urging of a former Republican Arizona attorney general, sent a letter to the state attorney general referring the supervisors for criminal investigation, arguing that they had committed “potential violations of Arizona law.” The letter concluded, “This blatant act of defying Arizona’s election laws risks establishing a dangerous precedent that we must discourage” by taking “all necessary action to hold these public officers accountable.” A spokesperson for the Arizona Attorney General’s Office wrote that they “cannot confirm or deny any potential investigation” that may have resulted from the letter.

In January, a group of Cochise County voters launched a petition to recall Crosby. As of late February, it had approximately a quarter of the 6,000 signatures it would need by early May to result in a new election, according to Eric Suchodolski, the chairperson of a committee leading the effort. “It’s our best recourse as citizens,” he said. “I didn’t think the authorities would ultimately do something, and even if they did, it can take awhile.”

In response to a request for comment, Crosby said: “If I get into defending myself it will never end. I’ve already answered all this stuff.” In the past, he has disputed the validity of the certification of the county’s voting machines, despite assurances from the state.

While in North Carolina and Arizona there are ongoing efforts to hold accountable local officials who didn’t certify their elections, Nevada and New Mexico decided not to pursue such efforts.

In Nevada, one Republican commissioner in Washoe County and another in Nye County refused to certify, though in both cases the other four commissioners outvoted them. A spokesperson for the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office said that “our office is not aware of any legal consequences for that action” by the commissioners.

In Otero County, New Mexico, the county’s three commissioners initially voted unanimously against certifying the June 2022 primary elections. This followed months of disputes about election security driven by conservative activists who also fueled protests in Surry County.

New Mexico law requires commissioners to approve election results unless they can point to specific problems. The Otero commissioners only raised debunked concerns about hacked voting machines, with one of the officials, Couy Griffin, referencing his “gut feeling.” The New Mexico secretary of state subsequently asked the state’s Supreme Court to step in, and it ordered the commissioners to certify. The secretary of state also sent a letter to the state’s attorney general notifying him of “multiple unlawful actions by the Otero County Commission” and asked for “a prompt investigation.” Faced with this, two of the commissioners switched their votes, certifying the election. Griffin did not. (In Sandoval County, on the other side of the state, one commissioner voted against certification, though the four others on the panel outvoted him.)

Griffin did not respond to a request for comment.

The New Mexico Secretary of State’s Office decided not to further pursue “punitive action” against the officials who did not certify, according to Alex Curtas, its communications director, because “our concern was getting the election certified, so that’s where that ended.”

“Once it became clear that we had that state Supreme Court precedent and this wasn’t really a widespread thing, just two hard-right commissioners, we felt comfortable that this wouldn’t be a major problem in the general election,” he said, “and in our perspective it became a bit of a moot point.”

Griffin eventually was subsequently removed from public office and banned from holding it by a judge’s order as part of sentencing for participating in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Part of the challenge for states seeking to crack down on officials who refuse to certify elections is that many of the laws that provide recourse were written more than a century ago. “We’re dealing with modern issues with very old statutes,” said Quinn Yeargain, a professor at the Widener University Commonwealth Law School in Pennsylvania.

Some states recently enacted new regulations. Last year, Colorado legislators passed the Election Security Act, which mandates that the secretary of state certify a county’s results if it misses the deadline to do so. In Michigan, voters passed a wide-ranging voter-protection ballot proposal in November that made certification a “ministerial, clerical, nondiscretionary duty.” This clause was in response to conservative members of a county canvassing board for Detroit refusing to certify the 2020 presidential election for a few hours, momentarily threatening to throw its certification into chaos.

Election legal experts note that holding local election officials accountable for voting against certifying elections will continue to be complicated. Muller, the Iowa law professor, favors what he calls the “least invasive process,” one that would allow courts to replace local officials who refuse to certify elections with other officials who would do their duty.

But he said any process that results in an official being forcibly replaced is likely to carry political risks, including the potential to abuse the system to disempower political opponents.

“We haven’t seen fallout from local election officials being removed yet, because these processes are just beginning,” Muller said. “But we could see that soon.”

Help ProPublica Investigate Threats to U.S. Democracy

by Doug Bock Clark

Uvalde District Attorney Fights Release of Public Records Against Wishes of Most Families

2 years 7 months ago

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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.

Uvalde’s district attorney has joined the Texas Department of Public Safety in fighting the release of public records related to last year’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, arguing that all of the families who lost children want them withheld. But attorneys for a vast majority of the families are refuting that claim, saying that the information should be made public.

“These Uvalde families fundamentally deserve the opportunity to gain the most complete factual picture possible of what happened to their children,” wrote Brent Ryan Walker, one of the attorneys who represents the parents of 16 deceased children and one who survived, in a court affidavit filed Tuesday evening.

Numerous news organizations, including The Texas Tribune and ProPublica, are suing DPS for records that could provide a more complete picture of law enforcement’s response to the shooting, which left 19 students and two teachers dead in the border community.

The state’s top police agency has refused to release records, including incident reports, internal communications, ballistic reports and body-camera footage.

Last week, Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell supported DPS’ position in a court filing. Disclosing such records could jeopardize any criminal charges Mitchell may seek in response to an investigation by the Texas Rangers, her office wrote.

Mitchell did not respond to multiple requests for comment. She previously told the Tribune that “every adult that was in that building is going to be looked at,” including law enforcement officials. She has not clarified whether she plans to pursue prosecutions.

Attorneys for the coalition of news organizations argued that DPS is required to show how releasing records could harm its investigation. The agency, attorneys wrote, has not provided that explanation but instead asserted that Mitchell has “unlimited power” to unilaterally decide what information should be withheld. DPS officials did not respond to requests for comment.

“By claiming the possibility of a future prosecution (without even identifying potential charges), the District Attorney seeks to withhold from the public not just sensitive investigative materials, but every single piece of information that could shed light on the tragedy and the law enforcement response, including information about the deceased shooter,” the attorneys wrote.

In a court filing asking a judge to block the release of records, Mitchell’s office claimed that the families of every child who was killed shared her view.

“All of the families of the deceased children have stated to District Attorney Mitchell that they do not want the investigation of the Texas Rangers released until she has had ample time to review the case and present it to an Uvalde grand jury, if appropriate,” her office wrote.

At least two parents told ProPublica and the Tribune that Mitchell never asked for their input on the release of records. Separately, attorneys representing numerous families said they disagreed with Mitchell’s attempt to withhold the records related to the investigation.

“To date our attempts to gain information that these families should be entitled to receive from their government officials has been thwarted under the vague allegation of ongoing investigations. This attempt by Ms. Mitchell to intervene and prevent the release of this report is another example,” said Robert Paul Wilson, a lawyer representing the families of a teacher and a student killed in the shooting as well as children who survived.

Since the May 24 massacre at the elementary school, state and local officials have offered conflicting accounts of what happened. Gov. Greg Abbott initially praised the response, then said he was misled when authorities revealed that law enforcement waited more than an hour to confront the gunman.

Footage and records separately obtained by news organizations have helped to show the flawed law enforcement response and additional failures that further delayed emergency medical treatment.

Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son, Uziyah Garcia, was killed during the shooting, said that he is torn on whether the records should be released, but that Mitchell had not reached out to him.

“She didn’t ask me, so she ain’t being factual,” Cross said.

He said his efforts to hold local officials accountable and to seek transparency have come, in part, as a result of journalists’ scrutiny of local officials’ actions after the shooting.

“At the same time, I don’t want anything to happen to jeopardize the case, but I also feel like she’s not going to do everything in her power to do this correctly,” he said.

Thomas Leatherbury, the director of the First Amendment Clinic and adjunct law professor at Southern Methodist University, said he has been disappointed by government officials’ efforts to avoid releasing public records related to the Uvalde shooting.

“It’s interesting to see the lengths that are gone to, to not be transparent, not let the public see the information and make up their own minds about the quality of the investigation and gain additional facts about an issue that was of such great public concern,” Leatherbury said.

by Uriel J. García, The Texas Tribune, and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

The Federal Government Is Investigating an Illinois School Where Students With Disabilities Were Frequently Arrested

2 years 7 months ago

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

This story is a collaboration between ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune.

The U.S. Department of Education has opened a civil rights investigation into a tiny Illinois school district for students with disabilities to determine whether children enrolled there have been denied an appropriate education because of the “practice of referring students to law enforcement for misbehaviors.”

The investigation was initiated Feb. 13, two months after ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune reported how the district, which operates a therapeutic day school for students with severe emotional and behavioral disabilities, turned to police to arrest students with stunning frequency.

An Education Department spokesperson said its Office for Civil Rights does not discuss details of open investigations. But in a five-page letter dated Feb. 24, federal investigators requested numerous records from the Four Rivers Special Education District, including details of every student discipline incident for the past two school years at Garrison School in Jacksonville.

For each incident in which police were summoned, investigators asked for the reason police got involved, an accounting of how much classroom time was missed and how that time was made up, and records of any communication with parents.

The district, which also provides special education services to students in nearby school districts, was given 15 days to respond and was directed not to destroy any records.

“I emphasize that at this time OCR has reached no conclusion as to whether the District has violated any law OCR enforces,” wrote Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department, in opening the case. Results of the department’s review “will have a direct and positive impact on students” at Four Rivers, she wrote.

In a letter to the school district director, the U.S. Department of Education requested all records related to student discipline incidents at the Garrison School from the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years. (Source: United States Department of Education)

In recent years, Garrison administrators called the police to report student misbehavior every other school day on average, the Tribune and ProPublica found. Staff members routinely asked to press charges against the children — some as young as 9 — and officers arrested them.

No other school district — not just in Illinois, but in the entire country — had a higher student arrest rate than Four Rivers, according to the most recent federal data that has been made public. That school year, 2017-18, half of all Garrison students were arrested. The school has fewer than 65 students in most years.

The Tribune-ProPublica investigation found that Garrison students had been arrested at least 100 times in the past five school years, including five students in the first 12 weeks of this school year. Officers typically handcuffed students and took them to the Jacksonville police station, where they were fingerprinted, photographed and placed in a holding cell.

There have been no student arrests since Nov. 15, when school administrators called police on a student who had spit at staff members. He was arrested for aggravated battery, records show. The next day, reporters visited the school for a board meeting and asked questions about Garrison’s approach to discipline, including its reliance on police. School officials said they had begun to make changes.

Guidelines for detaining children are posted above temporary evidence lockers in a room where the Jacksonville Police Department brings students after their arrest. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)

“I think it’s long overdue,” a parent named Lena said of the federal attention on Garrison. “I want some kind of change for that school and the students still in there. I want them to find out everything that was done; I want somebody held accountable for all the crap that people are put through there.”

One of Lena’s sons attended Garrison until September, when he was arrested at school and his parents decided to withdraw him. Her stepson was a student there in 2019 until she had him transferred to a private school. (When including the last name of a parent would identify the student — and in doing so create a publicly available record of the student’s arrest — ProPublica and the Tribune are referring to the parent by first name only.)

Although the civil rights office often launches investigations in response to a complaint, the Education Department said it initiated the Garrison case on its own.

“Probably from the media attention,” Four Rivers Director Tracey Fair told district board members at a meeting in late February when she briefed them on the investigation. A recording of the meeting was provided to ProPublica and the Tribune by Jacksonville news radio station WLDS.

Fair, who has overseen Four Rivers since July 2020, did not respond to reporters’ requests for comment. But she told the Tribune and ProPublica previously that administrators call police only when students are being physically aggressive or in response to “ongoing” misbehavior.

Records obtained by the news organizations, including 415 of the “police incident reports” that employees fill out every time they involve law enforcement, detailed instances when staff called police for a range of misbehavior, from disobedience to damaging a filing cabinet to shoving staff members. About half of the calls to police were for students who had run away from school, but those incidents rarely led to an arrest.

The school called police on a 12-year-old who was “running the halls, cussing staff” and on a student who broke a desk in the hallway after he was told he couldn’t use the restroom and left the classroom anyway, school records showed. Both students were arrested.

Education Department investigators are focused on whether school workers discipline students for behavior related to their disability — something explicitly prohibited by federal law — and fail to educate and support those students, according to the letter notifying Fair of the inquiry.

Investigators also asked for records detailing the reasons that students were transferred to

Garrison. Students, some of whom have autism, ADHD or other disorders in addition to their other disabilities, are supposed to stay at Garrison only long enough to get the skills and education they need to succeed, then transfer back to their home schools.

Concern about the students at Garrison has also prompted a separate inquiry by Equip for Equality, the federally appointed watchdog for people with disabilities in Illinois. In February, an attorney for the group sought the names and contact information of parents or guardians of Garrison School students, citing “probable cause to suspect educational neglect, i.e. that students with disabilities enrolled at Garrison School have been harmed by the school.”

The Equip for Equality letter, citing ProPublica and Tribune reporting, noted that the school had no curriculum for teaching social and emotional skills even though students are placed there because of their emotional and behavioral disabilities. It also referenced incidents that former students had described to reporters, including a teenager who reported being placed in a seclusion room for misbehavior and another student being denied access to the restroom.

After Four Rivers provided parents’ contact information to Equip for Equality, the organization mailed letters and flyers to current Garrison School families inviting them to reach out to an attorney with the group.

“We want to be able to help families and help the students get what they are entitled to. And we want to listen to what parents’ needs are and what students’ needs are,” said Olga Pribyl, vice president of the special education clinic at Equip for Equality. “We want to help them get back what they lost for educational opportunities for their children.”

The group’s efforts are focused on current Garrison students, but Pribyl said she also hopes to hear from former students who may have been denied educational services.

There have been signs of change at the small school. The Garrison principal, Denise Waggener, plans to resign effective June 30, and the school is looking to hire another social worker and behavior management specialist, board members were told at their meeting last month. Waggener did not respond to a request for comment.

The school added an “on call” social worker in November to respond quickly to classrooms when students are upset or struggling with their behavior. In the past, a “crisis team” of four aides would respond and could remove the student from class, sometimes putting them in a seclusion space or physically restraining them. Amy Haarmann, who is serving as co-principal until June, told the board the new social worker approach could “help us become a little more therapeutic.”

She said the number of crisis situations has decreased and no students have been arrested since the social worker was put on call. Jacksonville police have issued three municipal citations to students since Nov. 15, two for fighting and one for disorderly conduct, Jacksonville Police Chief Adam Mefford said Tuesday. Police were not called to the school at all in February, he said.

Other efforts to make the school more therapeutic and less punitive are being funded in part by a $635,000 federal grant through the Illinois State Board of Education. The grant is meant to fund training for staff to help students with their behavioral and mental health needs and reduce the reliance on punitive discipline.

Following the reporting by the Tribune and ProPublica, a team from the state board of education visited the school one day in December but did not mandate any changes. They confirmed an overreliance on police and said they plan to send a representative to monthly meetings with school leadership to discuss ways to help support students. The agency also connected school officials with education experts from universities in the state.

Michelle Prather, whose daughter Destiny graduated from Garrison in 2021, said she’s glad investigators are looking at the school. She said she believes an overhaul is needed.

“They need to shut it down or get new workers,” she said, for the sake of students. “I don’t feel like they get fair treatment and they’re actually learning. The teachers are not doing what they need to do.”

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by Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune, and Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica

Illinois to Relocate at Least Half of Residents in Facility Plagued by Abuse and Cover-Ups

2 years 7 months ago

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.

Update, March 9, 2023: This story has been updated to include community reaction after the plan to make changes was released.

The Illinois Department of Human Services plans to dramatically reduce the number of patients with developmental disabilities who live at the embattled state-run Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center.

In an exclusive interview before an expected Wednesday announcement, IDHS Secretary Grace Hou outlined a “repurposing and restructuring” of Choate, located in rural Anna, about 120 miles southeast of St. Louis. That process will start with the relocation of 123 residents with developmental disabilities who entered the facility voluntarily — roughly half the current population.

In a separate interview with reporters, Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker said that IDHS has been working on improvements at Choate since he first took office in January 2019. But he said “it became clear, I would say certainly over the last year — and, in part, because of your reporting — that there were more significant changes that needed to be made.”

The announcement — which the governor’s office billed as a “transformational” behavioral health initiative in southern Illinois — comes after months of reporting by Capitol News Illinois, Lee Enterprises and ProPublica that detailed the beatings of patients, a concerted effort by some staff members to cover up abuse and serious neglect, the intimidation of employees who reported it and the attempt to coerce new employees into participating in the abuse or being silent about it. Local prosecutors have filed felony charges against at least 49 people, both residents and employees, since 2015, a review of court records by reporters showed.

Hou also said the reporting played into the timing of the announcement because it has “brought a lot of this to light and I think forced the conversation into the public discourse.”

The agency will help residents relocate from Choate, and it will give them two to three years to move, Hou said. She said some will likely move into state-supported centers and others will go to community settings.

IDHS will also develop a plan for an additional 112 residents with developmental disabilities who currently live in its so-called specialty units, Hou said. The group includes some people who were sent to Choate by a criminal court judge after they were found unfit to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity. Hou said that the state is likely to move a “significant portion” of those residents, but that the agency does not want to rush the decision before it is able to determine “what capacity we have to serve those individuals in a different setting.”

In the interviews and news release, Hou, IDHS and the governor’s office did not label their plans for Choate as a closure, and no layoffs were included in the announcement. The facility’s 49-bed psychiatric hospital will remain open and may expand, Hou said. They’ve tapped the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine to determine the best path forward for the institution.

The restructuring of Choate, she said, is part of a broader goal for Illinois to expand services for people with developmental disabilities who are receiving state funding and want to live in the community; the aim is ultimately to reduce the number of people living at its seven developmental centers.

Advocacy and legal organizations that represent people with disabilities have long criticized the state for its heavy reliance on large public and private institutions to house people with disabilities, and for its lack of adequate funding for community-based options such as group homes or supports to keep people at home with loved ones.

Spurred by a slew of lawsuits across the country, states have reduced the number of people with developmental disabilities in state-operated institutions by more than 90% over the past half century, according to a 2022 study by the University of Minnesota. As of 2018, only four states — Illinois, Texas, North Carolina and New Jersey — had 1,000 or more state-operated beds open, the Minnesota study found.

Closures of large institutions accelerated with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1999 Olmstead decision, which found it unconstitutional to segregate people with disabilities from the rest of society. Seventeen states no longer operate developmental centers at all, and others have dramatically reduced the number of beds they operate.

Illinois has shuttered some of its large institutions over the past two decades, but it has been slow to transition compared with other states. It houses more people with developmental disabilities in large institutions and spends more to operate those institutions relative to statewide personal income than almost every other state in the nation, according to a review of data compiled by researchers with the University of Kansas. The number of people, nearly 15,000, on its waitlist for community-based services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities is one of the largest in the country.

In addition, a 2005 lawsuit brought on behalf of residents living in large privately operated state-funded centers argued the state had failed to live up to the mandates of Olmstead. As a result, Illinois currently operates under the terms of a federal consent decree to ensure that people with developmental disabilities get sufficient support from the state in their homes and community settings.

Hou said this week that when Pritzker appointed her to lead IDHS after he took office in 2019, the state’s poor record was common knowledge. “I think all of us leaders knew that Illinois was a laggard as it relates to prioritizing community-based care,” she said.

But Hou said that back then, the provider network that serves people in the community was not in a place to handle a large influx of people. Then COVID-19 hit the following year, putting significant changes on hold. “We’ve taken the opportunity over the course of the past four years to build up the community-based system,” she said, including increasing pay for direct service professionals, the front-line caretakers.

Hou said the state has made significant new investments in its community-based system since Pritzker took office, but it has so far failed to make the improvements needed to bring the consent decree to a close.

Pritzker, who just won a second term, has faced numerous challenges with the large state agencies that provide social and human services. Advocates for people with disabilities have praised the administration’s expansion of services, but they argued it hasn’t been enough to correct decades-old problems. Pritzker said the budget crisis under his predecessor “hollowed out” social service agencies; the pandemic further caused a labor shortage, he said.

“Rebuilding takes time, and we’re proud of the progress that we’ve made so far,” he said.

The plan Hou put forth also signaled changes for all state-operated developmental centers, including safety enhancements, and expanding support for community-based living.

The agency also created a new position of chief resident safety officer to oversee security at all residential centers. Ryan Thomas, a former compliance officer for a Chicago community health organization, will fill that role. In addition, the agency announced it would be adding 10 investigators to its Office of Inspector General, which investigates allegations of patient maltreatment.

In an exclusive interview, IDHS Secretary Grace Hou, right, and Chief Resident Safety Officer Ryan Thomas discussed impending changes to the state’s system that serves developmentally disabled individuals. (Jerry Nowicki/Capitol News Illinois)

This week’s decision to repurpose Choate “advances the State’s commitment to equity and the civil rights of people with disabilities,” IDHS said in its news release about its planned announcement. “It also reflects the State’s legal duty to ensure residents with disabilities have a full opportunity to live in the least restrictive environment of their choosing.”

In its news release, IDHS noted that Choate had been heavily scrutinized by state and federal overseers, as well as Equip for Equality, a legal advocacy organization appointed to monitor conditions inside Choate, for at least the past 20 years.

In a 2005 report, Equip for Equality detailed cases of patient abuse and neglect, poor medical and mental health care and an excessive use of restraints; it said that an “archaic system” had resulted in “tragic consequences for people with disabilities.” A U.S. Justice Department investigation had similar findings in a report four years later. At the time, IDHS promised to improve conditions, but the news organizations’ reporting uncovered that strikingly similar patient mistreatment and poor care persisted long after the Justice Department closed its case in 2013.

Past governors have closed facilities, but Illinois has a poor record when it comes to ensuring that the community-based system has the proper oversight and staffing to provide safe care for those who move. In 2011, then-Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, announced plans to close several state-operated facilities under a plan he called a “rebalancing initiative.” Those included Jacksonville Developmental Center, about 35 miles southwest of the capital, Springfield, and the Warren G. Murray Developmental Center in the southern Illinois city of Centralia.

Some residents moved out of Murray, but ultimately it was not closed after parents, the union and local leaders opposed the plan and Quinn lost his reelection bid. Jacksonville was. Four years later, a Chicago Tribune investigation documented the state’s botched transition efforts, resulting in horrifying mistreatment and tragic deaths across the state.

Hou, in the interview, acknowledged the difficulty of closing facilities. “The one thing that is common throughout those closures is that it tears communities apart. And it pits people against each other,” she said, adding that it was her hope to avoid past mistakes.

Hou also said there would be no change in the administration at Choate. Bryant Davis, the facility manager, and Gary Goins, the quality manager, were both indicted by a Union County grand jury in 2021 on charges of felony official misconduct in connection with a patient abuse case. After the charges were issued, they were relieved of their duties at the facility. They pleaded not guilty, the charges were later dismissed and they returned to work.

“We’ve weighed a lot of different perspectives, but I think we need a leader who knows Choate inside and out, who has relationships with the residents and the parents and the staff to lead us through this challenging transition. I think to put someone new in there, I think would be very disruptive and even further unsettling,” Hou said.

After the announcement, families of Choate patients expressed concern that residents were being pushed out of stable homes, potentially to other placements far away in the state. And union leaders representing Choate employees expressed alarm at potential job losses.

Terri Bryant, a Republican from Murphysboro whose district neighbors Choate, called the plan shortsighted and said it lacked concrete details. In a call with reporters on Wednesday, she accused the governor of taking the “lazy-man’s route” to fixing safety and workforce issues raised in news reports. Other legislators took a more wait-and-see approach.

During a news conference on the day of the announcement, Pritzker told reporters that IDHS was making reforms to ensure patient safety, but “this is something that you can’t snap your fingers and fix.”

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

Seeding Hope

2 years 7 months ago

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This story discusses pregnancy loss.

Jocelyn knew only one way to live. Growing up next to the Manombo Special Reserve in southeast Madagascar, his family taught him from a young age to see the forest as a source of income. His grandfather had been a logger, cutting trees for timber and burning wood to make charcoal to sell. His grandfather taught his father, and his father taught him.

It was dangerous work. He risked landing in jail for illegal logging every time he ventured into the protected reserve. “I needed to feed my family,” recalled Jocelyn, who doesn’t use a surname; the vegetables he grew near his house weren’t enough. He also needed money for health care. Once, when his wife was pregnant and fell ill, he sold all of their plates and pans to pay for treatment at a government clinic. She wound up losing the baby anyway.

Then in 2019, Jocelyn went to a meeting that upended his life. Representatives from an American nonprofit, Health In Harmony, asked villagers who lived around the forest: “What do you need from the world as a thank you to continue to protect this precious rainforest that the health of our planet depends on?” The answers across 31 villages were consistent: health care, job alternatives and help growing food for their families.

Jocelyn’s wife, Falinety, holds Kristy as the family gathers for an evening meal.

The following year, representatives from each of those villages gathered in a soccer field to watch as their chiefs pressed inky thumbs onto paper, signing an agreement that affirmed their communities would stop encroaching on the forest. In return, Health In Harmony began providing affordable health care through mobile clinics and teaching residents how to grow more food and support themselves without cutting down more trees.

Founded in 2006 to save rainforests and combat climate change, Health In Harmony may have stumbled upon a way to help prevent the next pandemic.

Researchers have shown that deforestation can drive outbreaks by bringing people closer to wildlife, which can shed dangerous viruses. Scientists found these dynamics can explain several recent outbreaks of Ebola, including the largest one nearly a decade ago in Guinea, which scientists believe started after a toddler played in a tree that was home to a large colony of bats. The child may have touched something contaminated with saliva or waste from an infected bat, then put his hands in his mouth, inadvertently giving the virus a foothold.

The moment in which a virus jumps from an animal to a human is called spillover. Though we now know more than we ever have about why, where and how these events happen, global health authorities have failed to make preventing them a priority. Instead, they’ve focused resources on fighting outbreaks once they begin.

Many see stopping deforestation as an intractable problem that would eat up the scarce money set aside to combat pandemics. Experts convened at the request of the World Health Organization last year argued that the “almost endless list of interventions and safeguards” needed to stop spillover was like trying to “boil the ocean.”

But this Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit, with an annual budget of just $5.3 million for programs in three countries, is demonstrating how working creatively across health, agriculture and the environment may be the key to prevention.

First image: Dr. Andriantiana Tsirimanana, Madagascar program director for Health In Harmony, pays a visit to the village of Maharoroka. Second image: Dr. Néhémie Fiderantsoa Andrianasoloherilala discusses medication with a patient. Third image: Residents can pay for medications with cash or cups they weave from reeds. The nonprofit uses the cups to plant tree seedlings. First image: A young girl gets a finger prick to test for malaria. Second image: Tsirimanana gives advice about caring for children experiencing diarrhea.

The organization has managed to quantify its success at its pilot location in a rural part of Indonesia on the island of Borneo. With help from Stanford University researchers, Health In Harmony analyzed 10 years of patient records along with satellite images of the forest there, comparing 73 villages that signed its agreement to places that hadn’t. They estimated that the project averted 10.6 square miles of deforestation and achieved significant declines in malaria, tuberculosis, neglected tropical illnesses and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, even while the rates for some of these conditions increased in the surrounding region.

In 2019, Health In Harmony launched its program in Madagascar. An island nation off the southeast coast of mainland Africa, Madagascar is a biodiversity hot spot with hundreds of mammals and birds that can be found only there. Researchers say the extensive range of unique animals makes it a more likely place for a novel virus to emerge. Madagascar fruit bats, which roost in the Manombo reserve, can carry coronaviruses, filoviruses (the family of viruses that includes Ebola) and henipaviruses (the family that includes the brain-inflaming Nipah and Hendra viruses). Rats and fleas in parts of the country carry the bubonic plague.

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Madagascar was once known as the “green island,” but the lush areas of the Manombo reserve now are filled with holes cleared by loggers or people using trees to make charcoal. On the fringes, slash-and-burn farming has scarred the hillsides, sending red dust and gritty sand over the landscape when the dry-season winds blow.

But today Jocelyn walks in the reserve without his former trepidation. He works for Health In Harmony as a paid “forest guardian,” trekking barefoot through the reserve to collect seedlings and deter loggers, people harvesting wild yams and hunters poaching lemurs. His observations are used to grade the village three times a year. There’s a strong incentive not to break the rules: Fewer infringements earn villagers a deeper discount on testing, prenatal care and other health care services that the nonprofit provides.

“I have learned that the forest, humans and animals are interdependent,” Jocelyn said, “and if the forest is sick, then the animals will be sick, and animals will surely impact humans’ health too.”

Jocelyn works on a plot of farmland next to his house.

On a clear morning last October, 40 people were already waiting when Health In Harmony’s van pulled into Karimbelo, a coastal village of about 500 residents on the southern edge of the Manombo reserve. Some mothers stood with babies tied to their backs with brightly patterned cloth. An elderly woman, who was recovering from a broken hip, sat in a wheelbarrow that a young man pushed to a makeshift clinic set up by the van.

Before the nonprofit arrived, the only option for health care here was to walk three hours on hilly terrain to a government clinic that few could afford. Some villagers recall neighbors dying on the road on their way to seek care.

Now, two teams, each with a doctor and two midwives, visit 13 sites like this around the reserve on rotation so patients are seen in each location twice a month. Medicines cost substantially less than what they do in a government clinic, but most people choose to pay with an alternate currency: cups that they weave from reeds that grow next to their rice paddies. The cups piled up around the feet of Dr. Néhémie Fiderantsoa Andrianasoloherilana, an energetic 30-year-old who goes by “Dr. Dera”; he traded them for medicines that treat malaria, fevers and coughs.

Health In Harmony uses the cups to hold tree seedlings in its 11 nurseries. Villagers help the nonprofit plant 50,000 trees a year in an effort to reconnect gaps in the forest. The nonprofit’s programs in Madagascar, Indonesia and Brazil follow an approach known as “one health,” which posits that human health is intrinsically connected to the health of animals and the environment, and that to address one requires addressing the others. Dr. Dera has seen how slash-and-burn agriculture can harm people’s lungs and believes that rates of malaria and bubonic plague could be reduced if forests were left untouched.

First image: Jocia is employed by Health In Harmony to care for seedlings in a nursery. Second image: Trees grow in pots woven by residents. First image: The nonprofit planted native tree seedlings in a gap in the Manombo Special Reserve. Second image: Cédric Andriamananarivo, who leads reforestation efforts, crouches by young trees growing in that gap. Third image: Nelly Ranjemiarisoa, who works as a community liaison, spends time with residents at a Health In Harmony nursery.

Though Health In Harmony is based in the U.S., its staff is hired locally. Dr. Andriantiana Tsirimanana, its director in Madagascar, says his upbringing as a child of farmers made him particularly interested in working for the organization. He and his staff have worked to build trust with the local residents. When COVID-19 vaccines became available, conspiracy theories circulated and nobody showed up to get their shots. Tsirimanana rolled up his sleeve in public. Now about 70% of adults in the organization’s treatment area have received the vaccine, compared with 8% for the country as a whole, according to Health In Harmony.

There are limits to what the organization can do. As a primary care provider, it doesn’t pay for hospital visits. The nonprofit plans to seek government approval to treat tuberculosis, but it currently isn’t authorized to help those patients. When two sisters in Health In Harmony’s treatment area tested positive for TB, they had to go to a government clinic for treatment. Though the medicine would have been free, the clinic was a seven-hour walk away, and the women, both single mothers, couldn’t afford the bus fare for weekly visits for the six-month treatment period. They both died last year, leaving their mother to raise six grandchildren.

First image: Denise, who lost two daughters to tuberculosis, brought her grandson Jomel to the clinic to be tested for malaria. Second image: Habeloma walks through her village, Karimbelo, on the southern edge of the Manombo reserve. It is home to about 500 residents.

Still, more villages are eager to join Health In Harmony’s project. Some residents south of the Manombo region have been asking the group to expand, but so far, the team has had to decline. It’s too small to meet the needs of the larger area.

In addition to health care, a big draw is the nonprofit’s support of farmers. Hunger was driving villagers to scavenge and log in the forest. The nonprofit introduced new varieties of crops that allow farmers to grow sweet potatoes in three months rather than nine and to harvest rice two to three times a year rather than once every eight months. Trainers showed communities how to make fertilizer using a mix of dead plants and dung from zebu, a type of cattle. In one village, the organization replaced the leaky wood in an irrigation channel with concrete, a move that helped protect rice paddies during a severe drought last year.

Bruno, king of the village of Morafeno, originally was drawn to the nonprofit’s health care but has come to appreciate the agricultural programs even more as climate change has wreaked havoc. In the past, when there were no crops left to eat, he recalls neighbors foraging for wild yams and honey, often eating plants not meant for human consumption. “Many people died for nothing,” said Bruno, who uses one name.

There have been occasional setbacks. A pilot project to grow cash crops, including cloves and vanilla, was destroyed by a cyclone. While Bruno still worries about the ongoing drought, the farming improvements have convinced him his village will survive. “We are not afraid of hunger anymore,” he said.

Bruno, king of the village of Morafeno, has welcomed guidance on farming from Health In Harmony.

Watch video ➜

Health In Harmony has taught residents new ways to plant rice.

Watch video ➜

Health In Harmony is now planning a project to measure its ability to restore biodiversity, improve the health of people and wildlife and reduce the risk of spillover in Madagascar. Partnering with Zoo New England, Centre ValBio and researchers at four universities, Health In Harmony plans to document the diversity of regional wildlife; test rodents, bats, tenrecs and lemurs for pathogens; and track human diseases affected by the environment. In all, the researchers estimate a 10-year project will cost $8.9 million — more than 1.5 times the nonprofit’s annual budget across the countries in which it operates.

Raising that much money has been challenging in the siloed world of grant giving. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a statement like this from prospective funders: ‘We do health care. We don’t do conservation’ or ‘We do conservation. We don’t do health care,’” said Devika Agge, the organization’s chief development officer. “There are hundreds, potentially thousands, of grants that I can’t and don’t apply for because of our intersectional work.”

The other constraint is the limited number of years in typical grants. The nonprofit wants to help farmers plant cloves and coffee to sell, but it takes five years to grow coffee and seven to grow cloves — too long to show results for most grants.

In the world of scientific grants, three years of funding is considered solid. Five years is great. Beyond that, good luck.

For now, the Health In Harmony team in Madagascar says it is buoyed by the turnabout within the community, starting with people like Fanjanirina Pascaline Andrianandraina, or, as she prefers, “Madame Fanja.” The 56-year-old moved to the region two decades ago to join the timber industry. It was only when Health In Harmony arrived that she was forced to consider the destruction of her work.

She stopped logging and led women in her village to start their own tree nursery. They grow seedlings she sells to Health In Harmony for reforestation. And her green thumb has touched her home too. Potted plants surround the entrance, and pink bougainvillea flowers climb over her door.

When Madame Fanja looks at the Manombo reserve now, she is filled with regret. “I hope someday,” she said, “I can replace all the trees I have destroyed.”

Madame Fanja at her home in the village of Anivorano. She moved to the region two decades ago to join the timber industry, but she stopped logging and led women in her village to start their own tree nursery. .spillover-toc-wrapper{ width: 100%; display: block; } .spillover-kicker{ display: block; margin-left: 0; margin-top: 0; } .spillover-kicker h4, .toc-body .toc-hed h4, .toc-body .toc-block h4{ font-size: var(--scale-1); font-family: var(--fonts-sans); color: var(--warm-30); font-weight: 700; } .toc-body{ background-color: #312822; padding: 1.5em; } .toc-body .toc-hed{ display: block; border-bottom: 1px solid var(--warm-20); display: flex; flex-direction: row; } .toc-body .toc-hed h2{ font-size: var(--scale1); color: var(--warm-20); font-family: var(--fonts-sans); font-weight: 700; line-height: var(--line-height-1); } .toc-body .toc-hed h2.toc-hed-left{ text-align: left; flex: 1; } .toc-body .toc-hed h4.toc-hed-right{ text-align: right; flex: 1; align-self: end; } .toc-body .toc-hed h4 a, .toc-body .toc-block h3 a{ text-decoration: none; color: inherit!important; } .toc-body .toc-hed h4 a:hover, .toc-body .toc-hed h4 a:visited, .toc-body .toc-block h3 a:hover, .toc-body .toc-block h3 a:visited{ text-decoration: underline; cursor: pointer; } .toc-body .toc-block h3{ font-family: var(--fonts-hed); font-weight: 700; text-transform: none; letter-spacing: 0; font-size: var(--scale1); color: var(--warm-10); line-height: var(--line-height-2); } .toc-body .toc-block{ display: flex; flex-direction: row; padding: 1em 0 0.5em 0; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item{ flex: 1; width: 50%; gap: 1em; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper{ display: flex; flex-direction: row; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper .item{ flex: 1; width: 50%; gap: 1em; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper .item img{ width: 90%; margin-left: 0; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper .item.right{ border-right: 1px solid var(--warm-60); padding-right: var(--spacing1); } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper.left{ padding-left: var(--spacing1); } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper.just-read{ opacity: 0.5; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item p{ position: absolute; padding: 5px 7px 5px 7px; background-color: var(--warm-20); color: #312822; z-index: 100; font-size: var(--scale-2); font-family: var(--fonts-sans); font-weight: 700; } @media screen and (max-width: 60em){ .toc-body .toc-block{ flex-direction: column; column-gap: 1em; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item{ width: 100%; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper .item.right{ border: none; padding-right: 0; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper.left{ padding-left: 0; padding-top: var(--spacing1); border-top: 1px solid var(--warm-60); margin-top: var(--spacing1); } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item p{ margin-top: 4em; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper{ flex-direction: column; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper .item{ flex: 1; width: 100%; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper .item img{ width: 100%; padding-bottom: 10px; } .toc-body .toc-hed h2.toc-hed-left{ flex: 3; } } Read More From Our Series Roots of an Outbreak View All Part One On the Edge: The Next Deadly Pandemic is Just a Forest Clearing Away

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Part Two Seeding Hope: How Saving the Rainforests Could Prevent the Next Pandemic

Translation by Ndriha Nomena Taitsy and Amir Antoy. Photo editing by Peter DiCampo. Design and development by Anna Donlan.

by Caroline Chen, photography by Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica

Legislators Vote to Fix Utah Law That Made It Hard for Some Sexual Assault Survivors to Sue

2 years 7 months ago

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

This story discusses sexual assault.

Ninety-four women whose sexual abuse lawsuit against a Utah OB-GYN was thrown out of court last year are celebrating a victory this month. But it’s a victory tinged with irony.

Last week, the Utah Legislature passed a bill that will — if signed by Gov. Spencer Cox — put their rallying cry into law: Sexual assault is not health care.

The change, however, will not help the women, whose case was dismissed because Utah judges and appellate courts have interpreted the state’s current law to mean sexual assaults by health care providers are considered part of medical treatment. That meant their allegations had to be filed under the more restrictive rules of the state medical malpractice act.

The new law would reform medical malpractice law to exclude sexual assault. It would not be retroactive, which leaves the women hoping that the Utah Supreme Court will reverse the dismissal of their case on appeal.

Still, Brooke, one of the women suing the OB-GYN, Dr. David Broadbent, said it felt like a victory that their case will change how future victims will be treated if they decide to sue their abuser in court. Brooke is using only her first name to protect her privacy.

“It just felt like we were really a part of this,” Brooke said. “I’m so glad that the legislative side of the law corrected this huge problem, fixing that gap in our legal system that 94 women essentially fell through. We’ll fill it in for future people in this situation.”

Brooke alleges that Broadbent groped her in December 2008 while she was hospitalized after experiencing complications with her first pregnancy. (Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune)

The bill’s passage follows a recent investigation by The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica, which detailed how survivors who had been sexually abused by health care workers were treated more harshly in Utah’s civil courts than those harmed in other settings. Their cases had to be filed within two years, and they faced a $450,000 cap on damages for pain and suffering in medical malpractice cases. Both those restrictions are now likely to be lifted, and those who allege sexual assault in medical settings have the same legal standing as those who allege abuse in other settings: no damages cap and a four-year filing deadline.

Limits on medical malpractice awards are routine around the country, initially in response to concerns — largely driven by insurance companies — that the cost of health care was rising in the 1970s because of frivolous lawsuits and “runaway juries” doling out multimillion-dollar payouts. But Utah’s insistence that victims of intentional assaults like sexual abuse face the same caps is far less common.

The women who sued Broadbent alleged that he inappropriately touched their breasts, vaginas and rectums, hurting them, without warning or explanation. Some said he used his bare hand, instead of a speculum or gloves, during exams; one woman alleged that she saw he had an erection while he was touching her. His actions were not medically necessary, the women allege, and were instead “performed for no other reason than his own sexual gratification.”

The OB-GYN’s attorney, Chris Nelson, has said they believe the allegations against Broadbent are without merit. He declined to comment further, saying they will present their case in court.

The new law doesn’t open an avenue for these women to refile their case. Their hope remains with the Utah Supreme Court, which has agreed to hear their appeal of District Judge Robert Lunnen’s ruling dismissing their case.

“Sexual Abuse Is Not Health Care”

In arguing for the new law in the House, bill co-sponsor Rep. Nelson Abbott said the shorter, two-year filing deadline for medical malpractice can be particularly difficult for those who have been sexually assaulted. An abuser may try to assure them that the inappropriate behavior was part of a medical treatment, he explained, and it can take time for the victim to understand they were sexually assaulted.

“I think we can all agree that sexual abuse is not health care,” Abbott said on the House floor. “To create extra burdens or difficulties is really not fair to the patient. I think that’s why we’re carving out those exceptions to try to help those patients in those difficult situations.”

Fixing the law was particularly urgent in Utah because of the broad way its medical malpractice law is written and how it has been interpreted by judges, said state Sen. Mike McKell, who co-sponsored the bill.

State Sen. Mike McKell presented a bill to the Senate in February that would give those who allege sexual assault in medical settings the same legal standing as those who allege abuse in other settings. (Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune)

Any acts “arising” out of health care are considered part of a practitioner’s treatment under Utah law, which means any related claims must be filed under the medical malpractice act. Judges and appellate courts have ruled, for example, that a teenage boy was receiving health care when he broke his leg while hiking in a wilderness therapy program, as was a woman who was allegedly groped during a chiropractic exam.

Both of those plaintiffs’ lawsuits were dismissed because they were not filed as medical malpractice claims.

McKell said he thinks Utah judges have interpreted the malpractice act incorrectly.

“We need to be careful when we draft legislation. Words like ‘arises out of’ create a broad interpretation,” he said. “I think it's tragic the way it happened.”

Patients sexually assaulted by health care providers face different challenges in other states. In Wisconsin, for example, an appellate court ruled that a physician groping a patient and having an erection was not medical malpractice. But there, the distinction hurt the victim’s case, because Wisconsin’s filing deadline for medical malpractice is longer than an intentional injury lawsuit. She lost her ability to sue.

Utah’s bill sailed through the state Legislature with little opposition. It received a unanimous vote in the Senate and only three nay votes in the House. The legislation had the support of the Utah Medical Association, which lobbies on behalf of state physicians, as well as an association of trial lawyers called the Utah Association for Justice.

Beau Burbidge, with the Utah Association of Justice, said he believed the legal challenges these women faced was an unintended consequence when the medical malpractice law was put into place decades ago.

McKell talks with personal injury attorney Beau Burbidge, center right, after the two presented McKell’s bill to a House committee on Feb. 28. (Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune)

“Nobody contemplated that a health care provider who sexually assaults a patient should be protected in some way by that act,” he said during a committee hearing. “The act is meant to protect health care providers providing good-for-the-community health care. Not rape. Not sexual assault.”

Broadbent’s accusers filed their lawsuit last year after one former patient, Stephanie Mateer, spoke out publicly about feeling violated during an examination more than a decade prior. She said Thursday that she “couldn’t be happier” that legislators took action in response to their lawsuit’s dismissal. The Salt Lake Tribune generally does not identify alleged sexual assault victims, but Mateer agreed to the use of her name.

“When I first spoke out about what happened to me, I had no idea that it would have such a massive and far-reaching impact,” Mateer said. “I never imagined that it would lead to the passing of this law, which increases the rights and safety of everyone receiving medical care in the state of Utah.”

Stephanie Mateer (Bethany Baker/The Salt Lake Tribune)

Brooke said she and the other women knew that the law change wouldn’t benefit them personally, but they wanted to advocate for it in hopes it could help prevent future abuse.

“It’s not about taking anyone down. It’s not about trying to win settlements,” she said. “It’s about trying to right a wrong that happened, whether that’s changing the law or through getting our justice in the courtroom. But that’s the goal that everyone is seeking.”

“Hiding Under White Coats”

Although he recognized that the plaintiffs suing Broadbent wouldn’t benefit from the new law, McKell, the Senate sponsor, said he did not write the bill to be retroactive because he worried the law could be found unconstitutional if it allowed older cases to be reopened.

The Utah Supreme Court in 2020 struck down a similar law that reopened a window of time where survivors of childhood sexual abuse could sue their abuser in civil court. Those victims previously had until they were 22 years old to sue.

The law, passed in 2016, was a recognition by state lawmakers that childhood sexual assault has long-lasting effects on victims and that it could take decades of healing before someone is ready to sue their abuser. But Utah's high court found it unconstitutional, saying that a filing deadline, called a statute of limitations, was a “vested right” of a defendant that state legislators could not take away.

The 94 women who sued Broadbent are now hoping that the Utah Supreme Court will reverse Lunnen’s ruling and allow them to continue their lawsuit against Broadbent and two hospitals where he had delivered babies and where some of the women say they were abused.

Adam Sorenson, the women’s attorney, argued in an appeal filed Thursday that Utah’s existing medical malpractice law was “not meant to advantage sexual predators hiding under white coats and specialty titles.”

“To think this is even a question, that is an issue being heavily debated, is shocking,” he wrote.

Attorney Adam Sorenson is representing the 94 women who sued Broadbent. (Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune)

Sorenson further argued that medical malpractice insurance policies often expressly exclude acts like sexual assault from its coverage, noting that Broadbent’s insurance carrier has also filed a lawsuit asking a judge to declare that his alleged actions are not covered by their insurance policy. It’s “nonsensical,” he wrote, to apply medical malpractice limitations to his clients simply because their alleged abuser is a health care provider.

Attorneys for Broadbent and the hospitals being sued now have a month to file their response. Sorenson estimates a Supreme Court decision won’t come until late fall.

Brooke said she lost hope in the legal system after the judge dismissed their case. Seeing the Legislature’s swift and nearly unanimous support to change the law because of their lawsuit has renewed her hope that the Utah Supreme Court will also take action and let their case move forward.

“I just never thought it would be questioned,” she said. “I never thought this would ever be the situation when I signed the paperwork and decided that this was something that I felt strongly that I needed to be involved in.”

Help ProPublica and The Salt Lake Tribune Investigate Sexual Assault in Utah

If you need to report or discuss a sexual assault in Utah, you can call the Rape and Sexual Assault Crisis Line at 801-736-4356. Those who live outside of Utah can reach the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673.

Mollie Simon of ProPublica contributed research.

by Jessica Miller, The Salt Lake Tribune

Closing Critical Gun Background Check Loophole Gains Bipartisan Support in Texas

2 years 7 months ago

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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.

Texas lawmakers are working to plug a gap in a 2009 law that was meant to keep people with a history of serious mental health issues from legally acquiring firearms.

Bipartisan legislation has been filed in the state House and Senate that would explicitly require courts to report information on involuntary mental health hospitalizations of juveniles age 16 and older after a ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation revealed that they were being excluded from the national firearms background check system.

Under the current law, county and district clerks across the state are required to send information on court-ordered mental health hospitalizations to the Department of Public Safety. The state’s top law enforcement agency is charged with forwarding those records to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, known as NICS. Federally licensed dealers are required to check the system before they sell someone a firearm.

Elliott Naishtat, a former state lawmaker from Austin who authored the 2009 law, told the news organizations that he intended for it to apply to all Texans no matter their age. But following the May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, the outlets discovered that local court clerks were not sharing that information for juveniles, either as a matter of policy or because they didn’t believe that they had to.

A bill by state Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston-area Republican, passed unanimously out of committee last week with bipartisan support.

The legislation aligns Texas with new federal reporting requirements and is “meant to make the background check more thorough and hence make our communities and schools safer,” Huffman at the committee hearing.

Congress passed gun reform legislation in June that includes a requirement that federal investigators check state databases for juvenile mental health records. But such checks would fail to reveal many court-ordered juvenile commitments in Texas because they are not currently being reported.

It’s impossible to say how many Texans with juvenile mental health records have been able to purchase firearms as adults. But the same month Congress passed the reforms, San Antonio police arrested a 19-year-old man who had been placed in mental health facilities twice when he was 16, his father told police. The man, who had recently purchased an AR-style rifle, considered the Uvalde gunman an “idol” and threatened to commit a mass shooting at an Amazon delivery station where he worked, according to an arrest affidavit.

Since the news organizations’ investigation, the Texas Judicial Council, which monitors and recommends reforms to the state judiciary, has called on lawmakers to clarify juvenile reporting requirements, concluding that there was widespread confusion about them.

Naishtat also reached out to current legislators to request that they file legislation to clarify the requirements after learning about the gap from ProPublica and the Tribune.

“I just want to get this fixed,” Naishtat said.

by Jeremy Schwartz and Kiah Collier

Ex-Honorary Consul Accused of Financing Hezbollah Indicted on Money Laundering, Terrorism Counts

2 years 7 months ago

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A former Lebanese diplomat sanctioned by U.S. authorities for allegedly funneling money to the terrorist group Hezbollah was arrested last week in Bucharest, Romania, and U.S. officials are seeking his extradition.

Mohammad Ibrahim Bazzi, 58, is accused by federal prosecutors of attempting to evade sanctions by trying to launder and move more than $800,000 from the United States to Lebanon, according to the Department of Justice.

Bazzi was one of 500 current or former diplomats identified last year in an investigation by ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that revealed widespread abuses in a little-known and poorly regulated system of international diplomacy.

So-called honorary consuls work from their home countries to represent the interests of the foreign governments that appoint them. In exchange, the volunteer diplomats are afforded some of the same legal protections offered to career diplomats, including travel benefits and political connections unavailable to most private citizens.

The “Shadow Diplomats” investigation found that a number of consuls have stood accused of crimes or were embroiled in controversy — many while they held their posts. Thirty current and former honorary consuls have been sanctioned by the United States and other governments; nine have been linked to terrorist groups by law enforcement and governments, including Bazzi.

Bazzi was appointed honorary consul in Lebanon by the government of Gambia in 2005 under the regime of then-Gambian President Yahya Jammeh, according to court records. The Gambian government terminated his appointment in 2017.

A year later, the U.S. Treasury Department designated Bazzi a “global terrorist,” accusing the businessman of funneling money to Hezbollah, a militant group that has attacked U.S. service members, civilians and others in countries including Israel, Argentina and Iraq. The designation blocked Bazzi’s interests in domestic real estate and prohibited American citizens from conducting any business that would benefit him.

In 2019, Bazzi sought to overturn the U.S. sanction. In court records, he said the government failed to provide evidence that he had financed Hezbollah. The sanction is still in place.

Bazzi’s attorney could not be reached for comment.

In a three-count indictment unsealed last week in New York, Bazzi and a second man were charged with conspiring to launder money and to cause U.S. individuals to conduct unlawful transactions involving a global terrorist. Recorded communications revealed that the men proposed numerous strategies to move money, including transferring funds through a fake restaurant deal and a family loan scheme in Kuwait, according to the Justice Department.

“The defendants in this case attempted to provide continued financial assistance to [Hezbollah], a foreign terrorist organization responsible for death and destruction,” Daniel Kafafian, acting special agent in charge at the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New Jersey division, said in a statement.

John Marzulli, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in New York’s Eastern District, declined to comment on Bazzi’s prior status as an honorary consul. Marzulli said he could not say when the men will arrive in the United States; the government is seeking extradition. Each count in the indictment carries up to 20 years in prison.

The Eastern District U.S. attorney, Breon Peace, said in a release: “Mohammad Bazzi thought that he could secretly move hundreds of thousands of dollars from the United States to Lebanon without detection by law enforcement.” This “arrest proves that Bazzi was wrong.”

Matthew Levitt, a counterrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Bazzi was especially skilled at finding ways to establish relationships with people in power.

“This is someone who is a player for senior Hezbollah operatives and senior Iranian leadership,” Levitt said. “His arrest and extradition is significant.”

Evan Robinson-Johnson is a student at Northwestern University's Medill Investigative Lab.

Debbie Cenziper contributed reporting.

by Evan Robinson-Johnson for ProPublica

A Top UC Berkeley Professor Taught With Remains That May Include Dozens of Native Americans

2 years 7 months ago

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For decades, famed professor Tim White used a vast collection of human remains — bones sorted by body part and stored in wooden bins — to teach his anthropology students at the University of California, Berkeley.

White, a world-renowned expert on human evolution, said the collection was passed down through generations of anthropology professors before he started teaching with it in the late 1970s. It came with no records, he said. Most were not labeled at all or said only “lab.”

But that simple description masked a dark history, UC Berkeley administrators recently acknowledged. UC Berkeley conducted an analysis of the collection after White reported its contents in response to a university systemwide order in 2020 to search for human remains. Administrators disclosed to state officials in May that the analysis found the collection includes the remains of at least 95 people excavated from gravesites — many of them likely Native Americans from California, according to previously unreported documents obtained by ProPublica and NBC News.

The university’s disclosure was particularly painful because it involved a professor who many Indigenous people already viewed as a primary antagonist, according to interviews with tribal members.

UC Berkeley has long angered tribal nations with its handling of thousands of ancestral remains amassed during the university’s centurylong campaign of excavating Indigenous burial grounds.

.repat-intro-block .repat-tag h2{ color: var(--black); text-align: center; font-family: var(--fonts-sans); } .repat-intro-block{ background-color: #E1DCD0; padding: 1em; border-radius: 5px; } p a.intro-block-link{ text-decoration: none; color: var(--color-accent-70); font-weight: 700; } p a.intro-block-link:hover{ text-decoration: underline; } .repat-intro-block p{ font-size:var(--scale-1); font-family:var(--fonts-sans); line-height:var(--line-height-1); padding-top: 1em; } .repat-intro-block h6{ font-size: var(--scale-2); font-family: var(--fonts-sans); line-height: var(--line-height-1); color: var(--warm-60); padding-top: 1em; } .repat-tag{ display: block; position: relative; } .repat-tag h2{ font-size: var(--scale-1); text-align: center; padding-bottom: 1em; color: var(--warm-10); font-family: var(--fonts-sans); font-weight: 700; } The Repatriation Project A series investigating the return of Native American ancestral remains.

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More than three decades ago, Congress ordered museums, universities and government agencies that receive federal funding to publicly report any human remains in their collections that they believed to be Native American and then return them to tribal nations.

UC Berkeley has been slow to do so. The university estimates that it still holds the remains of 9,000 Indigenous people in the campus’ Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology — more than any other U.S. institution bound by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, according to a ProPublica analysis of federal data.

That tally does not include the remains that White reported and relinquished in 2020. For decades, White served as an expert adviser in the university’s repatriation decisions, sitting on committees that weighed whether to grant or deny tribes’ requests, according to a review of hundreds of pages of federal testimony and internal university documents.

White said the collection did not need to be reported under NAGPRA because there is no way to determine the origin of the bones — and therefore the law does not apply.

The collection has exposed deep rifts at UC Berkeley, pitting a prominent professor who said he’s done nothing wrong against university administrators who have apologized to tribes for not sharing information about the remains sooner.

Watch the NBC News Report

For tribes the episode follows a familiar pattern of UC Berkeley’s delays and failures to be transparent with them.

“This is a major moral, ethical and potentially legal violation,” said Laura Miranda, a member of the Pechanga Band of Indians and chair of the California Native American Heritage Commission. She made her comments at a July hearing held by the commission, which oversees the university system’s handling of Indigenous remains.

UC Berkeley officials declined interview requests, saying “tribes have asked us not to.” In a statement, the university said White was no longer involved in repatriation decisions. There is now a moratorium on using ancestral remains for teaching or research purposes, according to the statement. The Hearst Museum is currently closed to the public so that staff can prioritize repatriation.

The university also acknowledged that, in the past, UC Berkeley had “mishandled its repatriation responsibilities.”

“The campus privileged some kinds of scientific and scholarly evidence over tribal interests and evidence provided by tribes,” the university said in the statement.

University of California, Berkeley, anthropology professor Tim White holds a replica of a 1.7-million-year-old homo erectus skull in the National Research Centre on Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain. (Ricardo Ordóñez/Ediciones El País, 2022)

In an interview with ProPublica and NBC News, White said he’s been villainized for strictly adhering to the federal law, which he said requires balancing scientific proof with other evidence.

In the years immediately after Congress passed NAGPRA, UC Berkeley relied on White’s expertise as curator of the museum’s skeletal collection to challenge Indigenous people’s repatriation requests, according to testimony before a federal advisory committee.

Some tribal members accused him of demanding too high a burden of scientific proof for repatriations and discounting knowledge passed down through the generations. In the 1990s, he made headlines for fighting to use Native American remains as teaching tools, arguing that students should not be deprived of the opportunity to learn from them. He later sued to block the UC system from returning two sets of remains estimated to date from 9,000 years ago, saying they were too old to be linked to any living descendants.

NAGPRA does not require definitive scientific proof for repatriation, only that institutions report human remains that could potentially be Native American and consult with the affected tribal nations, said Sherry Hutt, an attorney who is a former program manager of the federal National NAGPRA Program. “It’s not a scientific standard. It’s a legal standard,” she said.

White often had the backing of university administrators in disputes over remains, but not anymore. At the July hearing before the California Native American Heritage Commission, UC Berkeley administrators cited an analysis by another anthropologist at the school, Sabrina Agarwal, that determined thousands of the bones in the collection were excavated from gravesites.

Given UC Berkeley’s legacy of raiding Native American graves, it is likely the collection White taught with contains the remains of Native Americans from what is currently California, said Linda Rugg, associate vice chancellor for research at the university.

“I want to apologize for the pain that we caused by holding on to this collection,” Rugg said at the hearing. “When we found out about it, we were dismayed ourselves.” A university spokesperson said staff and administrators are consulting with several tribes on next steps. Federal officials confirmed UC Berkeley has contacted them requesting guidance.

The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley (Justin Katigbak for ProPublica)

White, who retired last spring but is still a professor emeritus, said administrators knew about the collection, which was used to teach hundreds of students over the years. “It is very disappointing to find the Berkeley employees are making false allegations and misrepresentations,” he said.

Behind UC Berkeley’s reckoning is the centurylong saga about a powerful, progressive institution that is finally confronting its past. Isaac Bojorquez, chairman of the KaKoon Ta Ruk Band of Ohlone-Costanoan Indians of the Big Sur Rancheria, called for accountability for the newly reported remains, but also for UC Berkeley’s decadeslong delays and denials of other tribes’ repatriation requests.

“We want our ancestors,” he said. “They should have never been disturbed in the first place.”

A Painful History

With no documentation for the origin of his teaching collection, White surmised in a report to university officials in 2020 that it dated back to UC Berkeley’s early days and the university’s first anthropology professor, Alfred Louis Kroeber.

Kroeber, who joined the faculty in 1901, became a world-renowned scholar for his research on Native Americans in California, encouraging the excavations of Indigenous gravesites during his four-decade tenure.

His name recently was stripped from Berkeley’s anthropology building, in part for housing an Indigenous man found in the Sierra Foothills as a living exhibit at what would later become the Hearst Museum. Described as the last living member of his band of Yahi Indians, the man — whom Kroeber called “Ishi” — was studied and made to craft arrows and greet visitors for nearly five years, until his death in 1916.

Anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber with “Ishi,” the last known member of the Yahi tribe (Via website of University of California, San Francisco)

The Hearst Museum continued for decades to voraciously collect Native American remains and funerary objects, trying to assemble a collection to rival the British Museum and Harvard University, said historian Tony Platt, a distinguished affiliated scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society. “To be a great university you’ve got to acquire stuff, you’ve got to hoard massive amounts of things,” Platt said.

The vast majority of UC Berkeley’s collection of remains came from sacred ancestral sites in California, according to ProPublica’s analysis of federal data. The collection included ancestors of the Ohlone, the tribe whose land was seized by the federal government to fund public universities, including UC Berkeley.

The university eventually amassed the remains of about 11,600 Native Americans, stored in the basement beneath its gymnasium swimming pool and in other campus buildings. But Platt said that number is likely an undercount because museum records often counted multiple remains excavated from the same gravesite as one person.

A section in the 1878 University of California Register soliciting contributions to the school’s collections (Highlighting by ProPublica. Register of the University of California, 1878-79.)

In the early 1970s, Native American activists’ long-standing resistance to the grave robbing started gaining momentum amid protests that stealing from Native Americans’ burial sites in the name of science was a human rights violation.

By then, the teaching collection that anthropology professors used had grown to thousands of bones and teeth that White said in his report to university administrators had been commingled with others donated by amateur gravediggers, dentists, anatomists, physicians, law enforcement and biological supply companies.

The remains were unceremoniously sorted by body part so students could study them. A jumble of teeth. A drawer of clavicles. Separate bins for skulls. For decades, anthropologists added to the collection, used it in their classes and then passed it along to the professors who came after them, White said.

It was this collection that White started teaching with when he joined UC Berkeley’s anthropology faculty in 1977.

UC Berkeley hired White, then 27, soon after he had obtained his Ph.D. in biological anthropology from the University of Michigan. He already was collaborating with a team to analyze “Lucy,” a 3.2-million-year-old human ancestor.

White published articles in prestigious journals and co-authored a textbook, “Human Osteology,” that boasted of UC Berkeley’s collection of human remains and called ancient skeletons “ambassadors from the past.”

American anthropologists Donald C. Johanson, left, credited with discovering the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton “Lucy,” and White in 1979. (Johanson is not involved in the current controversy at Berkeley.) (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Congress passed NAGPRA in 1990, recognizing that human remains of any ancestry “must at all times be treated with dignity and respect.” As UC Berkeley prepared to comply with the new law, the campus museum appointed White curator of biological anthropology, overseeing the university’s collection of human remains.

Almost as soon as tribes started making claims to ancestral remains under NAGPRA, Indigenous people accused White of undermining their efforts to rebury their ancestors, according to a review of hundreds of pages of testimony before a federal review committee tasked with mediating NAGPRA disputes.

Since NAGPRA only applied to federally recognized tribal nations, many tribes in California were not entitled to seek repatriation. (Of the 183 tribes in the state, 68 still lack federal recognition, according to the Native American Heritage Commission.) UC Berkeley’s collection of remains included those of thousands of people designated as unavailable for repatriation because they came from tribes lacking federal recognition.

Recourse under the law was limited, leaving tribal nations to file formal challenges with the federal NAGPRA Review Committee, an advisory group whose members represent tribal, scientific and museum organizations. It can only offer recommendations in response to disputes.

In the first challenge following the passage of the law, in February 1993 the Hui Mālama I Nā Kūpuna O Hawai’i Nei, a Native Hawaiian organization, took a dispute over repatriation of two ancestral remains before the federal committee. The remains had been donated to UC Berkeley in 1935, at which time a museum curator classified them as Polynesian. White disagreed.

Addressing the committee, White introduced himself as “the individual who is responsible for the skeletal collections at Berkeley.” He argued the remains might not be Native Hawaiian and could belong to victims of shipwrecks, drownings or crimes. They should be preserved for study, he added, making an analogy to UC Berkeley’s library book collection, where historians access volumes for years as their understanding evolves.

Edward Halealoha Ayau, then the Native Hawaiian organization’s executive director, pounded his fists on the table in outrage. “We do not have cultural sensitivity to books. We did not descend from books,” he said, according to a transcript of the meeting.

Ancestral remains are not research material, Ayau said, they are people with whom he shares a connection — a perspective that is central to Native Hawaiian culture.

White recently said that his analogy comparing human remains to books was taken out of context. “Both hold information,” he said. “I was obviously speaking metaphorically.”

Instead of recommending that both ancestors’ remains be repatriated directly to the Hui Mālama, the committee advised UC Berkeley to return one of them and send the other to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu for analysis, Ayau said. There, researchers finally agreed that the remains were Native Hawaiian — but only after conducting a scientific analysis over Ayau’s objections.

“I just started crying,” Ayau, who now chairs the federal NAGPRA Review Committee, recalled in a recent interview. “We failed to prevent one more form of desecration.”

The Bishop Museum declined to comment on its role in the 1993 repatriation, saying it happened too long ago for anyone to have knowledge of it.

For Ayau, the experience left him with a sense of loss over the treatment of his ancestors.

“To have someone disturb them is really bad,” he said. “But then to have them steal them and then fight you to get them back is beyond horrific.”

Kalehua Caceres, left, and Edward Halealoha Ayau, former director of Hui Mālama I Nā Kūpuna O Hawai’i Nei, represent the Office of Hawiian Affairs at a ceremony to present the human remains from the collection of Germany’s Overseas Museum to a delegation from the state of Hawaii in 2022. (Sina Schuldt/picture alliance via Getty Images) “Berkeley Should Be Ashamed”

White’s fight to use a set of Native American remains he had borrowed from the Hearst Museum for teaching purposes made headlines in the 1990s after he clashed with then-museum director Rosemary Joyce. She said when she was hired in 1994, it was common practice for White and other museum curators with keys to borrow ancestral remains and belongings without documenting what they’d taken.

“Just leaving aside NAGPRA, as a museum anthropologist, that’s an unacceptable thing,” she told ProPublica and NBC News. “When materials are not in the physical control of the staff of the museum, you need legal documentation.”

She changed the locks on the museum’s storage space. Heeding requests from tribes, she tried to recall a museum collection of Native American remains that White kept on loan in his lab and used for teaching. White refused to return them.

The vice provost for research of the UC system sent Jay Stowsky, then the system’s director of research policy, to mediate the dispute between White and Joyce. Stowsky agreed with Joyce, calling the lack of controls at the museum “terrible.” He said human remains were “just sort of thrown into boxes” with a label on them. “Berkeley should be ashamed of itself on so many levels,” Stowsky, now a senior academic administrator at UC Berkeley, said in a recent interview.

Drawers in the “Osteology Teaching Collection,” as depicted in a report that White wrote and sent to the director of the Hearst Museum and others. (Via letter from Tim White, Aug. 28, 2020)

White filed a whistleblower complaint with the university in 1997 accusing the museum, under Joyce’s leadership, of seeking an unnecessary extension to NAGPRA’s reporting deadline. (Campus investigators found no improper activity, according to White.)

Joyce said she was simply trying to account for all the remains that would need to be reported under NAGPRA. “It’s really kind of insane to have to say, I did the thing that the law said I should do,” she told ProPublica and NBC News. Joyce said the complaints were found to be “meritless.”

White then filed an internal grievance against Joyce with the school’s Academic Senate, alleging that by asking him to relinquish the human remains she had infringed on his “academic privileges.”

The university brokered a deal: White could keep ancestral remains provided museum staff and tribes could access them to conduct inventory and report them under NAGPRA.

Joyce said the arrangement was untenable and she felt unsupported by the university’s leadership. White continued to teach with the remains.

A Decade After NAGPRA

Myra Masiel-Zamora, now an archaeologist for the Pechanga Band of Indians, enrolled in White’s osteology class more than 20 years ago when she was 18 and a first-year student. But, she said, she withdrew from the course after a teaching assistant told her the human remains belonged to Native Americans.

“That was the first time I really truly learned that an institution could and can — and is — using real Native American ancestors as teaching tools,” she said. “I was really upset.”

Concern over institutions’ handling of Indigenous remains extended beyond the classroom.

Troubled by the slow pace of repatriations under NAGPRA, California lawmakers passed their own version of the law in 2001, aiming to close loopholes in the federal statute and allow tribes to claim remains regardless of whether they have federal recognition. But the state failed to fund an oversight committee established by the bill.

In 2007, without consulting tribes or offering public explanation, UC Berkeley abruptly fired museum employees who were responsible for NAGPRA compliance, and named White and others to a newly formed campus repatriation committee, according to tribal leaders.

That upset tribal members, who brought their concerns about the new committee to state senators. The firings “eliminated the only staff at the university that would stand up to Mr. Tim White and his offensive remarks regarding Native American tribes and our ancestral remains,” Reno Franklin, then a council member and now the chairman of the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians, said during a 2008 state legislative hearing.

In emails sent to ProPublica and NBC News, White sought to discredit the testimony by Franklin and others at the hearing by saying that it had been the result of a decadeslong effort by the university to use him as a scapegoat for its failures. White said he only held an advisory role and did not make final repatriation decisions.

Thousands of Native American remains were used as research materials in the Anthropology and Art Practice Building at UC Berkeley. (Justin Katigbak for ProPublica)

Meanwhile, White’s career was skyrocketing after he led a team that discovered and excavated a 4.4-million-year-old hominid unearthed in Ethiopia. It was deemed the scientific breakthrough of the year in 2009 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and cemented his reputation in the field. It also landed him, along with the likes of Barack Obama and Steve Jobs, on Time magazine’s 2010 list of the world’s 100 most influential people.

Two years later, White and two other professors sued to block the repatriation of two 9,000-year-old skeletons to the Kumeyaay, 12 tribes whose homelands straddle the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego. White and the other professors wanted to study the remains, which had been unearthed in 1976 from the grounds of the chancellor’s house on the University of California, San Diego, campus.

They argued that there wasn’t enough evidence to support the Kumeyaay’s ancestral connection to the remains, and that the UC system had failed to prove that the remains could legally be considered “Native American.” Based on the professors’ interpretation of the law, human remains had to have a cultural or biological link to a present-day tribe to be considered Native American.

They said that not allowing them to study the remains violated their rights as researchers. An appeals court ruled against the professors, citing the Kumeyaay’s sovereign immunity, meaning they couldn’t be sued.

As tribes’ frustration with the lack of progress on repatriations grew, UC Berkeley convened a “tribal forum” in 2017. In the private gathering, tribal leaders and others expressed anger that university staff, including White, had resisted their requests to repatriate and that the university was requiring an excessive amount of proof to reclaim ancestors, according to an internal university report.

The following year, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ disbanded the campus’ NAGPRA committee that White had served on, records show. The university established a new one that did not include him.

Meanwhile, Berkeley prepared for its biggest repatriation to date: the return of more than 1,400 ancestors to the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, a small tribe whose ancestors’ remains were excavated from burial grounds along California’s coast and Channel Islands. According to the school’s NAGPRA inventory records, many of the remains had been taken by an archaeologist in 1901 whose expeditions were funded by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, wife of mining magnate George Hearst and namesake of UC Berkeley’s anthropology museum.

UC Berkeley held on to the Chumash remains and loaned some to White for research projects, before returning them to the tribe in the summer of 2018.

When the repatriation day finally came, Nakia Zavalla and other tribal members drove 300 miles to campus and entered a backroom of the anthropology building where UC Berkeley stored their ancestors.

“Going into that facility for the first time was horrifying. Literally shelves of human remains,” said Zavalla, the tribe’s cultural director. “And you pull them out, and there’s ancestors mixed all together, sometimes just all femur bones, a tray full of skulls.”

Nakia Zavalla, cultural director of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, said the tribe had to bring its own cardboard boxes when retrieving repatriated remains. (Alejandra Rubio for NBC and ProPublica)

Zavalla said tribal members had to bring their own cardboard boxes to carry their ancestors home for burial — a complaint other tribal nations have made in dealing with the university. UC Berkeley officials said they were unaware of Zavalla’s “disturbing account” but have changed their policies to ensure they provide assistance “as requested by Tribes.”

Zavalla said the visit highlighted how the university had deprived the tribe of more than ancestral remains, she said. The university housed recordings and items that ethnographers and anthropologists had previously collected from Chumash elders.

For Zavalla, the information could have benefited her and other tribal members’ efforts to revitalize the Santa Ynez Chumash’s language and traditions — which government policies once sought to eradicate. But the information was not freely shared, she said: “They stole those items.”

The Chumash reservation is in California’s Santa Ynez Valley. (Alejandra Rubio for NBC and ProPublica) “They Need to Go Home”

California state lawmakers passed a bill in 2018 to expand the Native American Heritage Commission’s oversight of repatriation policies and compliance committees within the UC system. The legislation called for an audit of all UC campuses’ compliance with NAGPRA.

The following year, UC Berkeley finally barred the use of Native American remains for teaching or research, according to the university.

The state auditor’s office announced the results of its review in 2020, singling out UC Berkeley for making onerous demands of tribes claiming remains.

The auditor also noted that UC Berkeley had identified 180 missing artifacts or human remains. In a statement, UC Berkeley said staff had searched for the missing remains and artifacts, some of which had been lost for more than a century.

Soon after the audit, the UC president’s office called for all campuses to search departments that historically studied human remains for any that had not been previously reported.

In August 2020, White reported the contents of the collection he taught with to university administrators.

White told ProPublica and NBC News that given the lack of documentation, it would be impossible to determine if they were Native American, much less say which tribe they should be returned to.

“There’s nobody on this planet who can sit down and tell you what the cultural affiliation of this lower jaw is, or that lower jaw is. Nobody can do that,” he said.

The Native American Heritage Commission is continuing to press UC Berkeley for answers and accountability for its handling of the collection White reported.

Bojorquez, the tribal chairman and an NAHC commissioner, said it was “mind-blowing” that Berkeley still has not provided any documentation on the origins of the collection.

The university should have consulted tribes sooner, he said, to ensure the remains were handled respectfully and to help speed the repatriation process. “So much happened to these ancestors,” he said — they should not be in a box or on a shelf.

“They need to go home,” he said.

More Missing

Separate from the teaching collection that White reported in 2020, he also notified administrators that he’d discovered remains with museum labels stashed in gray bins in a teaching laboratory. They later were identified as the partial remains of six ancestors of the Santa Ynez Chumash that were supposed to have been repatriated in 2018.

When UC Berkeley finally informed the Chumash six months later, it felt like a “blow to the chest,” said Zavalla, the tribe’s cultural director. Zavalla and other tribal staff members drove to Berkeley to retrieve the remains.

“I felt lied to,” she said. “They did not give us all of the ancestors, and they didn’t do their due diligence.”

The discovery of the missing remains outraged Sam Cohen, an attorney for the tribe, who called for probes into whether UC Berkeley or White had violated policies or laws.

“He is considered untouchable, I think, by Berkeley because he’s so famous in human evolution,” Cohen said of White. “He basically wasn’t going to voluntarily comply with anything until he was forced.”

White said he was unsure how the remains ended up in the teaching laboratory. He suggested they may have been mistakenly placed in his lab during a move years ago while he was overseas. He provided ProPublica and NBC News with a copy of an email from an investigator with UC Berkeley's Office of Risk and Compliance Services, which said the office found no violation on his part regarding the Chumash remains. UC Berkeley declined to comment on the outcome of the investigation, calling it a personnel matter.

“I have accounted for everything that happened in granular detail,” White said in an interview.

Chancellor Christ apologized to the tribe in December in a letter and acknowledged: “We do understand that, given our history, it is difficult for tribes to have confidence in our university and Professor White.”

The apology was little consolation, Cohen said, especially since it came with yet another painful acknowledgement. University records show there are still more unreturned Chumash ancestors. So far, they have yet to be found.

Christ assured the Chumash that the university was committed to returning all Native American ancestors to all tribes. UC Berkeley officials estimate it will be at least a decade before that happens.

Alex Mierjeski contributed research. Ash Ngu contributed data analysis.

Correction

March 5, 2023: A photo caption with this story originally misstated the positions of Kalehua Caceres and Edward Halealoha Ayau. Caceres was representing the Office of Hawaiian Affairs but is not an employee. Ayau is the former director of Hui Mālama I Nā Kūpuna O Hawai’i Nei, not its current executive director.

by Mary Hudetz, ProPublica, and Graham Lee Brewer, NBC News

Alaska Says It’s Now Legal “in Some Instances” to Discriminate Against LGBTQ Individuals

2 years 7 months ago

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

In June 2020, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that workplace discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity was illegal, Alaska quickly moved to follow suit.

It published new guidelines in 2021 saying Alaska’s LGBTQ protections now extended beyond the workplace to housing, government practices, finance and “public accommodation.” It updated the website of the Alaska State Commission for Human Rights to explicitly say it was illegal to discriminate against someone because of that person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

The executive director for the state commission co-wrote an essay describing the ruling as a “sea change under Alaska law for LGBTQ+ individuals’ rights to be free from discrimination.”

But a year later, the commission quietly reversed that position. It deleted language from the state website promising equal protections for transgender and gay Alaskans against most categories of discrimination, and it began refusing to investigate complaints. Only employment-related complaints would now be accepted, and investigators dropped any non-employment LGBTQ civil rights cases they had been working on.

The Alaska State Commission for Human Rights website previously stated, “In Alaska it is illegal to discriminate … because of … sexual orientation / gender identity or ‘expression.’” As of Aug. 18, 2022, the site removed the language saying it was illegal to discriminate against LGBTQ people. A reference that was added lower on the page now says it is illegal to discriminate for those reasons “in some instances”. (Highlights added by ProPublica for emphasis)

An investigation by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica found the decision had been requested by a conservative Christian group and was made the week of the Republican primary for governor, in which Gov. Mike Dunleavy was criticized for not being conservative enough. The commission made the change on the advice of Attorney General Treg Taylor and announced it publicly via its Twitter feed — which currently has 31 followers — on Election Day.

The LGBTQ advocacy nonprofit Identity Alaska called the reversal “state-sponsored discrimination.”

The group noted that discrimination against LGBTQ people can occur in a variety of domains, including housing, financing and other decisions by the state. “The real-world consequences of these policies are harms to LGBTQIA+ Alaskans,” Identity Alaska’s board said in a written statement to the Daily News and ProPublica.

“Without regard to sexual orientation or gender identity, all Alaskans should be protected against discrimination at the Alaska State Commission for Human Rights,” the statement said.

Robert Corbisier, who has been executive director of the Alaska State Commission for Human Rights since 2019, said the attorney general directed him to make the change in an email, though Corbisier said he would not provide the news organizations with a copy of it. He said that Taylor said the Supreme Court case, known as Bostock v. Clayton County, was limited to employment discrimination and therefore the agency should limit its own enforcement to employment matters, unless the state Legislature expanded its authority.

Taylor is Dunleavy’s third attorney general appointee. The governor’s first choice, Kevin Clarkson, resigned in August 2020 when the Daily News and ProPublica reported he sent hundreds of unwanted texts to a colleague. Dunleavy’s next nominee to lead the Alaska Department of Law, Ed Sniffen, resigned as the newsrooms were preparing an article about a woman who had accused him of sexual misconduct that occurred in 1991. (Based on those accusations, the state charged Sniffen with three felony counts of sexual abuse of a minor. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.)

Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor, foreground, appears before the House Judiciary Committee for a confirmation hearing in 2021 in Juneau. (Becky Bohrer/AP Photo)

Taylor refused to be interviewed. In response to questions about the timing and purpose of his communications with the commission, his office provided a written statement.

“The Department of Law’s role is to provide legal advice to state government based on the law. The department does not make policy. Policy decisions are left up to the department’s clients, which include most executive branch departments, divisions, agencies, boards and commissions, including ASCHR,” Taylor said. “As necessitated by changes in the law or the need to correct prior advice, the department will update the advice it has previously provided to its clients.”

The office noted that Alaska joined other states in suing the federal government in August 2021 to block the application of the Bostock decision to LGBTQ people in schools and government jobs. A federal judge sided with the states and issued a preliminary injunction last year; the federal government is appealing.

Dunleavy declined interview requests. In a written statement, a spokesperson said, “The Governor’s office was not involved in the Department of Law’s legal advice on LGBTQ+ discrimination cases.”

Asked why the commission changed its policy based on a brief communication from the attorney general, Corbisier said, “The attorney general is counsel to the agency. And, I mean, I’m a lawyer. I’ve been in private practice. I think you should do what your lawyer tells you to do.”

The human rights commission describes itself as an impartial, nonpartisan arm of state government. Dunleavy ordered an investigation into the former executive director in 2019, for example, after she made a post to the agency’s Facebook page criticizing a “black rifles matter” sticker as racist.

The post drew an outcry from Alaska conservatives and gun owners, and the director was suspended for 15 days. She soon resigned, followed by the commission chairman, a gay Black man. Both said at the time that they hoped their departures would help the commission put the controversy to rest and allow it to resume its work.

The current commission chairperson said he once filed an equal opportunity employment complaint claiming he had been passed over for a job in the U.S. Army because he is a man. He has in the past year posted tweets questioning the validity of transgender identity.

“So this Roe v. Wade leak is said to be a preview of an attack against women. To the Left, what’s a woman,” the chair, Zackary Gottshall, tweeted on May 3, 2022. Two months later he retweeted a statement by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, saying, “Crazy this needs to be said, but men can’t get pregnant.”

Asked by the Daily News and ProPublica about his views on transgender issues, Gottshall wrote: “As per my religious beliefs and convictions, I believe in the family unit as a whole, that being a primary social group consisting of parents and children. Everyone has the right to define themselves and/or identify themselves as they see fit. Everyone also has the right to respectfully disagree based upon the protections under the 1st Amendment.”

Gottshall’s wife, Heather Gottshall, served as campaign field director for Kelly Tshibaka, who lost to incumbent Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski last year. As a Harvard Law student, Tshibaka wrote in support of an organization that advocated for gay conversion therapy, stating that “unlike race or gender, homosexuality is a choice.” Heather Gottshall also is one of three registered directors for a nonprofit called Preserve Democracy, created by Tshibaka in December.

The commission reelected Zackary Gottshall as chairman at its annual meeting on Feb. 22.

State law does not explicitly offer civil rights protection to gay and transgender people.

But under federal law, Title VII of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 “prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.”

With the Bostock ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court found sex discrimination includes discrimination against people based on sexual orientation or gender identity. In Alaska, the state Supreme Court has found that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act provides the framework for Alaska’s civil rights laws.

It was based on that precedent that the Alaska State Commission for Human Rights began accepting all categories of anti-LGBTQ discrimination complaints in 2021.

“The guidance we received from the Department of Law was, ‘You should be taking all LGBTQ cases’” in the areas in which the commission has jurisdiction, Corbisier said in a recent interview. “So employment, public accommodation, sale and rental of real property, credit and financing, and government practices. Retaliation is also a covered jurisdiction.”

That legal advice, he said, came from Kevin Higgins, an assistant attorney general assigned to advise the commission.

Neither Higgins nor Corbisier would provide the written advice, saying it was covered by attorney-client privilege.

Even so, the advice from the state Department of Law suggested that the Bostock decision had broader implications for LGBTQ rights in Alaska.

“We started thinking we had the ability to take cases across the board,” Corbisier said.

Jim Minnery, the president of the conservative Christian group Alaska Family Council, became aware of the new policy. The family council does not hesitate to criticize Republican candidates for what it considers to be too liberal a view of LGBTQ issues.

“The AK State Commission on Human Rights is simply another bureaucracy trying to seize power to make its own laws. This can’t pass in Juneau through elected office holders so they’re trying to pull an end run,” Minnery said in a text message.

Minnery said his group informed the Dunleavy administration in the beginning of 2021 that “the ASCHR was trying to use the Bostock ruling to circumvent having to pass legislation.”

The attorney general’s office said Minnery’s group did not influence its guidance.

What is clear, however, is that around the time of last year’s primary election, the attorney general personally got involved.

Unlike in most states, the Alaska attorney general is appointed by the governor rather than elected.

Dunleavy appointed Taylor as acting attorney general after Sniffen resigned in January 2021. Taylor had twice run unsuccessfully for local political office. Since becoming attorney general, he has appeared on public records as the director for a group that paid for attack ads on Democratic candidates during the 2022 election cycle and is advertised as the host for a $15,000-a-head fundraiser the group is planning this summer.

Dunleavy entered the summer facing two well-funded Republicans who positioned themselves as more conservative than the incumbent.

On a July 8 talk radio show in Kenai, host Bob Bird called on the governor’s spokesperson to explain why Dunleavy had settled a federal lawsuit that now allowed public funds to be used for transgender surgeries and hormone treatments.

What would Dunleavy do, Bird hypothesized, if the Supreme Court “ruled that white males were not fully human,” according to an account by the conservative faith-based news website Alaska Watchman.

“At what point would say a governor, a so-called conservative governor, say we’re just not going to obey that because white males are human beings?” Bird asked, according to the website.

The Dunleavy spokesperson, Dave Stieren, said he had asked the same question in an effort to understand the state’s choices for paying for gender-affirming surgeries, the site reported. He said his understanding, at the time, was that Alaska’s federal Medicaid funding was at risk if the state refused the payments.

Bird at one point told the governor’s spokesperson: “The people will rally to somebody who shows spine.”

On July 11, the commission received a briefing on the status of LGBTQ protections in Alaska at the request of Gottshall. According to a copy of the briefing, provided by Gottshall, the commission at that time was still investigating all categories of discrimination against Alaskans based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

Within the next few weeks, the director for the state human rights commission received a new email about the Bostock ruling and LGBTQ rights law in Alaska. This time it was from the attorney general himself, Corbisier said in a phone interview.

He said the email was “not a formal AG opinion.”

“The substance of it was, you know, ‘Your jurisdiction is for LGBTQ, is just employment,’” he said.

The Department of Law has not yet responded to a records request for the email.

It’s unclear when Taylor sent the email, but Corbisier said it was just before the commission posted a note about the change to Twitter and Facebook on Aug. 16, the day of the primary election.

“Based upon updated legal advice, ASCHR will only be able to take LGBTQ+ employment discrimination cases filed under AS 18.80.220. Our position that LGBTQ+ discrimination applied to places of public accommodation, housing, credit/financing, and government practices is void,” the social media posts said.

The agency issued no press release saying it was rolling back enforcement of equality laws. There was no essay or editorials. The human rights commission’s social media posts reached only a smattering of followers on the day of the statewide primary elections.

The commission also began deleting language from its website.

The homepage, as of Aug. 15, had stated, “In Alaska it is illegal to discriminate in employment, places of public accommodation, sale of rental or real property, financing and credit, practices by the state or its political subdivisions because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation / gender identity or ‘expression,’ national origin, physical disability.”

According to the Internet Archive, the page was changed sometime between Aug. 16 and Aug. 18 to remove the words: “sexual orientation / gender identity or ‘expression’” from the list of reasons it is illegal to discriminate against someone.

A line was added lower on the page saying that it is “in some instances” illegal to discriminate against someone based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Elsewhere on the website, the commission removed a link to a document called “ASCHR LGBTQ Discrimination Guide.”

In the meantime, the commission stopped accepting complaints of LGBTQ discrimination except for those that are workplace related.

It’s unclear how many non-workplace complaints the commission received during the year it was accepting those cases. At first, Corbisier said he couldn’t provide that number because complaints are confidential under state law.

When reminded that the commission does publish an annual report that provides the number of complaints received based on the category of discrimination, Corbisier said, “You might have just caught me because I know we started tracking LGBTQ (complaints) when that jurisdiction originally changed.”

The director later called back to say no statistics would be available on the number and nature of anti-LGBTQ complaints the commission received because that information was not tracked within its database. (Any such complaints would have been filed under the more broad category of sex discrimination, he said.)

The commission’s 2022 annual report showed 134 complaints were filed in 2022, including 25 based on sex.

Brandon Nakasato served on the human rights commission from 2016 to 2019. He resigned as chairman around the same time the former director was suspended for publicly criticizing the “black rifles matter” sticker she saw on a truck in the agency’s parking lot.

Alaska State Commission for Human Rights members Marcus Sanders, left, David Barton, middle, and Brandon Nakasato at a meeting of the panel in 2019. “I think legislators need to hear how this lack of protection is hurting people,” Nakasato said. (Mark Thiessen/AP Photo)

It hasn’t been a smooth ride since. The agency made headlines in November 2022 when its former executive director, a black woman, sued the state saying that she was subjected to a hostile work environment, underpaid compared with past directors and fired because of her gender, race and status as a military veteran. The state denied the claims in a November answer to the lawsuit; the case is awaiting trial in federal court.

Nakasato had been part of an effort in 2016 to try and convince the Alaska Legislature, unsuccessfully, to change state law to enshrine civil rights protections for gay and transgender people so that the commission wouldn’t have to rely on the whims of judges.

“I think legislators need to hear how this lack of protection is hurting people,” he said. “I was one of those little gay kids that considered killing themselves, living in a rural area, who believes that they were the weirdest person on earth. And there are teens like that in the (Alaska) Bush right now who need to hear that their leaders are caring for them too.”

Have you filed or tried to file a complaint alleging discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity with the Alaska State Commission for Human Rights? If so, we’d like to hear about your experience. Please email us at alaska@propublica.org.

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

New Bill Could End Police Ticketing in Illinois Schools

2 years 7 months ago

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

This story is a collaboration between ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune.

A new bill in the Illinois House aims to stop schools from working with police to issue students tickets for minor misbehavior, a harmful and sometimes costly practice that many districts have continued despite pleas to stop from the state’s top education officials.

An investigation by ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune revealed last year that school-based ticketing was rampant across Illinois, with police writing citations that can result in a fine of up to $750 for conduct once handled by the principal’s office.

A 2015 Illinois law prohibits schools from fining students as a form of discipline; school officials instead have been referring students to police, who then ticket the students for fighting, littering, theft, possessing vaping devices and other violations of local ordinances.

The new legislation, introduced last month, would amend the state’s school code to make it illegal for school personnel to involve police to issue students citations for incidents that can be addressed through a school’s disciplinary process.

“We have to close that loophole and end school-based ticketing,” said Rep. La Shawn Ford, a Democrat from Chicago who is sponsoring the legislation. “There is no place for this type of system to be in our schools.”

Ford’s legislation deals only with school tickets, which are issued for civil violations of local laws and often are adjudicated in administrative hearings. The bill is not intended to stop police from arresting students for crimes. It would also not prevent schools from seeking restitution from students for lost, stolen or damaged property.

After the Tribune and ProPublica began publishing the investigative series “The Price Kids Pay” in April 2022, then-state education Superintendent Carmen Ayala urged schools to stop working with police to ticket students and “consider both the cost and the consequences of these fines.”

The investigation documented about 12,000 tickets written to students over three school years and also found that, in places where information was available on the race of ticketed students, Black students were twice as likely to be ticketed as their white peers. (Use our interactive database to look up how many and what kinds of tickets have been issued in an Illinois public school or district.)

Some school districts heeded Ayala’s plea or scaled back on ticketing, but new reporting shows that many others have continued the practice into this school year.

Over the last seven weeks, ProPublica and the Tribune sought new ticketing records for roughly 60 Illinois schools in districts that had some of the highest numbers of citations in previous years. Reporters have been able to obtain ticket records in 37 of those schools so far and found that students in 26 — or 70% — of them have been ticketed this school year, though some districts have scaled back the practice.

Ticketing has continued even in District U-46, the state’s second-largest district, where then-Superintendent Tony Sanders had been shocked to learn of the practice and told his administrators and police working in district schools to stop ticketing students. At the same time, he tweaked the student code of conduct to limit when schools should involve police in student incidents.

Sanders, who took over last week as the new state superintendent, said Wednesday he was “appalled and saddened” to learn that students are still being cited by school-based police, known as resource officers, in some of the district’s schools.

At South Elgin High School in U-46, students have not received any tickets this year, compared with 83 last school year. But police have ticketed students at the district’s Bartlett High School, most often for fighting and possession of cannabis, with fines between $50 and $250. At the two U-46 high schools in the city of Elgin, students have been ticketed, but city officials initially assigned them to counseling or another community program instead of a fine.

“I tried to do it by saying, ‘Effective immediately, we’re not doing it any longer.’ That clearly didn't work,” Sanders said in an interview. “I think legislation is needed. I think professional development for staff in schools and school resource officers is needed. You can’t just say, ‘No more ticketing,’ and have that be effective.”

The Illinois State Board of Education supports Ford’s legislation, Sanders said, and is helping shape the language of the final bill.

U-46 district spokesperson Tara Burghart said administrators have been told they cannot sign tickets as complainants. She said the schools don’t decide whether to ticket and fine students; the police and municipalities do.

Ticketing students is also still routine at McHenry Community High School in McHenry, Amos Alonzo Stagg High School in Palos Hills and Plainfield South High School on the border of Plainfield and Joliet, for example. At Stagg, police have written students more tickets so far this school year than they did in all of the 2021-22 school year. Most of the tickets were for tobacco vaping devices or for cannabis, records show.

A spokesperson for Consolidated High School District 230, which includes Stagg, said the district believes that school officials “are obligated to inform local police” when a city ordinance is violated.

“If a student is smoking or vaping while at school, they are still breaking the law and there are consequences to those actions. Smoking at school does not preclude police from enforcing the law,” spokesperson Jennifer Waterman wrote in an email. “We take all offenses seriously. We want our halls to be clean, safe and secure.”

Amos Alonzo Stagg High School (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)

In East Peoria Community High School District 309, where students this year have continued to get tickets for theft, for fighting and for possession of cannabis and vape materials, Superintendent Marjorie Greuter said the school still refers students to police for tickets so the school doesn’t become a place where young people can break the law without consequences.

“This would, in effect, make the school a ‘safe’ zone for breaking an ordinance,” she said.

East Peoria police records show that officers ticket young people at the high school more than anywhere else in the city.

At schools throughout the state, students and their families have continued to pay a high price. McHenry High School students have been issued more than 50 tickets so far this school year, and the city has imposed at least $7,500 in fines and fees, records show. High school students in Oswego got more than 40 tickets totaling over $7,000. At Jacobs High School in Algonquin, police have written 28 tickets at $100 each, police records show. In all, at 11 high schools in McHenry, Palos Hills, Oswego, Algonquin and Plainfield, the fines for about 250 tickets totaled more than $36,000. (Oswego, McHenry, Algonquin and Plainfield school officials did not respond to requests for comment.)

“It is not an effective tool when you write these tickets. Children are children. They don’t pay. It drives the parents deeper in debt and causes them to be responsible. It is just a total economic injustice,” Ford said.

Ayala similarly said in her letter to school officials last April that issuing tickets does not lead to positive changes in behavior. “There is no evidence that tickets lead to fewer fights or less vaping,” she wrote.

The steep costs associated with ticketing drew the attention of Debt Free Justice Illinois, a coalition of advocacy groups working to end fines and fees for youths in the justice system. That group is behind efforts to change Illinois law in response to the Chicago Tribune-ProPublica investigation.

“There’s an increasing recognition of the financial penalties that go along with this and the impact of those financial penalties,” said Lisa Jacobs, an associate director with the legislation and policy clinic at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Jacobs has been working with the coalition.

Some communities have scaled back how often students were ticketed and for what reasons. Last school year, for example, police in Woodstock, northwest of Chicago, wrote 87 tickets to students in Woodstock Community Unit School District 200, mostly for tobacco and cannabis possession. This school year, they have issued 10 tickets, all but one for fights, police records show.

In some places, such as Bloom Township High School District 206 in the suburbs south of Chicago and Naperville Community Unit School District 203 in the western suburbs, records from the districts and police show no citations issued to students this school year. Last school year, police issued nearly 60 tickets to Bloom Trail students and about 30 tickets to Naperville high school students, records show.

Bloom officials said last spring that they would end the practice of ticketing, while Naperville police said they have shifted to less punitive forms of discipline.

“While our emphasis was never solely on citations, our policy now focuses even more closely on restorative justice measures, which is likely responsible for the decrease in tickets,” Naperville Police Chief Jason Arres wrote in a statement. He said police department rules call for “fair and consistent” handling of incidents involving young people, “and we will remain committed to that moving forward.”

Naperville, however, has continued to prosecute a former Naperville North student who received a citation for theft in 2019 after she said she mistakenly took another student’s AirPods. Now a college student, Amara Harris has maintained her innocence and has refused to pay a fine. Her case is expected to go to trial this year.

Illinois Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, a Democrat from suburban Maywood, said she supports Ford’s legislation. Lightford was the chief sponsor of the 2015 law, known as Senate Bill 100, that broadly overhauled school discipline in the state, including a ban on fining students as punishment.

Lightford lamented that some school districts have found ways to get around the 2015 law, which did not penalize school districts for noncompliance.

“School districts have to be accountable for laws that we pass that they do not implement,” Lightford said.

Ford’s new bill, however, includes no oversight or enforcement measures for any districts that continue having students ticketed at school.

Students from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism contributed to this reporting by filing public records requests.

by Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica, and Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune

How to File Taxes for Free Without TurboTax

2 years 7 months ago

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Intuit, the Silicon Valley software giant behind TurboTax, doesn’t provide the only way to file your taxes electronically, but it has captured the market share like no other.

For over two decades, Intuit waged a campaign to prevent the federal government from making filing taxes simple and free for most taxpayers. The company spent millions of dollars on lobbying to restrict the IRS from creating its own free filing system, all while growing its multibillion-dollar franchise.

If you made $73,000 or less in 2022, you can file your federal taxes for free through the IRS Free File program. You must start at the IRS Free File page to get the correct tax products.

Why Do I Have to Pay TurboTax?

Intuit once participated in the IRS Free File program, a public-private partnership between the IRS and tax software companies to provide free tax filing services to millions of lower-income Americans. But it left the program in 2021 after ProPublica detailed the many ways TurboTax tricked Americans into paying to file their return.

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TurboTax made its free version difficult to find, deliberately hiding its Free File landing page from search engines. (The code that enabled this has since been removed.) Through “dark pattern” web design tricks, it directed customers away from TurboTax’s Free File software in favor of a paid option. Meanwhile, it marketed some tax software options as “free” but would later charge taxpayers fees to finish the process.

After ProPublica reported on TurboTax’s deceptive campaign to stop Americans from filing for free, the FTC began investigating Intuit and last year sued to stop TurboTax’s “free” ad campaign. In May 2022, the company reached a $141 million settlement with state attorneys general to pay lower-income Americans who were “unfairly charged” for filing their taxes. Intuit did not admit any wrongdoing in the settlement.

Today, TurboTax continues to advertise a “free” version but notes it’s only for simple tax returns — defined by Intuit as IRS Form 1040 only “with no added complexity.” The FTC said only one-third of all tax filers in 2020 qualified for TurboTax’s “simple return.”

How to Do Taxes for Free Without TurboTax

If you made less than $73,000 in 2022, you can file for free with the IRS Free File program. You must start at the IRS Free File site to access the truly free version of the tax software.

According to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, about 70% of taxpayers were eligible to file for these free guided tax preparation programs during the 2020 tax year, but less than 3% of eligible taxpayers used the program.

There are two ways you can file your taxes through the program: You can use guided tax preparation (provided by partner companies) or use IRS fillable forms.

Guided Tax Preparation

If you’ve used TurboTax before, you’re familiar with the guided tax preparation process. The IRS offers 11 free guided tax preparation options delivered by participating tax preparation companies. The software will ask you simple questions and compute all the math for you.

Each free option has different requirements to use them for free. Some tax preparers will charge for state tax filings, for example, while others only offer free services for those making under $60,000. The IRS created a tool to browse free file options based on your adjusted gross income, filing status, age, state of residence, eligibility for the earned income tax credit and military status.

Free Fillable Forms

You can also choose to do the work yourself directly on the IRS website by filling out Free File Fillable Forms, which are essentially electronic versions of IRS paper forms. Anyone, regardless of income, can file their taxes for free with these forms. With this method, you don’t get step-by-step guidance, and you’ll have to work on your state tax return separately.

Step by Step: How to File Your Taxes Through the IRS Free File Program

1. Gather your tax documents. Before you begin guided tax preparation, find all documents related to your income so you can easily fill out your tax return. These forms and information could include:

  • All income statements like W2s or 1099s.
  • Any information about adjustments to your income you’ll need to make.
  • Dependent and spouse information, such as Social Security numbers.
  • Your adjusted gross income from 2021 and self-selected personal identification number from the 2021 tax year.

A full list of necessary paperwork can be found here, but this information will get you started on selecting a free file option.

2. Browse free file options. Use the IRS Free File Online Lookup Tool to direct you to the offers you qualify for based on your adjusted gross income, filing status, age, state of residence, eligibility for the earned income tax credit and military status.

Or you can browse the 11 free file programs offered by On-LineTaxes, 1040Now, ezTaxReturn.com, FileYourTaxes.com, TaxAct, FreeTaxUSA and TaxSlayer.

3. Choose the program that meets your needs. Now, select the program that you want. It will take you to the chosen IRS partner’s landing page, where you will need to create a new account or sign into an existing account. From there, the program will guide you through e-filing your tax return.

Important: To receive the free file option, you must begin your guided tax preparation at IRS.gov. If you go directly to a company’s website, you may not receive the benefits offered through the IRS Free File program.

About this guide: ProPublica has reported on the IRS, the Free File program and other tax topics for years. ProPublica’s tax guide is not personalized tax advice. Speak to a tax professional about your specific tax situation.

Kristen Doerer is a reporter in Washington, D.C. Her writing has appeared in PBS NewsHour, The Guardian and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other places. Follow her on Twitter at @k2doe.

by Kristen Doerer for ProPublica

Colorado Lawmakers Consider Reforms to the Way Family Courts Handle Abuse Allegations

2 years 7 months ago

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.

Colorado lawmakers are considering two bills that would reform the way family courts in the state handle cases involving allegations of domestic abuse, saying ProPublica’s reporting on the issue has catalyzed efforts to change the state’s custody evaluation system.

Rep. Mike Weissman, an Aurora Democrat and the chair of the state House Judiciary Committee, praised ProPublica’s investigation, which found that four custody evaluators on the state-approved roster last year had been charged with harassment or domestic violence. In one case, the charges were dismissed. One case — that of psychologist Mark Kilmer — led to a conviction. In the two others, it is unclear how the charges were resolved.

Rep. Meg Froelich, a Democrat representing Englewood and a co-sponsor of one of the bills, said she gave a copy of the article to every judiciary committee member before the legislative session got underway.

“We don’t usually see in-depth coverage on this kind of thing,” Weissman said.

Meanwhile, Kilmer, who was suspended from working as a custody evaluator following publication of ProPublica’s story, is being sued by six plaintiffs over his involvement in their cases.

ProPublica’s story revealed that Kilmer was appointed to evaluate custody disputes involving allegations of domestic abuse despite Kilmer himself being charged with assault in 2006, after his then-wife said he pushed her to the bathroom floor, according to police reports. He pleaded guilty to harassment in 2007. Kilmer told ProPublica that his guilty plea was a result of poor legal representation and that his ex-wife made false allegations to get him arrested.

Kilmer was quoted in the story saying he did not believe about 90% of the claims of abuse he encountered in his work — an estimate he said was based on experience, not scientific research.

The bill co-sponsored by Froelich would require experts who advise the court on custody proceedings to have expertise in domestic violence and child abuse and would restrict judges from ordering forced “reunification” treatments that cut a child off from their protective parent, meaning the parent who expressed concerns about abuse or neglect. Court-ordered reunification “camps” often prohibit contact between minors and the protective parent as part of “therapeutic” treatment.

Among those testifying on behalf of the legislation was Elina Asensio, a teenager who was featured in the ProPublica article. Elina’s father was charged with felony child abuse and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault after dragging her up a flight of stairs. Kilmer was appointed to evaluate the case and recommended that she remain under the authority of her father. The parties ultimately resolved the custody dispute through arbitration and Elina remains partially under her father’s authority.

“The system failed me. My voice did not matter,” Elina, 17, told the committee. “My childhood has been taken for me. To this day, I still don't know what peace feels like.”

Through his lawyer, Elina’s father, Cedric Asensio, told ProPublica that while the initial charge of felony child abuse against him was “very serious,” the case’s ultimate resolution — a misdemeanor assault plea — indicated “there is much more to the story.”

The second bill, which passed the House Judiciary Committee and is pending budget approval before the Colorado General Assembly this week, would create a task force to study training requirements for judicial personnel on the topics of domestic violence and sexual assault, among other crimes.

The plaintiffs suing Kilmer, who include Elina’s mother, Karin Asensio, allege fraud and breach of contract related to his work on their cases. They accuse Kilmer, who is licensed as a psychologist in Colorado, of violating the American Psychological Association’s code of conduct by advising the court on matters related to domestic violence and child abuse despite his history of domestic violence.

The plaintiffs claim they would not have hired Kilmer had they known his personal history and views about abuse allegations, which they learned of from ProPublica’s reporting, according to the complaint.

In Colorado, the fees for parental responsibility evaluations — expert psychological assessments intended to inform judges’ custody decisions — are paid by the parties to a case. Fees are not capped and typically range between $12,000 and $30,000 for a custody evaluation, with some Colorado parents reporting that they paid over $50,000.

Kilmer didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Following his suspension last fall, Kilmer wrote to the court and criticized ProPublica’s investigation as the work of a “nonsense journalist” and apologized to his colleagues “for any inconveniences my well-intentioned interview may have caused for party/client relations past, present and future.”

“I have little experience with the print media, personally or professionally,” Kilmer told the court in an email obtained through a public records request. He said he had been willing to publicly discuss his work as a custody evaluator because “I assumed that it might help the practice here in Colorado, as it is an esoteric world that most people have little or no idea of how it works. Inadvertently, I entered into a political maelstrom that I did not understand existed.”

Since his suspension, Kilmer has continued to testify on cases to which he was previously appointed by Colorado courts. In one February hearing, Kilmer told a judge that the suspension was informal and he was continuing his state appointment.

Jaime Watman, who oversees custody evaluators for the Colorado State Court Administrator’s Office, told ProPublica that Kilmer has been removed from the rosters of custody evaluators, but the decision about whether he completes the appointments he was previously given “is at the discretion of the appointing court.”

Lauren May Woodruff, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, also testified about her experience with Kilmer at the House Judiciary Committee hearing on the bill to require courts to consider past evidence of abuse before allocating custody.

Kilmer completed his evaluation of Woodruff’s case in January, months after his suspension, according to court records. In his report, Kilmer advised the court that Woodruff should share custody and decision-making power with her daughter’s father, despite multiple mandatory reports to Colorado’s Department of Human Services — including one filed by Kilmer himself — that the father had endangered the child through reckless driving, including driving over 100 mph at night. Custody orders in the case are pending.

Woodruff’s soon-to-be-ex-husband, William F. Woodruff, said in a statement: “None of these allegations have been founded by DHS or the Court.”

In his evaluations, Kilmer routinely cites parental alienation, a disputed psychological theory in which one parent is accused of brainwashing a child to turn them against the other parent. In email correspondence between Kilmer and Jennifer J. Harman, an associate professor of psychology at Colorado State University and a parental alienation scholar, Harman sympathized with Kilmer after ProPublica’s report was published.

“I can tell the article is part of a larger strategy,” Harman wrote.

At the legislative session, a handful of individuals voiced opposition to the bills, including Katie Rubano, who runs a parental alienation support group for parents in Colorado. Rubano, citing Harman’s research on the subject, argued that “passing this bill would not solve the problem of child abuse in Colorado.”

“We need experts but we need them to be better and be trained in all forms of child abuse, including parental alienation,” she said.

Froelich’s bill would align Colorado with federal efforts to encourage family court reform. Last year, President Joe Biden signed a law that allocates additional federal funds to states that update their child custody laws to better protect at-risk children.

Weissman said he has felt momentum on family court reform gathering in Colorado over the past few years and said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the state was one of the first to pass an equivalent to Kayden’s Law, a Pennsylvania act named for a child who was killed by her father during court-ordered unsupervised custody time, which he was granted despite his history of violence. Last March, Biden included provisions of Kayden’s Law in the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, committing federal funding to states that update family court laws to better protect children.

Colorado has frequently been a “leader in all manner of policy areas,” Weissman said, including legalizing cannabis and regulating ride-sharing companies. “We’re a place where we try new things when it becomes evident that they need to be tried.”

Update, March 2, 2023: This story has been updated to include a statement from William F. Woodruff.

by Hannah Dreyfus

Were You Affected by the Massive Wildfire in Northern New Mexico? We Want to Hear From You.

2 years 7 months ago

Eric Maestas didn’t have much time to spare on an afternoon in April when he stepped out of the old Memorial Middle School gymnasium with an armful of food, water and an extra pair of slippers.

The supplies were for his parents, waiting for him at a nearby campground. They’d been evacuated from their Cleveland home, threatened by what was becoming the biggest wildfire in New Mexico history. His parents were elderly, his father on oxygen. They feared their home had been consumed by flames.

Yet Maestas took a few moments to tell me, a reporter he didn’t know, what it was like to flee that home, that land, that village full of history and memories.

“Everybody was panicking,” he said, placing the slippers on top of boxes in the back seat of his sedan. “They shut down all the electricity. They shut down all the cellphones. There was nothing. And everybody was fighting to get gas and get out of there. It was pretty crazy.”

The blaze he was fleeing was the result of two planned fires, ignited by the United States Forest Service, that escaped containment lines and became the biggest wildfire in New Mexico history. The Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire ultimately burned more than 340,000 acres, destroyed at least 900 structures, including 400 homes, and forced about 15,000 people to flee. Then, monsoon rains fell on the scarred earth and floods further damaged rural homes, ranches, forests, watersheds and centuries-old waterways.

As a reporter with Source New Mexico, I’ve relayed similar tales about this disaster dozens of times since that Saturday afternoon in April.

Across more than 100 articles Source New Mexico has published since that first day, we’ve kept elected officials and state and federal agencies aware that the crisis here is still unfolding. With your help, we’ve revealed how the Forest Service barely met its own requirements for one of the prescribed burns, how the Federal Emergency Management Agency delayed aid for acequias — the waterways that have irrigated the land for generations — and how FEMA denials for housing aid have hurt families.

In order to hold the federal government accountable for how it is handling a crisis it sparked, I need to hear from you about how things are going. If you’ve got a few minutes, please reach out.

I was born and raised in New Mexico. I recently moved to Las Vegas, New Mexico, to dedicate all of my time to speaking to my new neighbors about the fire, the flood and the aftermath. I’ve partnered with ProPublica, a national nonprofit news organization that has provided resources and expertise to help me investigate the government’s response to the fire. I want to speak with as many of you as I can about what you’ve been through, whether you’ve gotten what you need and how the government has handled this.

The people working on this project are not lawyers, contractors or consultants who stand to make a profit off this disaster. We are journalists who will listen to you and investigate what happened.

Here’s how to reach me:

Phone: (505) 933-9013

Email: PLohmann@SourceNM.com

Or you can answer a few questions on this short form so I can learn about your experience and get in touch. Thank you.

We take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these stories for the purposes of our reporting and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story. We are the only ones reading what you submit.

Byard Duncan contributed reporting.

by Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico

Arizona Child Welfare Director Dismissed Amid GOP Attacks Speaks Out

2 years 7 months ago

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Arizona’s newly elected Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, has given up on another of her Cabinet nominees in the face of misleading attacks from Republicans in the state Legislature. Matthew Stewart was forced out last Wednesday after serving just a month and a half as Hobbs’ director of the Department of Child Safety, the state child protective services agency.

When Hobbs selected Stewart in December, she called him one of “the best minds Arizona has to offer” and a leader on racial justice issues who would “transform” a child welfare system that ProPublica and NBC News had found investigated the families of 1 in 3 Black children in metro Phoenix during a recent five-year period.

Now, Hobbs has forced Stewart to leave his post before he could defend his record in a public hearing.

In an interview with ProPublica, the first since his ouster, Stewart said the Republicans’ attacks on him are inaccurate and reputation-damaging. More than a dozen current and former DCS employees, all of whom were contacted independently by the news organization and not at Stewart’s recommendation, confirmed that the allegations about him that have since been circulating in the news media are unfounded.

“If you believe change is needed, and you make a decision to bring in a person who will create change, then you stand behind that person,” Stewart said of the governor abandoning him. “I’m an example of someone willing to take a risk going into a bureaucratic, deeply ingrained system trying to bring new thinking, new energy.”

“I wanted to have the opportunity to go through [the confirmation process] and defend myself,” Stewart said, adding that dismissing him was a “way for the governor to stay safe.”

It all started with a vaguely worded news release issued Wednesday by state Sen. Jake Hoffman, a Republican who has been banned from social media platforms for spreading misinformation and running an online troll farm. He has also denied Hobbs’ legitimacy as governor.

Hoffman chairs the Arizona Senate Committee on Director Nominations, a panel for vetting Cabinet appointments that was formed after Hobbs’ November victory over Republican Kari Lake and that never existed before 2023.

In his statement, Hoffman said that “Katie Hobbs openly touted skin color as her seemingly only priority in the search for the next potential DCS director.”

Stewart is Black and the son of the longtime senior pastor of Phoenix’s most prominent Black church. He previously worked at DCS for over a decade as a case manager and training supervisor before quitting over the racial disproportionality he saw in the agency’s enforcement.

Hoffman also said, without providing supporting detail, that Stewart had committed insubordination and taken an unauthorized absence during his prior stint working at the agency.

DCS disciplinary records, obtained by ProPublica from the department, show Stewart received this reprimand (his only complaint during his more than a decade on the job) because he asked to work from home in the spring of 2020, at the onset of the pandemic. His daughter is severely asthmatic, and a doctor had warned him against going in to the office.

Stewart said he informed Hobbs about this when he interviewed with her team, and they said it wasn’t a problem.

Hoffman, the Republican lawmaker, also cast aspersions on Stewart’s recent decisions to dismiss four top DCS officials — adding that some of those who’d been let go are “openly gay.”

According to an internal email obtained by ProPublica from DCS employees independent of Stewart, he did inform the staff on Jan. 20 that he was dismissing the department’s deputy director of field operations, its chief of the office of child welfare investigations and two top program administrators in Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located.

Matthew Stewart (Screenshot from an NBC Nightly News interview)

But Stewart had already told ProPublica in multiple interviews over the last year that those individuals were part of an institutional culture that had led to the agency’s high rate of investigations and separations of low-income families as well as its problem with turnover among overworked caseworkers — and that for DCS to change direction, they would have to go.

Trying to reform any agency, he has consistently said, requires replacing people in leadership positions.

Stewart said in an interview Sunday that his decisions to part ways with the four officials were run by the governor’s office and went through normal HR channels at the Arizona Department of Administration, and that he didn’t know each of the individuals’ sexual orientation.

Five current and former DCS employees who identify as LGBTQ also said in interviews or emails with ProPublica that Stewart has consistently supported them and worked closely with them, and that the implication of any discrimination by him is, in their view, without merit.

The governor’s office agrees that none of the issues brought up by the Republican committee had anything to do with Hobbs dismissing Stewart.

“Completely baseless,” said Ben Henderson, the governor’s director of operations, of the implication that there was anti-LGBTQ bias in Stewart’s personnel decisions.

Henderson told ProPublica that the real reason for forcing Stewart out was that while he had the “vision” to change the direction of DCS, he didn’t have the day-to-day administrative acumen to run an agency with a billion-dollar budget and thousands of employees.

The governor’s team declined to specify what exactly Stewart wasn’t capable of as an administrator or how a month and a half was enough time to know that he wasn’t up to the task.

Stewart said it is “news to me” that there was any issue with his performance, and that the governor’s office had never contacted him about this. He said that on Wednesday morning, they scheduled a meeting and told him it was clear to them that his confirmation wouldn’t make it past Republican opposition, and that they would therefore be withdrawing his nomination.

Nothing substantive about his record or managerial abilities was mentioned then or at any point in the past month and a half, Stewart reiterated, saying that he’d only received positive if sparse feedback from Hobbs’ office on his hiring and other executive decisions.

The version of events from the governor’s office “sounds like controlling the narrative,” Stewart said.

In an email Tuesday, C. Murphy Hebert, the governor’s spokesperson, said that Hobbs has “so much respect for Mr. Stewart” that she doesn’t want to challenge his experience of what happened last week. And the issue of his likely not getting through the committee process “was definitely part of the larger conversation.”

“The bottom line, Cabinet members serve at the pleasure of the Governor, and this is a decision that was made in everyone’s best interest,” Hebert said.

The governor’s staff said they’re having internal conversations about repairing the reputations of both Stewart and Dr. Theresa Cullen, who too was recently pulled from consideration as head of the state’s health department after similar attacks from Hoffman and his committee.

In Cullen’s case, several supporters of Stewart pointed out, the governor did at least issue a statement defending her.

After Stewart’s dismissal Wednesday, he was sent back to the DCS office to pack up his belongings and go home. Later that day, Hoffman, the Republican legislator, released his statement taking credit for the governor’s decision to remove Stewart and citing it as evidence of the need for his new Cabinet nominee vetting committee.

Claire Louge, executive director of the child maltreatment prevention organization Prevent Child Abuse Arizona, said she met with Stewart the morning before he was forced to leave. She said she asked him what he was looking for in the high-level positions he had dismissed people from.

Part of his answer was that he really wanted DCS leadership to have optimism and “show up differently” in the lives of struggling families, Louge said.

“What did they expect?” she said of the governor’s office. “Matthew Stewart is a known visionary, a known advocate, who did not have extensive administrative experience. They knew that.”

DCS staffers — some of whom took jobs at the agency since Stewart was hired because they wanted to work with him — say they are upset by the way he was treated, as are many people in Arizona’s Black community.

Dustin Sallaz, a case manager and later supervisor at DCS from 2017 to 2022 who is openly gay and has worked extensively with Stewart, said Stewart was always an “amazing” and “communicative” DCS colleague who took time to get to know the families he worked with — and that he was right to fire the people he fired.

Samantha Aiello was a case manager and program specialist at DCS from 2016 to 2022, when she left the department to work with Stewart’s nonprofit organization, Our Sister Our Brother, which advocates for vulnerable families caught up in the child welfare system. She also identifies as LGBTQ, noting that Stewart knew this and sent her an Edible Arrangement for her wedding.

“Matt is the most compassionate person I’ve ever had the chance to work for,” she said.

The current and former DCS employees interviewed by ProPublica agreed that the officials whom Stewart fired, all key figures in charge of the department’s day-to-day operations, were widely known for contributing to long-standing problems at the agency, including staff retention.

ProPublica has requested that DCS provide documentation of the officials’ complaints about Stewart but has not received the records.

The four officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

In an interview, Kim Quintero, director of communications for the Arizona Senate Republicans, said the allegations about Stewart came from a whistleblower whose identity Hoffman and his team are protecting. “We have attorneys that review these things before they even go out, so we did everything legally accurate,” she said, referring to documentation she said the committee reviewed.

Regarding the allegation that discrimination had something to do with Stewart’s decisions about which DCS officials to dismiss, Quintero said that “obviously, an investigation hasn’t been done.”

Meanwhile, Hoffman, the committee chair, is leading a group of conservatives who plan to sue Hobbs for issuing an executive order guaranteeing equal employment opportunities for LGBTQ people working at state agencies. He also wrote a bill that would have banned books from schools that depict “acts” of “homosexuality.”

Stewart said that many of the changes he made in the short time he was director “were ones that needed to happen for years, maybe decades,” adding that his goal was to reshape “what the community experiences when DCS knocks on their door.”

He also said that during his initial interviews with Hobbs’ team, he was asked what it would mean to the public if he were picked as DCS director. “I said it would mean she wants change,” Stewart said of the governor.

“That was my charge,” he said. “I believe that is why I was hired.”

Lynn Dombek contributed research.

by Eli Hager

How an Anti-Abortion Law Firm Teamed Up With a Disgraced Kansas Attorney to Dispute the 2020 Election

2 years 7 months ago

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For decades, lawyers at the Thomas More Society have backed provocateurs and long shot causes in hopes of winning severe restrictions on abortion in the U.S.

As others in the anti-abortion movement distanced themselves from clinic protestors accused of trespassing, vandalism and sometimes violence, the Thomas More Society defended them in civil and criminal court. The legal nonprofit once sided with a Wisconsin pharmacist who refused to fill a birth control prescription on religious grounds.

More recently, the Chicago-based organization has embraced a far different but equally divisive undertaking — relentlessly questioning the integrity of elections. Leaping into the 2020 “Stop the Steal” frenzy, which was consistently discredited, the Thomas More Society aggressively pursued scores of lawsuits and complaints across the country.

Yet for all the scrutiny given to election denialism and its champions — including Rudy Giuliani, Mike Flynn and Sidney Powell, former advisers to President Donald Trump — the significant role played by the Thomas More Society has received little attention.

One of its strategists, Phill Kline, tried to convince state legislatures in swing states to hold off on certifying Joe Biden’s electors, a maneuver that drew the notice of the House Jan. 6 committee. Kline is the former attorney general of Kansas whose law license was suspended indefinitely a decade ago by the state Supreme Court over ethical violations. Interviews and records examined by ProPublica show how closely aligned Kline has been with the Thomas More Society.

Phill Kline (Topeka Capital-Journal/Thad Allton/AP Photo)

With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the fight over abortion is increasingly playing out at the state level and local elections for legislators and judges have taken on added weight. “That’s why it’s doubly important for pro-life advocates to ensure the integrity of state and local elections,” one of the group’s attorneys wrote in an op-ed last summer.

Thomas More’s role in the push to change election law should not be underestimated, say abortion rights groups familiar with the legal society’s tactics and record.

An examination by ProPublica of Thomas More’s 2020 election-law initiative shows it helped fuel skepticism over President Joe Biden’s victory and the fairness of elections in numerous states.

The legal machinations haven’t led to big victories in court so far, and in fact Thomas More’s efforts have sometimes drawn ridicule from the bench. In one such rebuke, a judge concluded that the real goal of a Thomas More attorney’s request was “the undermining of a democratic election for President of the United States.”

But these persistent legal challenges mirror the approaches used in the fight over abortion: Never stop pushing for the cause in court or legislatures. Play the long game.

Ilyse Hogue, former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, does not doubt the willingness of the Thomas More Society or other anti-abortion forces to stick with a strategy for years, even decades, until they’re successful.

“One win erases a dozen losses,” she said. “We saw that time and again on abortion.”

Other anti-abortion groups have likewise become more involved in influencing voting laws. The Election Transparency Initiative is a project, in part, of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, which works to elect anti-abortion lawmakers. The initiative, established in early 2021, targeted federal voter rights legislation for defeat. In recent months, it successfully lobbied Ohio lawmakers to enact a strict voter photo ID law.

Through its efforts, the Thomas More Society raised its profile in Republican circles and broadened its appeal beyond its foremost cause of outlawing nearly all abortions. Contributions to the Thomas More Society jumped 82% between 2019 and 2020 to nearly $17.4 million, financial documents filed with the IRS show. (The organization does not release the names of its donors.)

Contributions to the Thomas More Society Leapt Up in 2020 (Source: IRS, 990 forms)

Initially, the group — which is run by staunch Catholics and named for a Catholic saint and lawyer — focused on defending people in the anti-abortion movement. Its most well-known cause was the decades long defense of Joe Scheidler, founder of the Pro-Life Action League, against the National Organization for Women.

NOW accused him and others of conspiring to close down clinics through extreme measures, including blockades and mob violence; it sought a permanent injunction forbidding the groups from engaging in illegal conduct. Lawyers for Thomas More made three trips to the U.S. Supreme Court in the clash, ultimately winning a 2006 decision in which the court held that the protests couldn’t be barred under extortion or racketeering statutes.

Lawyers for the society, in recent years, also have brought legal action opposing vaccine mandates, gay marriage and transgender rights. Then came Trump and an obsession among his followers with proving that he lost due to election fraud, and a new mission emerged.

Alliance Leads to New Strategy

Long before the Thomas More Society and Kline joined together on election law, they had a different kind of relationship. Kline was a client.

Kline needed help in Kansas, beginning in about 2010, fighting professional misconduct charges arising from his investigation of abortion clinics as attorney general and later as a county district attorney. The state Supreme Court ultimately suspended his law license indefinitely in 2013 for 11 violations of professional conduct rules, including misleading a judge and grand jury.

Tom Brejcha, right, president of the Thomas More Society, stands by while Phill Kline speaks to reporters in 2011. (John Hanna/AP Images)

Kline considered the case against him to be political and denied acting unethically. Throughout the struggle, he had a key ally from Chicago: attorney Tom Brejcha, president of the Thomas More Society. According to a 2014 press release, the Thomas More Society underwrote Kline’s appeal of his suspension. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider it.

“We’ve known Phill Kline. He’s been a client of ours for a long time. We respect him terribly, ” Brejcha said in a 2020 webinar.

Kline, who now teaches law at the evangelical Liberty University, told ProPublica he approached the society in 2018 about working together to publicize alleged election vulnerabilities. “He brought it to us. We adopted it,” Brejcha is quoted saying in the Catholic publication Our Sunday Visitor.

At the time, the integrity of voter rolls was very much in the news. Early in 2018, Trump had disbanded a controversial White House commission he’d set up to investigate voter fraud after numerous state election agencies refused to supply requested voter information. The president made baseless claims that millions of ballots were cast illegally in 2016, causing him to lose the popular vote.

At the society, Brejcha and Kline agreed on a contract that covered 2018 through 2021, Kline said. They called their initiative the Amistad Project, a reference to an 1839 mutiny aboard a slave ship of that name. References to slavery are common in the anti-abortion movement, where the historical denial of personhood to Black people is likened to not treating a fetus as a person. Kline had already been working on a project called The Amistad Journey in his anti-abortion efforts and later incorporated a for-profit company by that name in January 2020, listing his home as its principal office.

An IRS form shows the Thomas More Society paid Kline’s firm more than $1.4 million in consulting fees in 2020. Kline said the fees were for the full length of the contract and helped cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses, including payments to contractors he employed.

The society declined repeated requests from ProPublica for an interview or to answer specific questions. It provided a three-page memo, however, highlighting some of its strategic initiatives and stating: “The core traditional values that the Thomas More Society fights to protect — the right to life, family values, and religious liberty — can be preserved only if elections are fair and secure.”

In the 2020 webinar, Brejcha described the society’s crossover into election lawyering as “a natural progression” of its work opposing what it considers government abuse of religious freedom, such as the forced closing of churches during COVID-19 lockdowns. “We are nonpartisan, we’re bipartisan, but we want the laws to be enforced so that the democratic process is not distorted and destroyed,” he said.

As director of the election project for Thomas More, Kline couldn’t argue the legal cases himself because of his ethical violations in Kansas, but he oversaw investigators and analysts, hired litigators and devised strategies.

Together, the society and Amistad moved aggressively. They targeted cities, counties, county commissioners, mayors, governors and election officials for legal action, focusing on key states Trump lost in 2020 — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Minnesota.

Asked whether his work regarding elections had any relationship to his moral objections to abortion, Kline said in an email to ProPublica, “Only in the general sense that any unjustified disparate treatment under the law represents an assault on the inherent value of the individual.”

One of the Amistad Project’s chief arguments in 2020 was that election officials in swing states adopted pandemic-related measures — such as the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots — that disproportionately aided turnout in Democratic strongholds. The society contended that those local governments placed their “thumb on the scale” by accepting tens of millions of dollars in private grants for election administration from a nonprofit backed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The money was awarded to communities across 47 states to pay for more staff, training, equipment and outreach to voters on how to safely cast their ballots.

“We have a corporate oligarchy that’s trying to control this election process,” Kline alleged on former Trump strategist Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast on Dec. 14, 2020.

After receiving complaints unconnected to the Amistad Project, the Federal Election Commission reviewed the grants last year and determined that Zuckerberg did not violate campaign finance laws, concluding that the grants were awarded to many jurisdictions and did not suggest any partisan motive.

A Litany of Judicial Criticism

In case after case over the Zuckerberg grants, judges found no merit in the arguments presented by lawyers associated with Kline and Thomas More. They were subjected to often stinging rebukes.

In tossing one of the Amistad Project’s suits in Wisconsin, U.S. District Judge William C. Griesbach wrote that they offered “only a political argument” and “their brief is bereft of any legal argument” that would support their claim.

Another Wisconsin judge, in state court, rejected the Thomas More Society’s lawyer’s characterization of the grants as “election bribery,” calling the assertion “ridiculous.”

Likewise, a federal judge in Iowa ruled in a case brought by the Thomas More Society that “the record contains no evidence” supporting accusations that the grants “pose an actual risk of shaping the outcome of any election or of favoring any particular party or candidate.”

Kline said he strongly disagreed with the judges’ opinions and believed the cases were valid.

In Wisconsin, the uproar over the grants became a central element of a taxpayer-funded, partisan review of the 2020 election, led by Trump supporter Michael Gableman, a former state Supreme Court justice. Erick Kaardal, a Thomas More Society attorney, worked closely with Gableman, who was appointed by the speaker of the state Assembly, a Republican.

Much of Gableman’s final report, released in March 2022, echoed the society’s assertions about private election grants and one of its other chief concerns: the validity of some votes from nursing homes. The state Assembly speaker later shut down the inquiry and Gableman got a job with the Thomas More Society.

Erick Kaardal, who often litigates for the Thomas More Society, speaks to the Wisconsin State Assembly elections committee. (John Hart/Wisconsin State Journal)

Despite the court losses, the society considers its assault on the Zuckerberg funds to be a major success because it “blazed the trail” for two dozen states to ban private funding of election administration, according to the memo Thomas More provided.

The organization also considers its efforts to ban ballot drop boxes in Wisconsin a success. It did not win through court action, but as increasing attention was paid to the drop boxes, the state Supreme Court ruled their use unlawful. Five cities embroiled in suits brought by Thomas More then abandoned their support for the boxes and the cases were dismissed.

In a slew of related legal actions in Wisconsin and other states, the Thomas More Society also raised the possibility that some nursing home residents had been able to vote despite having been declared mentally incompetent; challenged signature verifications for absentee ballot applications; and questioned COVID-19 restrictions that limited some large gatherings, such as campaign crowds, but not others, such as Black Lives Matter protests.

Kaardal filed at least 18 administrative complaints with the Wisconsin Elections Commission, beginning shortly before the 2020 election. Two are still pending and the others were denied, dismissed or withdrawn, according to the commission.

Kaardal also filed at least seven lawsuits against the agency, beginning just before the 2020 election. Only one is still pending; the rest were voluntarily dismissed or ended in defeat, according to the commission.

He did not respond to requests for comment.

One Democratic member of the bipartisan elections commission thought the Thomas More Society “nitpicked issues” in the midst of a deadly pandemic.

Said Mark Thomsen: “My overall sense is they filed things that were redundant and repetitive and served no legitimate purpose, in my mind, other than trying to wear down the staff and waste precious resources.”

Trying to Overturn the 2020 Results

Plenty of names associated with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 results are well known by now. Kline’s is not one of them.

But records and interviews show he played a prominent role, working largely behind the scenes, in attempting to stall the certification of Biden’s victory.

In the weeks leading up to the Capitol insurrection, Kline led a group of investigators and litigators working out of a northern Virginia hotel, trying to prove that unlawful activity had influenced the election.

In a Dec. 1, 2020, press conference, Kline talked about Amistad’s efforts to uncover fraud, saying it had attorneys “in virtually every swing state that are working on our behalf.”

Trump’s legal team was making similar efforts, and that team included Jenna Ellis, a former Thomas More Society attorney. Kline told ProPublica that the Amistad Project did not coordinate with Trump’s group, and the Jan. 6 committee revealed no evidence to the contrary.

But records do show Kline and the Trump camp communicated with each other. Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik told the committee that Kline briefed Giuliani on an allegation about a postal truck carrying completed ballots across state lines, a claim that was later debunked by postal inspectors working with the FBI.

“Amistad shared the results of its investigations and analysis with numerous organizations who requested it, including the media,” Kline told ProPublica.

Kline pushed hard on the idea that state legislatures could ask Congress to delay the electoral certification to allow for time to investigate whether laws were faithfully followed.

The Amistad Project produced an eight-page report titled “Set in Stone?” in which it argued that the “only Electoral College deadline specifically required by the Constitution is noon on January 20,” which is Inauguration Day. The memo stated that all other deadlines — including the Jan. 6 date for certifying election results — were established long ago in federal law for ease of travel and are “largely not relevant to a time when electors do not have to ride horses to Washington, D.C. to vote.”

“For the sake of American democracy and to strengthen our fraying social fabric, it is preferable to address the fraud issues before determining who is the next President. The investigations will be rigorous and continue whether or not the Electoral College vote is held December 14,” the report states.

In late November 2020 in Michigan, which Biden won, Amistad attorney Ian Northon petitioned the state Supreme Court to take control of all ballots to allow for a “constitutionally sound audit of lawful votes” and give the state Legislature time “to finish its constitutionally-mandated work to pick Michigan’s electors.”

The state’s high court refused. Northon then tried to help a set of unauthorized Republican electors enter the Michigan state Capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, to sign documents purporting to certify Trump the winner. They were blocked by police.

Talking to reporters that day, Northon said: “I’m representing a charity called the Amistad Project, it’s a 501(c)(3), and it’s affiliated with another charity called the Thomas More Society out of Chicago. We filed several preelection lawsuits on election integrity.”

But Kline and Northon told ProPublica that Northon was not, in fact, working for Amistad at that moment. Northon said that he was called to the state Capitol by several lawmakers who were clients and were locked out of the building. They had previously joined an Amistad suit he handled. “I tried to help them talk to the police,” he said in an emailed response. “That does not mean I was acting on behalf of Amistad, I wasn’t.”

On Jan. 2, 2021, Kline hosted a conference call with 300 state legislators in an “attempt to disseminate purported evidence of election fraud,” according to a subpoena issued to him by the Jan. 6 committee.

The briefing included Giuliani; John Eastman, the attorney behind the theory that Vice President Mike Pence could reject the Electoral College results; White House trade adviser Peter Navarro; economist John Lott; and Trump, who reportedly told the lawmakers they were more important than the courts and had the power to change the results.

That evening, Kline sent an email to participants on the call encouraging them to sign on to a joint letter to Vice President Mike Pence urging him to postpone the counting of the electoral vote. The letter asked for at least 10 days.

Jan. 6 committee records show Kline asked those willing to sign the letter to reply to a woman who worked for a communications firm founded by Mark Serrano, a paid consultant to Trump’s 2020 campaign. Serrano had touted legal efforts supported by Thomas More on Bannon’s podcast, in December 2020, when he talked about a lawsuit in Washington, D.C., regarding “the ecosystem that caused this fraud on a massive level to take place.”

Bannon applauded that action. The judge, however, was not as pleased.

U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg later fumed that Kaardal, the Thomas More Society attorney, filed in the wrong court and failed to even serve the complaint to his adversaries in the suit. The judge also expressed shock at the scope of the request — to have numerous state and federal election laws declared unconstitutional and an injunction issued that would prevent Pence and Congress from ratifying the electoral votes in key battleground states.

In denying the request, Boasberg ruled that it relied on “a fundamental and obvious misreading of the Constitution.”

“It would be risible were its target not so grave: the undermining of a democratic election for President of the United States.”

“It Was a Big Scam”

In its final report, the Jan. 6 committee did not cite the Thomas More Society or the Amistad Project by name. But it lumped Kline in the same bucket as Giuliani, Powell, Eastman and Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell — saying that in response to Congressional subpoenas, none offered any proof of widespread fraud.

“Not one of them provided evidence raising genuine questions about the election outcome,” the report states. “In short, it was a big scam.”

Though subpoenaed, Kline did not testify before the committee, a congressional source confirmed. The committee, which had a Democratic majority, was disbanded this year as Republicans reclaimed control of the House.

Kline told ProPublica that he gave the committee over 12 gigabytes of data, including 107,563 pages of documents, in response to the subpoena. “I do not believe the committee reviewed these materials, as they declined to schedule an interview with me, where I was happy to discuss the materials,” he said in an email.

He added that he agrees with the committee’s assessment that there was not sufficient proof of fraud to overturn the election. “That generally is the case, but that doesn’t mean there’s not evidence that requires further investigation and effort and I believe there is.”

The society and Kline no longer have a formal contract. The society’s election integrity initiative is now headed by its Executive Vice President Thomas Olp.

In January of last year, Brejcha wrote that his group will continue to work with and support Amistad but touted “decisive new initiatives.”

“Rest assured,” he added, “we mean to press this cause of election integrity to the hilt, as is our trademark.”

Going forward, the team plans to work on various election fronts, including preventing ineligible people from voting, according to the memo the society provided to ProPublica. The memo expressed concerns that noncitizens and other people who don’t have the right to vote might sway a close election, even though there is no evidence that demonstrates widespread voter fraud in modern elections. In Wisconsin, the Thomas More Society is also challenging the ease of obtaining absentee military ballots.

Kline, meanwhile, is aligned with the American Voters’ Alliance, a nonprofit led by his daughter, Jacqueline Timmer. It is pushing “model legislation” to states that would radically alter how elections are handled.

The 23-page blueprint calls on legislatures to set up bipartisan standing committees that would issue a report recommending whether to certify election results. These panels would have the power to investigate elections, determine whether laws were broken, force local officials to fund forensic audits “by disappointed candidates,” stay election results when appropriate and even place localities into receivership to ensure elections are run properly.

Kline told ProPublica that U.S. elections are “among the least transparent and accountable in the world.”

“So far,” he said, “the proper steps have not been taken.”

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by Megan O’Matz